Overall, I have to add another vote for Jeremy Brett ad the entire John Hawkesworth BBC/WGBH production. It was the best and most faithful Holmes ever put on the screen, and the managed to make Watson more than just a narrator, and not a bumbling idiot.
I grew up watching Basil Rathbone. He really resembled the Sidney Paget illustrations. And in the first two movies – Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, he was set in his correct Victorian milieu. It was only after that that they shifted him to a contemporary setting.
Originally, it was William Gillette that was the quintessential Holmes. He’s the one who personally adapted Doyle’s stories into the play Sherlock Holmes that continues to be performed on stage. His performance was thought to be lost, but a few years ago they found a silent film recording of it ( Sherlock Holmes (1916 film) - Wikipedia ) I have seen it, and it’s pretty good, but:
a.) The silent film really can’t capture the essence of his stage performance. A lot surely relied on his readings of the slyly humorous lines, andf that doesn’t come through in title cards.
b.) Gillette doesn’t really LOOK like Holmes (although he’s the guy responsible for the calabash pipe and for popularizing the deerstalker hat – first introduced by Paget’s illustrations – as Homes’ trademarks). He’s too broad and chunky. Although nowhere near as bad as Reginald Owen in 1933’s A Study in Scarlet.
I’ll add another vote for Jeremy Brett, especially in the earlier episodes, when he was leaner and more energetic. Sadly, in some of the later episodes toward the end of his life, he was visibly ill, and you kind of feel sorry for him even as you’re watching. But I agree with CalMeacham that the Granada series was very well-done over all, particularly in its representation of Watson.
Very few people these days remember Arthur Wontner, who appeared in a series of five British Holmes films from 1931-1937 (although I see that the OP mentioned him). But at the time, he was apparently very popular and well-received. No less a Sherlockian than Vincent Starrett said that “No better Sherlock Holmes…is likely to be seen and heard in pictures, in our time.”
Then Basil Rathbone made his first Holmes film, and Wontner faded into history. It would be interesting to see his movies, but I don’t know how widely available they are (wikipedia says that at least one of them is considered a lost film).
Jeremy Brett for sure as the TV Holmes, but there’s a special fondness for Clive Merrison and Michael Williams in the BBC radio series. What I like most about this pairing is Watson isn’t a complete idiot, which you see in other performances. He’s stuck doing dumb things due to the constraints of Doyle’s stories, but as each show is an hour long, there’s time to round out Watson’s character more and so he comes across as intelligent and capable, but just not on Holmes’ level. A nice example of this is in The Lion’s Mane. They redid the story to after Holmes’ retirement. Watson is visiting, and Holmes mentions a case he recently did. Holmes challenges Watson to figure it out, and the story is about Holmes stepping through the facts of the case, and Watson working out the solution on his own. Loved it.
I gotta go with Jonny Lee Miller in Elementary, as well. As they had 7 seasons and 150+ hour long episodes to work with, his is, to me, the Sherlock that is the most complete character, even if he is the least faithful to the character that Doyle wrote.
Brett hands down for the “closest to Doyle’s version” Holmes. Of the modern re-imaginings, I prefer Miller’s Holmes to either Cumberbatch’s or Downey’s.
Basically this. Watched Brett with my mom and have fond memories of him as well as the great look of the show.
Miller does a great job. Due to Brett, I thought Holmes was older than he was. It wasn’t until 2010, with all of the new shows, that I looked into it and people think Holmes was probably 35 or so when we first meet up with him. (I may have numbers wrong, so if someone has a better range or number, let me know!) Again, as I said in another thread, Miller’s Holmes grows and changes the people around him. They don’t stay bumbling or stupid and they still had Holmes be the one to figure it out.
The problem with Cumberbatch’s show is that Watson never rises above idiot, imo.
The stories past season two don’t fit Holmes at all, again, imo. That first season, though? Due to those, it took me a while to warm up to Miller and I thought it was tribute to Miller’s performance, and Lucy Liu, as well as the writing that they pulled me into it more than Sherlock.
I enjoyed Elementary (most of it, at least), but I always found it useful to think of it as a quirky CBS procedural, rather than as a Sherlock Holmes adaptation.
Something about Cumberbatch’s Holmes rubs me the wrong way. I’m not sure why, because I’ve enjoyed him in just about everything else I’ve seen him in. Maybe it has more to do with the style or sensibilities of the show itself, but whatever the reason, I just can’t enjoy the BBC Sherlock.
I think it’s interesting that each of the Holmeses (Homies?) of the past 20 years chose to stress a different one of the character’s negative traits as the basis of their performance:
Cumberbatch: his sociopathy and inability to connect with other human beings.
Miller: his addictive nature.
Downey Junior: his mania/depression.
Laurie: his abrasiveness.
Two that haven’t been mentioned that deserve consideration:
Nicol Williamson in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. I think he captured the brilliant, driven, and at times completely batty character pretty well. Robert Duvall was awful as Watson.
In the 1954-55 US TV season, producer Sheldon Reynolds had a series of 39 1/2-hour episodes of Sherlock Holmes. They starred Leslie Howard’s son Ronald Howard. I very much liked his portrayal, showing a more human side, sly and fun-loving. The rest of the production, especially the writing, was rubbish, but you can find them on Youtube and I think you’ll see what I mean.
Peter Cushing played Holmes at least once, but I would have loved to have seen Christopher Lee play it, with Cushing as a less-than-usually hapless Watson.
There are plenty I like–it’s hard to say which one is the “best” because each one brings something different. I like the RDJ movies even if they aren’t my ideal Holmes flicks.
My father would never accept any Holmes except Basil Rathbone. I liked Rathbone’s portrayal a lot–he did a nice job of combining Holmes’ occasional arrogance and superiority with the genuine compassion that Doyle also portrayed. Too many other Sherlocks go a little too far into “tortured/jerk genius” territory. If you read the original stories/novels, for every example of Holmes being arrogant or dismissive, there are many others of him being compassionate, generous, or concerned with his clients’ welfare. Doyle-as-Watson would describe Holmes as cold and emotionless, but Holmes’ actions gave that description the lie. And he could claim that his clients were no more than “units in a problem” until he was blue in the face, but who was it who was ready to beat the crap out of someone in “A Case Of Identity” for mistreating a female client? And although he usually preferred to keep mostly to himself, he had no problem interacting with others when he wanted to…The Sign Of The Four depicts him hosting dinner for Watson and one of the Scotland Yard inspectors and proving a charming and erudite host.
That business of updating most of the Rathbone Holmes movies to the 1940s was a little puzzling, but even the “modern-day” ones turned out some great stories Doyle would be proud of–The Scarlet Claw among the best. Of course, as endearing as he was and as much as I liked him, Nigel Bruce’s Watson sort of set back the portrayal for a while–he’s the reason everyone thought of Watson as the bumbling comic relief.
Jeremy Brett was a close second, although they played up the neurotic-genius angle a little too much. If they could combine Rathbone’s whip-smart but ultimately compassionate portrayal with the Brett version’s fidelity to canon (and either of Brett’s two Watsons), that would be ideal.
I’m glad to see someone mentioned Ronald Howard’s TV series. They ran that on PBS around the time I was discovering Holmes as a teenager. I remember thinking, “Boy, he looks like Ashley Wilkes…wait a minute, the actor’s last name IS Howard…” Sure enough, it was Ashley Wilkes’ son! I agree that Howard did a great job of bringing out Holmes’ more human side, and H. Marion Crawford was a SUPERB Watson. And Holmes in this was a YOUNG man…as he was supposed to be when he and Watson met. (I think it’s generally agreed that he was in his late twenties or so in A Study In Scarlet.)
I haven’t yet seen Murder By Decree, one of two Holmes-vs-Jack-The-Ripper big-screen movies from the sixties and seventies. (The other was A Study In Terror, with John Neville as Holmes.) Christopher Plummer plays Holmes in this one, and it’s said he’s quite good. I can see it.
Ian McKellen had an interesting turn as the character in Mr. Holmes (2015). Kind of a strange movie that wasn’t at all like what I’d expected. Frankly I’m not certain what exactly I was expecting from it, but it wasn’t that. It was a good movie, but it was much more of a character study than a mystery.
Yes, that WAS good. I understand that in the novel it was based on (A Slight Trick Of The Mind, by Mitch Cullin), the boy did in fact die. I’m glad they changed that point for the movie.
Forgot to mention Peter Cushing. He played Holmes in The Masks of Death, a movie depicting an elderly Holmes coming out of retirement. (Strangely enough, his buddy Christopher Lee also played an elderly Holmes! As well as the younger article in a German movie in the sixties, Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace. Unfortunately, Sir Christopher was dubbed in both the German and English voice tracks.) But Peter also played Holmes in a BBC series. You can find a few episodes on YouTube…his version of The Blue Carbuncle has some nice embellishments on the original story. Peter did a good job…his natural likability comes out well.
A cute touch in that movie: at one point, Holmes sees a film based on his adventures. The “Holmes” in that film-within-a-film is played by Nicholas Rowe, who had played the title role in Young Sherlock Holmes thirty years earlier.
I suppose the challenges in portraying comes down to ability to deliver huge amounts of expository dialog and the need to include enough psychosis to satisfy the fans while not making the audience wonder why this person isn’t in a padded room somewhere. The thing is, you can’t disregard the role the script or the director plays. All three need to be right or you get Will Ferrell. I think I’d have to go with Cumberbatch in the Hound of the Baskervilles episode, or Brett in The Man With the Twisted Lip.
Nobody’s mentioned anime though. Japan loves Holmes, although they never really get it right. Sherlock Hound is pretty bad, but it does have a few episodes by Miyazaki. The latest attempt in anime is “Case File nº221: Kabukicho” which is a pretty good version of Holmes but with the needle up hard against the “Freakin Nuts” end of the scale.
