The Game Is Afoot: For all things Sherlockian

[foxley]

I just watched the 1933 film A Study in Scarlet, which turned out to be a decidedly odd beast.

First of all, don't let the title fool you. This is not an adaptation of the first Holmes novel. Apparently, the Conan Doyle estate quoted the producers a price for the rights to the title and a considerably higher price to use the original story. So the producers paid the lower price and hired "B" director Robert Florey to write a new story.

Reginald Owen plays a largely forgettable Holmes. He is able to rattle off deductions with reasonable conviction, but his portrayal is oddly 'vanilla': lacking any of Holmes' quirks like his irritability, his puckish sense of humour, or his intellectual superiority. Owen's matinee idol looks don't help sell him as Holmes, and his muscular physique makes him look more like someone who used to be a quarterback rather than Holmes' lean whipcord strength. Interestingly, the year before, Owen had played Watson in 1932's Sherlock Holmes, opposite Clive Brook as Holmes, making him one of the handful of actors to have played both Holes and Watson. Having seen both films, I think he makes a better Watson than Holmes.

As for the rest of the cast... Warburton Gamble is almost invisible as Watson, and is too old for the role. But he is no buffoon, so that's a plus (although this was before Nigel Bruce made people expect Watson to be a buffoon). Alan Mowbray plays a very upper class Lestrade (or 'Lastrade' as he is listed in the credits) who is on extremely good terms with Holmes and seems almost slavishly grateful for his help (so not very like Lestrade at all, in other words). Of the supporting cast, Anna May Wong as Mrs Pyke is definitely the standout, although as is typical for her films, the writers don't seem to know what to do with a strong Asian female actor. Alan Dinehart plays Thaddeus Merrydew, one of the main bad guys, who has been written as a cross between Moriarty and Charles Augustus Milverton.

A touch that stands out is the killer leaving pieces of paper containing verses from the "Ten Little Indians" (to give it its more politically correct title) nursery rhyme (here referred to as "Ten Little Black Boys") on the bodies of the victims. At first I thought this was a blatant ripoff from Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, before realising this film came out 6 years before Dame Agatha's famous novel. Unfortunately, unlike the Christie book, the methods of death do not match the verses.

Although the story is original, it is scattered with ideas lifted from the canon, so some fun fun can be had spotting them all. Amongst others, there is the Whitaker's Almanac code from The Valley of Fear and Holmes giving a physical description of a criminal from examining the crime scene after the fact from The Boscombe Valley Mystery.

One odd slip-up is that Holmes' address is given as 221A Baker Street.

Overall, this a largely forgettable entry in Holmes cinematic canon, but it is in the public domain and so easy to find (the whole film is up on YouTube), and at only 71 minutes, it's not a huge commitment of time for anyone who wants to check it out.