Sherlock Holmes (1922)

Originally posted to Facebook on 4/18/2017

Sherlock Holmes was our first film from 1922, and it was based on the same play as the 1916 version we'd previously seen. The earlier version was written by and starred William Gillette. This version stars the famous stage actor (and Drew Barrymore’s grandfather) John Barrymore, the first movie in which we’ve seen him. It also marks the first film appearance of Roland Young (as Watson) who later starred in the Topper films. But even more notably, this is the first film appearance of William Powell, who was in a number of excellent films throughout the thirties and forties -- which I look forward to seeing if this project makes it that far. As so often happens though, the cast in this case is better than the film. This movie differs from the earlier film mainly in that there is a long prologue explaining some backstory of the subsequent plot. This section purports to show Holmes, Watson, and Powell’s character when they were together at college. This ends up being rather distracting, however, because Barrymore was 40 at the time, and Roland Young was 35, and neither looked remotely like a college student. Even more importantly, the whole sequence is totally unnecessary; any backstory can be easily inferred, as shown by the earlier movie. At some point after that sequence the movie starts to converge on the plotline that we were more familiar with, which had some of the same holes and pacing problems as the earlier film. Some of the action was a little more dynamic though, and the title cards took an interesting stab at a slightly more naturalistic style of dialogue, with sentences trailing off, and characters interrupting themselves. In addition there was an interesting aerial shot of London, presumably taken from an airplane. The only precedent I recall which we’d seen previously was a brief shot from a plane in 1914’s Perils of Pauline, which was nowhere near as striking.

Overall, though, the two versions of Sherlock Holmes are of similar quality. I probably prefer the earlier film; it was slow and padded and not entirely logical, but it had a consistent tone, and conformed more to the idea of Sherlock Holmes as primarily a creature of the mind. I suspect the biggest drag on both movies is that the play itself doesn’t translate naturally to film -- or to a silent film in any case.

Next week we’ll see our second film from from 1922, Erich von Stroheim’s Foolish Wives. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT