Quote of the Day (Arthur Conan Doyle, on His Exceedingly Eccentric, ‘Untidy’ Genius Detective)

“An anomaly which often struck me in the character of my friend Sherlock Holmes was that, although in his methods of thought he was the neatest and most methodical of mankind, and although also he affected a certain quiet primness of dress, he was none the less in his personal habits one of the most untidy men that ever drove a fellow-lodger to distraction. Not that I am in the least conventional in that respect myself. The rough-and-tumble work in Afghanistan, coming on the top of a natural Bohemianism of disposition, has made me rather more lax than befits a medical man. But with me there is a limit, and when I find a man who keeps his cigars in the coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack-knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece, then I begin to give myself virtuous airs. I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humors, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.”—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), “The Musgrave Ritual,” in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894)

(The actor in the image accompanying this post is Basil Rathbone, who set the template for subsequent cinematic depictions of Sherlock Holmes.)

This Day in Film History (‘Young Sherlock Holmes’ Paves Way for New Special Effects Wizardry—and New Cinema Wizard)

Dec. 4, 1985—By the mid-1980s, Hollywood saw Steven Spielberg as having an uncanny instinct for what would excite the public. But as an executive producer rather than his more accustomed perch as director, his golden touch failed him with Young Sherlock Holmes.

Oh, he didn’t have a budget-busting box-office bomb on his hands. But, with a $19.7 million domestic box-office take barely covering its $18 million production cost, this movie was a disappointment.

That did not mean, however, that Spielberg hadn’t advanced cinema as a medium even now. This story—a speculation about the origins of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Victorian detective and his friend, Dr. John Watson—took innovation in the still relatively new field of computer-generated imagery (CGI) to a new level: an entire character (a knight jumping from a stained-glass window).

CGI, first encountered onscreen in Westworld (1973) and revived later in Tron (1982), now steered special-effects specialists and the audiences that delighted in them away from old-fashioned matte painting and model building and towards a brave new digital world. This new form of razzle-dazzle put John Lasseter on the path towards becoming a legend in the animation field, and earned the film an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects (which, unfortunately, it lost to Cocoon).

(Oh, did I mention the major minds behind this Paramount movie? Lasseter’s boss was Spielberg’s old friend George Lucas, in his role as head of Hollywood’s answer to Edison’s Menlo Park, Industrial Light and Magic. Henry Winkler, having wound up his longtime gig as The Fonz on Happy Days, served as a producer here. Screenwriter Barry Levinson, having directed someone else’s script on The Natural the year before, was doing the same now for young Goonies and Gremlins scribe Chris Columbus. So much for the auteur theory of cinema!)

Critics greeted the movie in the same restrained manner as audiences, with ratings more or less ranging from two stars (Leonard Maltin) to three (Roger Ebert). Even as they noted the significance of the CGI tricks, they questioned why Levinson inserted it into what was essentially a Victorian mystery, or why, following Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Spielberg had yet again paid politically incorrect homage to the famous scene in Gunga Din (1939) showing a group of European characters watching in horror a human sacrifice occurring in a secret temple.

For years, this represented the final judgment on Young Sherlock Holmes: revolutionary in cinematic craft, but decidedly same-old, same-old as far as storytelling was concerned.

That verdict needs to be revised, or at least put in a different context. When I watched it 35 years ago, I found it a very pleasant way to spend two hours at the theater—and given the pretentious tripe that has come from film-school grads since then, that is nothing to sneer at.

Moreover, Columbus’ chief fear as he created the screenplay—i.e., outrage from Holmes purists over a departure from sacred scroll (Doyle envisioned them meeting instead as adults, in A Study in Scarlet)—seems in retrospect rather overblown, given the violent liberties taken by Robert Downey Jr. in converting the master of ratiocination into a bare-chested martial-arts devotee in two films.

Furthermore, I’m surprised that, with the passage of time, detractors continue to harp on how derivative Columbus was rather than acknowledge that he was paving the way for a far bigger trend in one of his later projects. So consider: What other Columbus film (this time with him as writer-director) also featured:

*another young hero with special powers (so great, you might even call him a wizard), along with another nerdy but loyal sidekick and another cute girl?

*another English boarding school with more than the usual trials of that setting?

*another battle against powerful forces of evil, in which the young hero is launched on his life’s mission?

Yes, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001)—not to mention its 2002 sequel, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets—made studio execs forget in a hurry that Columbus was ever involved in an underperforming variation on Sherlock Holmes.

(For a fun summary of this film, see this post from the blog "Classic Film and TV Cafe" by "Rick29."

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Dressed to Kill,’ In Which Holmes Shows Watson, Once Again, Why It’s ‘Elementary’)

Dr. John Watson (played by Nigel Bruce) (opening the curtains): "Look, Holmes, it's morning." 

Sherlock Holmes (played by Basil Rathbone): "Allow me to congratulate you on a brilliant piece of deduction!" —Dressed to Kill (1946), screenplay by Leonard Lee, adapted by Frank Gruber from a short story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, directed by Roy William Neill

Quote of the Day (Sherlock Holmes, on Dogs and Family Life)

“A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.” — Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930), “The Adventure of the Creeping Man,” in The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (1927)

(I can’t imagine how many actors have played Sherlock Holmes on stage, radio, film and TV. But I find it hard to think of anyone else in the role of the Victorian detective besides the peerless character actor Basil Rathbone, shown here in costume.)

This Day in Literary History (Trollope Ices Favorite Reader Character)

Sept. 15, 1866—Anthony Trollope, well into the serialization of his latest novel, overheard two readers carping about one of his most popular characters. Now in her fifth book, Mrs. Proudie, the domineering wife of the Bishop of Barchester, struck this pair of clergymen as tiresome and clichéd. The big, bearded, bellowing author walked across the drawing room of the Atheneum Club to assure the astonished ministers that he would “go home and kill her before the week is over.” And so he did.

One of the most feared mob hit men was nicknamed “The Ice Man” for his lack of emotion in dispatching victims. I’m afraid that many Victorians felt that one of their favorite authors had displayed similar callousness toward a character they looked forward to reading about in The Last Chronicle of Barset.

Trollope would not be the last Victorian author to kill off a popular character. When Arthur Conan Doyle tired of Sherlock Holmes, he sent the detective hurtling off the Reichenbach Falls in Switzerland, helplessly entangled in a seemingly fatal fall with arch-villain Professor Moriarty.

But the manner of the passing allowed Doyle to revive his creation when readers demanded Holmes’ return: The fall, it was revealed nearly a decade later, in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, had all been staged for Dr. Watson’s benefit, to allow his friend to evade Moriarty’s still-at-large, dangerous confederates.

No such plausible way out existed for Trollope: The death of Mrs. Proudie was irrevocable, the result of a heart attack. Her demise robbed readers of coming to grips with the kind of domineering, annoying, but all-too-human character they were likely to encounter in real life. 

Trollope had enjoyed a highly popular run with his series about the imaginary county of Barset (which previously had included The Warden, Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage and The Small House at Allington). But Mrs. Proudie possesses such intrinsic power—a moral busybody still utterly convinced that her actions will benefit her more restrained husband, Dr. Proudie—that her end can lead to only one logical conclusion: the last installment of this novel sequence.

What made Mrs. Proudie so compelling? It strikes me that certain aspects of Trollope’s gift for characterization are shared by Leo Tolstoy. In Anna Karenina, for instance, the Russian sets the stage for the title character's infidelity by contrasting her warmth and spontaneity with the cold-blooded intelligence and ironic speech of her husband Alexei, then tops it off with a detail that captures perfectly why she now finds him tiresome: he cracks his knuckles.  Yet, when she appears to be on her deathbed, Tolstoy allows Alexei an unexpected dimension: the cuckold forgives Anna for her adultery.

With Mrs. Proudie, Trollope employed similar details. In church, she wears a “dark brown silk dress of awful stiffness and terrible dimensions.” But at the moment when her husband turns on her with the most awful words he has ever expressed in their marriage—“You have brought on me such disgrace that I cannot hold up my head”—Trollope plumbs her psyche to allow a moment of sympathy:

“At the bottom of her heart she knew that she had been a bad wife. And yet she had meant to be a pattern wife! She had meant to be a good Christian; but she had so exercised her Christianity that not a soul in the world loved her, or would endure her presence if it could be avoided! She had sufficient insight to the minds and feelings of those around her to be aware of this. And now her husband had told her that her tyranny to him was so overbearing that he must throw up his great position, and retire to an obscurity that would be exceptionally disgraceful to them both, because he could no longer endure the public disgrace which her conduct brought upon him in his high place before the world! Her heart was too full for speech; and she left him, very quietly closing the door behind her.”

How hasty and impulsive exactly was Trollope’s decision to knock off Mrs. Proudie? Perhaps the seeds of his decision had been planted for awhile: The Saturday Review, for instance, had made a complaint similar to the two clergymen’s when Framley Parsonage and The Small House at Allington appeared. 

But the novelist could certainly have set the stage for his nasty surprise a bit better. Readers did not even know, for instance, that Mrs. Proudie even had a heart condition before her fatal attack. Moreover, the bishop has already endured so much at the hands of his wife that this breaking point here seems anti-climactic.

In a prior appreciation of Trollope on his 200th birthday, I discussed how the novelist hurt his critical standing by revealing his working method in his Autobiography (writing three hours each day before breakfast, itemizing how many words and pages he produced each hour as well as how much he was paid for his various works). I’m afraid that his discussion in the same memoir of how he came to dispatch Mrs. Proudie reinforced this critical disdain. What careful artist could be so thoughtless as to kill off a character on the mere say-so of two people he overheard in a London men’s club? 

Even the author came to feel pangs of regret over his decision: “I have never dissevered myself from Mrs. Proudie,” he wrote a decade later, “and still live much in company with her ghost.”

No matter how much he rued that decision, however, Trollope was prepared for similar ruthlessness toward a major female character—one a good deal more beloved than Mrs. Proudie—in his next series of books. At the start of the sixth novel in his “Palliser” series, The Duke’s Children, readers learn that Lady Glencora Palliser, the vivacious wife of the reticent politician the Duke of Omnium, has died. 

While the decision to eliminate her from the series allowed Trollope to explore different dramatic possibilities—i.e., how the Duke would cope alone with the coming of age of their three children without her mediation and sympathy—it came at a cost that his most devoted readers could hardly bear.

Movie Quote of the Day (Billy Wilder, on Sherlock Holmes’s Love Life)

Dr. Watson (played by Colin Blakely): “Holmes, let me ask you a question. I hope I'm not being presumptuous, but... there have been women in your life, haven't there?”

Sherlock Holmes (played by Robert Stephens): “The answer is yes...”

[Watson breathes a sigh of relief]

Holmes: “...You're being presumptuous. Good night.”—The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, directed by Billy Wilder (1970)

Bad enough that there’s an implication here (never entirely dismissed through the rest of the film) that this world-famous character might be, as Jerry Seinfeld might say, “not on our team” (or, at minimum, very distrustful of women) or even (anticipating the same point made later in The Seven-Percent Solution) that Holmes’ boredom with everyday life has triggered a fearsome cocaine addiction.

But did Billy Wilder really have to depict Holmes as less than perfect in solving crimes? From all over the world, the groans of the Baker Street Irregulars could be heard.

A year ago, I thought of writing about three great directors who came a cropper with disasters in 1964: John Ford (Cheyenne Autumn), Alfred Hitchcock (Marnie) and Billy Wilder (Kiss Me, Stupid). Ford made only one more film in the last seven years of his life (7 Women), while Hitch only created one work out of his last four that approached his masterworks: Frenzy.

Wilder had the most interesting final laps of the three. Unlike the Master of Suspense, he did not enjoy another hit comparable to Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard or The Apartment. But after Kiss Me, Stupid brought a storm of execration on his head for delivering up such louche work, he made another half-dozen films up to 1981, and kept going to his office, in the vain hope that he could concoct another property that would flourish under Hollywood’s new financing order, for some years after that. (The latter hope, of course, was in vain, and Wilder summed up his dilemma in typically witty fashion, noting that in the old days they made pictures, whereas now they made deals.)

Moreover, though his films never spun box-office gold again, they remained deeply individual and interesting, expanding the notion of what could be called the “Wilder touch” (in the manner of his great mentor who inspired “the Lubitsch touch”).

Case in point: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which premiered in the U.S. on this date 40 years ago. In the grand coffee-table interview book he did with Cameron Crowe, Conversations With Wilder, the venerable director bemoaned this as The One That Got Away, a film originally projected to run three hours and 20 minutes that ended chopped down, by another hand designated by studio execs, to only 125 minutes. (“I had tears in my eyes as I looked at the thing,” Wilder told Crowe.” “It was the most elegant picture I've ever shot.")

What The Magnificent Ambersons was to Orson Welles, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was to Wilder. In fact, Hollywood treated Wilder more criminally at this point than it had Welles. Both were irreverent about Hollywood but worshipful about film, yet one (Welles) was a one-hit wonder whose ego was so immense that thousands in Tinseltown wanted him taken down a peg, while the other (Wilder) was a three-decade veteran who had had box-office misses before (Ace in the Hole) but had rebounded with some of his strongest work.

Gone from The Private Life were entire sequences (and I do mean gone—unless a film reconstructionist of the stature of Ronald Haver or Robert Harris comes along, it’s likely that that excised hour is permanently missing in action).

In a way, it was an appropriate end to a star-crossed production, marked by the following:

* Wilder’s original wish—a musical with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe—had to be shelved when he couldn’t find enough backers.

* Likewise, the original Holmes and Watson, Peter O’Toole and Peter Sellers, became unavailable (Sellers, because, on his honeymoon, he had a heart attack in a futile attempt to give pleasure to his frisky young Scandinavian bride, Britt Ekland).

* The entire, effects-laden “Loch Ness Monster” sequence had to be entirely reshot, in miniature, when a) shooting at dark proved difficult, and b) the “monster” capsized in the lake.

* Bean counters at United Artists, suffering several flops in 1969, got cold feet over Wilder’s ambitious project and forced deep cuts.

Holmes purists, as I’ve indicated, were not happy with the results onscreen. But all kinds of variations have been tried on Conan Doyle’s familiar formula, and in any case this was hardly the worst instance of cinematic violence done to a great literary detective. (That dubious prize, I submit, belongs to Robert Altman’s deconstruction of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, with a woefully miscast Elliott Gould offering an adenoidal Philip Marlowe instead of the hard-boiled knight of the mean streets.)

Beginning in mirth but ending in melancholy, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is utterly unlike anything else in Wilder’s teeming and magnificent filmography. Together with his penultimate film, Fedora (1979), it not only bookends the Seventies but calls for a reassessment of his autumnal works.

Quote of the Day (Arthur Conan Doyle, in the Voice of Sherlock Holmes)

"'You will not apply my precept,' he said, shaking his head. 'How often have I said to you that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth? We know that he did not come through the door, the window, or the chimney. We also know that he could not have been concealed in the room, as there is no concealment possible. When, then, did he come?'"—Sherlock Holmes, in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1890)

James Cagney never said, “You dirty rat!”, Cary Grant never said, “Judy, Judy, Judy!”, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never wrote, “Elementary, my dear Watson!” The closest the creator of the great Sherlock Holmes came to writing the latter was, simply, “Elementary”; the last couple of the familiar words we know, from what Holmes experts say, might have come from one of the innumerable productions staged over the years by William Gillette.

What that phrase was really driving at, in any case, was the impatience that the lightning-fast Holmes felt with his partner and good pal, the more plodding reader’s stand-in, Dr. John Watson. I think you get maybe an even more vivid sense of this asperity in the quote above.

Doyle, born 150 years ago today, much preferred his historical fiction, such as The White Company, to his more famous creation, the fellow residing at 221B Baker Street. And, in truth, if you want an example of literary craftsmanship in your detective fiction, then look to Raymond Chandler, P.D. James, Peter Robinson, or even someone who started writing toward the end of Doyle’s life, Dorothy L. Sayers.

But it’s indisputable that Doyle created one of the most indelible creations in all of genre fiction. Even today, many a reader or moviegoer, such as myself, thrills to the sound of “Come, Watson, come—the game is afoot.”

This Day in Criminal History (Jack The Ripper Kills First Victim)

August 31, 1888—A frightening new chapter in urban violence—and one of the great unsolved crimes in history—began in the wee hours of the morning in the Whitechapel district of London, as the body of a prostitute, Mary Ann (Polly) Nichols, was discovered—the first victim of the archetypal serial killer: Jack the Ripper.

Occurring as they did in Victorian England, the Whitechapel horrors may be a bit hard to recreate for 21st-century readers and filmgoers. In a way, it seems so quaint, like the gaslit streets in those days.

It shouldn't. To understand the climate of fear The Ripper created, remember—and my readers in the New York area who are now of a certain age won't have trouble doing this—how unnerved you felt by the "Son of Sam" in the summer of 1977. (Even his letters, taunting police with their inability to solve the case, harked back to the London correspondence in which The Ripper christened himself). Remember the criminal patterns: the location of the victims, the manner of their deaths, the evil that came out of nowhere only to strike again with sudden insistence. Remember the media trumpeting of the story.

But you can also plunge yourself into the circumstances of the Ripper case itself. Start with the mortuary photographs of the five victims who died at the Ripper's hands between August and November 1888 in London’s East End--if you dare. The photos are gray, almost ghostly, but the faces register tumultuous shock and, as time went on, greater and greater mutilation.

As time goes on, with more and more scientific techniques, literary deconstruction, etc., the number of theories proliferate. On one of the more comprehensive Websites devoted to the event, the “Casebook,” I counted no less than 21 suspects, including, of all people, Alice in Wonderland author Lewis Carroll!

A couple of years ago, a new, composite electronic photograph was even produced of what was deemed “the most likely suspect.” (See the photo accompanying this post.) Hmmm… Somehow I doubt this is going to end the speculation about his identity...

Establishing a Pattern

I’m not sure why fiction writers have gone to such extraordinary lengths to reinvent the facts of the case. In actuality, even the physical environment in the immediate hours before the first murder was ominous. Heavy, incessant rain, accompanied by thunder and lightning, blanketed Whitechapel the night before—adding to the desperate circumstances of 44-year-old Polly Nichols.

Nichols was already on the downslope of a profession that, then as now, had no use for the aging. Her brown hair was turning gray; five front teeth were missing; and others were slightly discolored. A turbulent marriage had ended several years before when her husband was able to demonstrate in court that his wife was a hooker.

In the grip of alcoholism, Polly was running through all her last chances, having stolen money in a job as a domestic servant in which she’d been placed by a social agency, then being kicked out of her lodging house because she couldn’t produce enough “doss money” (slang for the money for a night’s lodging). Never mind, she said: “See what a jolly bonnet I’ve got now.” At 2:30 a.m. she told a friend she’d met by chance that she’d drunk away her doss money already three times that night, but she’d find a way to get it soon.

She never had the chance. Sometime between 3:15 a.m, when two policemen passing separately along Buck’s Row noticed nothing unusual, and a half hour later, when the body was discovered, Nichols was murdered. Whoever did it, the coroner’s report concluded, the results were brutal: “A circular incision…completed severed all the tissue down to the vertebrae. The large vessels of the neck on both sides were severed....”—and a lot more in this vein.

Remembering the Ripper in Fact, Fiction and Film

Much like another media phenomenon, the sinking of the Titanic, Jack the Ripper has inspired all kinds of studies. In a few months, there’s even going to be a conference on him, held in, of all places, Knoxville, Tenn. (a most unlikely setting for violence, it seems to me—the only things that get murdered down there with any regularity are cheating-hearts ballads by Hank Williams wannabees).

Just how much the case has sunk into the modern consciousness is revealed by this fact I discovered from the Internet Movie Database Web site: There have been no less than 52 films or teleplays that have dealt with The Ripper. They include some obscure TV shows that, if they're likely, will turn up periodically for cable (recycled trash TV—what a great way to save the planet!).

Other treatments, however, are at least intriguing, often deeply satisfying—and even classic:

A) "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper"

As a teenager, I came across this short story in a crime anthology. By chance a few years later, I discovered what seemed even then a rather old TV adaptation of this. Several factors made the original story and the adaptation worthwhile:

1) The story was written by Robert Bloch, who achieved fame more than a decade later for penning the novel on which Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho was based. Like fellow horror-suspense practitioner Richard Matheson, Bloch did much of his best work at mid-century, starting out in pulp publications, graduating to novels, and dabbling in TV series to pay the bills. Bloch’s fiendishly clever tale, set in Chicago in 1943 (the same year in which the piece was published), follows a London detective and an associate, John Carmody, who believe that The Ripper, 55 years after the Whitechapel murders, has turned up in the Windy City.
2) Bloch was inspired to write this story (which, if this essay by Eduardo Zinna is to be believed, was "the first modern work of fiction in t he English language to call him by his trade name") by the fact that the killer had christened himself in a letter to a news agency. "I was fascinated," Bloch wrote in his autobiography, "by the phrasing the murderer used for self-identification and upon due reflection, realized that these five words could constitute both the title and the plot of a short story."
3) Bloch saves his best stroke for the last line, one of those trick endings that make you re-read everything that came before it to see if it coheres (it does).
4) In 1961, an episode of the TV series Thriller (is this where Michael Jackson got the title?) aired, an adaptation of Bloch's story written by one "Barre Lyndon." (It sounds to me like a pseudonym for a scribe disgruntled by what had been done to his handiwork—though IMDB lists "Alfred Edgar" as an alternative name. Maybe that's a pseudonym, too--aren't the Edgars awards for best mysteries of the year?) The British detective chasing the modern Ripper was the familiar British character actor John Williams; the director was, of all people, Ray Milland. (I guess film work was getting scarcer for a former Hollywood leading man who was now struggling with a receding hairline.)
5) More than two decades after this short story, an episode of Star Trek, “Wolf in the Fold,” aired in which the suspect in a Ripper-style crime was chief engineer Scotty. (No, he didn't do it. I'm not even going to dignify that twist by calling this comment a "Spoiler Alert." Only an idiot could think good ‘ol Scotty could have done the foul deed!) The author of the teleplay was—natch!--Robert Bloch.

B) "The Lodger"

I don’t know why I’ve never gotten around either to reading the original mystery novel on which this was based, by Marie Belloc-Lowndes (sister of British man of letters Hilaire Belloc), nor the 1926 Alfred Hitchcock adaptation, his first thriller. Well, one of these days I will!

The story itself sounds irresistible: an elderly couple, fallen on hard times, are glad to take in a lodger who appears to be a gentleman. For a long time, they’re willing to put up with his little oddities, such as carrying around a long, brown bag and conducting all kind of “scientific experiments.” Still, there’s something about him…

I’m not at all surprised that Hitchcock directed this. It wasn’t just because one of his later films (Frenzy) concerns a modern Jack the Ripper type, or that two of his finest films (Psycho and Shadow of a Doubt) gradually peel away the criminal chaos lurking beneath a seemingly normal exterior. No, as Donald Spoto noted in his biography The Dark Side of Genius, Hitchcock had been addicted to sensational crimes as a Cockney youngster in London. I’ll bet he couldn’t wait to read everything he could get his hands on concerning the Ripper.

C) “From Hell”

I’m not a fan of this Hughes Brothers film, even though it’s interesting to see Johnny Depp try out a variation on the moody Victorian outsider that he later assayed, to Oscar-nominated effect, in Sweeney Todd. The problems are twofold: a) Heather Graham is miscast as Irish prostitute Mary Kelly, and b) The violence, though necessary, is still way over the top.

The film holds interest because of its source material, one of the “graphic novels” that Hollywood has turned to increasingly over the last decade. Film has been, from the inception of this communication form, an image-centered genre, with dialogue and story decidedly subservient. (Not too many people can remember the plots of Josef von Sternberg’s Hollywood collaborations with Marlene Dietrich, but more than a few people can recall her electrifying look from Blonde Venus.) Directors, however, have turned to the graphic novel as a new form of film noir, including such movies as The Road to Perdition, Sin City, and 300.

D) “Murder by Decree”

In an essay in Past Imperfect: History According to the Movies, British historian David Cannadine undercuts any claims for the theory of the Ripper offered by this film, which took its thesis from Stephen Knight’s Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. So don’t watch the film with any belief that you’re watching, God forbid, historical fact—though, to be fair, the only person who might think that any film featuring Sherlock Holmes on the trail of the Ripper could be historical would be Dan Quayle. (David Letterman had to instruct the former V-P, of course, that Murphy Brown was fictional. And he wasn’t the only politico who ever mistook a fictional character for real life: Former Gov. Hugh Carey of New York gave a speech in which he cited Miss Jane Pittman as a historically important African-American.)

No, Murder by Decree is just plain fun to watch. Forget about Professor Moriarty: History’s most elusive killer is easily the greatest adversary ever faced by history’s greatest detective. It was inevitable that somebody, somewhere, would pit the great Victorian detective – who had gotten his start, after all, shortly before the Whitechapel murders—against the killer. The notion of a great royal conspiracy to squelch the truth about royal involvement with a crime does not, at this juncture, seem so far-fetched. (Why, for instance, would Anthony Blunt remain in the royal family’s employ as Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures for 15 years after they knew of his involvement in the Cambridge spy ring—unless he had discovered something about the Duke of Windsor’s embarrassing involvement with Fascism when Blunt ferreted out materials in private German archives late in WWII?)

Watch this film, finally, for two actors at the top of their game—Christopher Plummer as Holmes and James Mason as Dr. Watson. It’s easy to understand here how Holmes and Watson became such fast friends. And for once, a film shows that the greatest detective of them all was not only possessed of a mighty brain but a mighty heart.

E) “Pandora’s Box”

The great Louise Brooks silent film about Lulu, dangerous symbol of sexuality, features Jack the Ripper in its final minutes. He becomes the force of society reaching out to punish Lulu for the unrest and destruction created when men come in contact with her. I

nitially, many felt that the American actress was completely wrong for this product of late German expressionist symbolism. Instead, Pandora’s Box became her most lasting cinematic monument—so much so that her luminous essay collection, Lulu in Hollywood, used her character’s name as an instant touchstone in selling the book.

It’s highly doubtful at this juncture whether the identity of Jack the Ripper will ever be conclusively established. It’s not just that many documents connected to the investigation have been lost over the years; it’s also that any definitive conclusion would put out of commission a virtual cottage industry of criminologists, conspiracy theories, scholars and hopeless obsessives.