Jeremy Brett: My Favorite Holmes

Recently, one of my favorite films from 2009 has returned to Netflix: the Robert Downy Jr./Jude Law film Sherlock Holmes. Though its an original film, developed using bits and pieces from the canon of 60 stories Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, it's a well-done film with an excellent cast and a compelling original story that does what the Holmes stories do best: reveal the truth behind the fakery of crime. It also does much to make Holmes, for a modern audience, what he was for the Victorian public who first read the stories as Conan Doyle wrote them. 

To the Victorians, and Londoners in particular, Holmes was a super-heroic man of action. In our Era of the Superhero movie, such a character fits right in. He was the equivalent of a character like Batman (minus the tragic backstory), a man endowed, not with magical superpowers, but with a unique intellect, instincts, and skill set, perfectly developed for one purpose: the eradication of crime. 

Yet, as much as I enjoy the 2009 film, and its sequel, A Game of Shadows, Downy Jr.'s portrayal of the sleuth is not my favorite. Nor are the other two great modern renditions, Benedict Cumberbatch's Holmes from Sherlock and Johnny Lee Miller's version from Elementary. Rewatching the movie again after some time made me want to revisit the show that simultaneously gave the world the best adaptations of the original Holmes stories and, what I consider to be, the best portrayal of Holmes yet performed.

"Every problem is absurdly simple when it is explained to you." 

~ The Adventure of the Dancing Men

That show is of course Granada TV's Sherlock Holmes, starring the actor Jeremy Brett in the eponymous role.

What made this series unique among other Holmes adaptations is that it didn't update the Holmes stories, as Gatiss and Moffat did in their series, nor did they try to add more 21st century pow to them as the 2009 film version. Instead, it simply endeavors to take the source material--Conan Doyle's original stories--and puts them on the screen. 

And did they ever succeed. 

My first encounter with Brett's version of Holmes (counterpointed first by David Burke, and then Edward Hardwicke's version of John Watson), came when I flipped on the TV one evening, and it so happened to tune into the PBS channel. At that moment, the adaptation of The Adventure of the Red Headed League was just starting. Within minutes, I was hooked. Brett's performance of Holmes, this eccentric, asocial man--the epitome of deductive logic--had me cheering for his success.

What makes Brett's version of Holmes so wonderful is exactly the same thing that made David Suchet's version of Agatha Christie's Hercules Poirot great. His performance was based not on other people's performances of Holmes. Instead, like the series itself, it was drawn from the details Conan Doyle provided about Holmes' character in the stories themselves. 

He's mercurial, prone to lethargy and depressive states when not working, yet, when he has a problem to solve, he's galvanized, energetic, and even jovial. He cares deeply about his own fastidious appearance ("a cat-like love of personal cleanliness," as Conan Doyle has Watson observe in the stories--and something the 2009 version of Holmes ignores), yet he doesn't give a fig about the cleanliness of his living space. He smokes like a chimney, occasionally uses cocaine, and, when in the grip of a befuddling conundrum, will not allow himself to eat or drink. And, most noticeable of all, Holmes is fond of very few people--a noted loner in literature--save for Watson, Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson, and his brother, Mycroft. (He's even antagonistic towards some of his own, more irksome clients).

Yet, despite getting all those details right, there's something else, a quality of Brett's acting that precludes his performance from being "just another Holmes," to being a definitive Holmes. While he never gets the core elements of Holmes wrong (see the previous paragraph), he also brings a certain humor and even impishness to the character's personality that deeply humanizes him. We see Holmes laughing and smiling far more in this series than he does in the original stories, with Brett's expressions and physicality when reacting to other characters do a good deal to bring Holmes to life. 

We also get to see that, though he doesn't have many friendships in his life, the few that matter the most to him (notably with Watson, Lestrade, and Mrs. Hudson), do mean a great deal to him. There are many moments even, where Holmes and Watson have passing moments of comedy which Conan Doyle never included in the stories.

With a few exceptions, all of the episodes take the full plots and twists of the original short stories (the medium in which many of the best Holmes tales are told), and puts them on the screen for viewers to enjoy. The modifications made often times are merely a means of flushing out characters who only appear briefly in the stories. All but four of the original stories, as any Holmes aficionado can tell you, are told in the voice of Dr. Watson, via a first-person narrative, and much of the action, like in classic Greek plays, is reported to the reader via copious amounts of dialogue (the slowest way to tell a story). This, of course, can't be replicated on film and TV exactly, as it would be boring. So instead, all the action that Holmes and Watson don't see is dramatized in scenes and flashbacks that veer from their viewpoints. Yet, the core of Conan Doyle's original stories always remain in tact.

For bringing him to life in a manner closer to what Conan Doyle likely imagined, Jeremy Brett, for me a least, will always be my favorite Sherlock Holmes.

If you'd care to see what this show has to offer yourself, check out the episode below, which is an adaptation of The Man with the Twisted Lip, one of my personal favorite episodes and stories in the Holmes Canon.