Post by Salzmank on Sept 4, 2018 0:17:54 GMT
A fun series for Holmes fans, even if the budget is very low and the plots and supporting actors weak. (It was shot in France, with a largely French supporting cast—and having Frenchmen attempt English characters and English accents is, needless to say, jarring.)
Ronald Howard, Leslie’s son, plays Holmes in the Rathbone mold, though more youthful, vibrant, even impish. Not a perfect Holmes, perhaps, but he hits on elements of the character that Rathbone and Brett didn’t emphasize as much. H. Marion Crawford is a lot of fun as Watson, though he alternates between the goofier, comic-relief Nigel Bruce approach to the character and a more faithful Doylean approach.
We do get the first filmed version of the Holmes-Watson meeting, which is excellent, though it’s placed in a story (“The Case of the Cunningham Heritage”) that doesn’t exactly measure up to the plotting of A Study in Scarlet. “The Case of the Pennsylvania Gun,” by the way, is a faithful, if dull, adaptation of The Valley of Fear. And there are some surprisingly intriguing plot-ideas, including a Christean/VanDinean murder-by-nursery-rhyme episode (“The Mother Hubbard Case”), though nothing’s ever that complicated.
The best episodes I’ve seen are “The Case of the Exhumed Client,” which reworks the murder-method of Doyle’s “The Devil’s Foot,” and the Carrian “Case of the Winthrop Legend,” a plot with which Rathbone and Bruce would have been at home.
Has anyone else here seen any of these? They’re all in public domain and available on YouTube, by the way.
Ronald Howard, Leslie’s son, plays Holmes in the Rathbone mold, though more youthful, vibrant, even impish. Not a perfect Holmes, perhaps, but he hits on elements of the character that Rathbone and Brett didn’t emphasize as much. H. Marion Crawford is a lot of fun as Watson, though he alternates between the goofier, comic-relief Nigel Bruce approach to the character and a more faithful Doylean approach.
We do get the first filmed version of the Holmes-Watson meeting, which is excellent, though it’s placed in a story (“The Case of the Cunningham Heritage”) that doesn’t exactly measure up to the plotting of A Study in Scarlet. “The Case of the Pennsylvania Gun,” by the way, is a faithful, if dull, adaptation of The Valley of Fear. And there are some surprisingly intriguing plot-ideas, including a Christean/VanDinean murder-by-nursery-rhyme episode (“The Mother Hubbard Case”), though nothing’s ever that complicated.
The best episodes I’ve seen are “The Case of the Exhumed Client,” which reworks the murder-method of Doyle’s “The Devil’s Foot,” and the Carrian “Case of the Winthrop Legend,” a plot with which Rathbone and Bruce would have been at home.
Has anyone else here seen any of these? They’re all in public domain and available on YouTube, by the way.