Shaken, Stirred and Elementary: ‘Sherlock Holmes’ and ‘Thunderball’
Created by Arthur Conan Doyle, the detective Sherlock Holmes belongs to us all. As noted by the historian Michael Saler in "As If," his account of literary imaginary worlds, the great detective was modern fiction's "first virtual reality character" — given that part of his readership chose to believe that he was an actual person. The 1916 movie "Sherlock Holmes" (newly restored and released by Flicker Alley in a dual Blu-ray/DVD edition) grounds that character's virtual reality in a corporeal presence, namely that of the tall, craggy American actor William Gillette (1853-1937).
Mr.
Gillette, the son of a United States senator from Connecticut, weight was Holmes's contemporary. It was during the hiatus between the fictional character's apparent demise in a struggle with Professor Moriarty and his return to life by popular demand that Mr. Gillette got the opportunity to take the title role in a revision of Conan Doyle's unproduced Holmes play.
First produced in 1899, Mr.
Gillette's "Sherlock Holmes" toured the English-speaking world and was repeatedly revived. Although he played Holmes as an American, Gillette was totally identified with his part. Only the illustrator Sidney Paget did more to create Holmes's distinctive accessories, the deerstalker, the cape coat and the curved pipe.
Mr.
Gillette was even credited with improving the detective's demeanor: An anonymous New York Times theater critic noted in 1915 that "the skillful, gracious, gentle, winning Mr. Gillette has added a charm that was beyond the author's somewhat limited power to bestow."In 1916, Mr. Gillette played Holmes in a feature-length movie produced by the Essanay Company in Chicago.
The film was long assumed to be lost, but, because it had been released in France in 1919 as a four-part serial, a nearly intact version, mislabeled for decades, was discovered in the French Cinémathèque in 2014. Perhaps no film could live up to the drama of this back story, but the impeccable restoration — the sole record of Mr. Gillette's characterization — comes close.
Hewing closely to the play, "Sherlock Holmes" draws on several stories, mainly "A Scandal in Bohemia." Dr. Watson is minimized, but Holmes enjoys a romance with the Irene Adler figure, Alice Faulkner (a 17-year-old Marjorie Kay, later a World War I poster girl for the Red Cross). Holmes has been hired to recover some incriminating letters written to Alice's late sister.
A criminal couple also covet them; to further their cause, they recruit Holmes's archenemy, Moriarty (Ernest Maupain). Drawing-room intrigue gives way to more gangsterly stuff, but Holmes is regularly shown in his study, hoisting a test tube.Despite a few bleak Chicago locations, "Sherlock Holmes" is unavoidably theatrical.
Still, the stage director Arthur Berthelet, making his first feature, keeps the acting restrained and the action fluid. No threat to D. W. Griffith, Mr. Berthelet nevertheless demonstrates better film chops than, for example, Frank Powell, who directed Theda Bara in the star-making sensation of 1915, "A Fool There Was.""Sherlock Holmes" was likely a good investment for Essanay, then absorbing the loss of its greatest attraction, Charlie Chaplin, to greener pastures.
It's a historical footnote that the teenage Chaplin once played opposite Mr. Gillette in a London revival of "Sherlock Holmes." In another coincidence, Flicker Alley has recently released a boxed set, with Blu-ray and DVD, of the two-reel comedies Chaplin made for Essanay in 1915.
It was with these 15 remastered films that Chaplin conquered the world. "Work" is still notable in its anarchic assault on middle-class propriety, and "The Bank" is the movie in which Chaplin perfected his persona. If, as Mr. Saler writes, Holmes was "one of the first characters to become ubiquitous through the new mass media," another, no less universal, was Chaplin's Little Tramp.
Although not quite Holmes or Chaplin, James Bond is one more seemingly indestructible mass-media titan."Thunderball" (1965), based on Ian Fleming's eighth Bond novel, starring Sean Connery (and reissued by 20th Century Fox in a 50th anniversary Steelbook Blu-ray), was the fourth Bond movie and, adjusted for inflation, most likely the series' greatest international success. Released for Christmas, it marked the apex of Bondmania, with Agent 007's license to kill more than equaled by United Artists' license to license 007 paraphernalia.
Publicity loss promised "the Biggest Bond of All!" Directed, like "Dr. No" and "From Russia With Love," by Terence Young, "Thunderball" was the most capacious Bond adventure to date; it was filmed in Panavision, ran over two hours and was markedly less taut than its predecessors. Insouciance rules: From 007's opening-scene jet-pack escape to a late exercise in color-coordinated underwater hand-to-hand combat, the movie ambles from impromptu boudoir to exotic battlefield against a backbeat of world-historical crisis as two NATO nuclear weapons are hijacked by the terrorist cabal Spectre.
With the nukes stashed in Spectre's Caribbean retreat, "Thunderball" wends its way to the Bahamas. Nassau (where the Beatles had just completed shooting scenes for "Help!") is conceived as a giant Club Med. The hairy-chested Mr. Connery spends half of his time in cabana wear or skin-diving gear.
The villain (Adolfo Celi) keeps a swimming pool stocked with hungry predators, contributing to the sense that "Thunderball" may have been the most shark-obsessed blockbuster before "Jaws."The real shark, of course, is 007, a sleek, highly functional and remorseless killer, who was often seen as the embodiment of Cold War moral relativism. The international tensions were such that by 1965 "Thunderball" was taken as a comedy.
(The Times critic Bosley Crowther compared it to Mack Sennett slapstick.)Bond circa 1965 was also — as argued by Alexis Albion in the essay "Wanting to Be James Bond" room (part of the collection "Ian Fleming & James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007") — an ego-ideal for both men and women throughout the Western world and thus something of a virtual reality character as well.Newly ReleasedBRITISH NOIR The five titles in this set of British thrillers from the 1940s and 1950s, produced by the Rank Organization, are largely unknown here and extremely entertaining — none more so than "The Golden Salamander" (1950) which, directed by Ronald Neame on location in Tunisia, stars Trevor Howard as a two-fisted archaeologist and a very young, very beautiful Anouk Aimée as a damsel in distress.
(Kino Classics)FIVE FILMS BY PATRICIO GUZMÁN The dean of Latin American political filmmakers, Mr. Guzmán has also been the custodian of Chile's historical memory. This sturdy eight-DVD box includes "The Battle of Chile," his three-part chronicle of the military coup that brought down President Salvador Allende, and his more recent poetic essay "Nostalgia for the Light," as well as three other documentaries and five short films.
(Icarus Films)FORBIDDEN HOLLYWOOD VOLUME 9 For anyone, like me, who regards the early, sauna pre-Production Code 1930s as Hollywood's most fertile period, this series has been a reliable source of pleasure. The latest, with five films on four DVDs, is among the best — notable not only for the Broadway pizazz of "Big City Blues" (1932) but also two examples of Depression-era muckraking, the chain-gang drama "Hell's Highway" and the sharecropper melodrama "The Cabin in the Cotton," both released in 1932. (Warner Archive)THE RANDOLPH SCOTT ROUND-UP This set has five of the seven classic westerns that Scott made with Budd Boetticher in the 1950s, plus "A Lawless Street" (1955), directed by the extremely credible B-movie auteur Joseph H.
Lewis.
The price is right, but the color transfers are only fair, and the six films are crammed on two DVDs, which in my experience proved a bit glitchy. (Mill Creek)W. C. FIELDS COMEDY ESSENTIALS COLLECTION It's a gift, if a bit pricey. These 18 films, spread over five DVDs, include Fields's classic features like the hitherto scarce "Million Dollar Legs" (1932) and "The Bank Dick" (1940), as well as several noteworthy Paramount releases in which he's part of the ensemble, like "International House" and "Alice in Wonderland" (both 1933).
No ancillary material apart from an appreciation
Mr.
Gillette, the son of a United States senator from Connecticut, weight was Holmes's contemporary. It was during the hiatus between the fictional character's apparent demise in a struggle with Professor Moriarty and his return to life by popular demand that Mr. Gillette got the opportunity to take the title role in a revision of Conan Doyle's unproduced Holmes play.
First produced in 1899, Mr.
Gillette's "Sherlock Holmes" toured the English-speaking world and was repeatedly revived. Although he played Holmes as an American, Gillette was totally identified with his part. Only the illustrator Sidney Paget did more to create Holmes's distinctive accessories, the deerstalker, the cape coat and the curved pipe.
Mr.
Gillette was even credited with improving the detective's demeanor: An anonymous New York Times theater critic noted in 1915 that "the skillful, gracious, gentle, winning Mr. Gillette has added a charm that was beyond the author's somewhat limited power to bestow."In 1916, Mr. Gillette played Holmes in a feature-length movie produced by the Essanay Company in Chicago.
The film was long assumed to be lost, but, because it had been released in France in 1919 as a four-part serial, a nearly intact version, mislabeled for decades, was discovered in the French Cinémathèque in 2014. Perhaps no film could live up to the drama of this back story, but the impeccable restoration — the sole record of Mr. Gillette's characterization — comes close.
Hewing closely to the play, "Sherlock Holmes" draws on several stories, mainly "A Scandal in Bohemia." Dr. Watson is minimized, but Holmes enjoys a romance with the Irene Adler figure, Alice Faulkner (a 17-year-old Marjorie Kay, later a World War I poster girl for the Red Cross). Holmes has been hired to recover some incriminating letters written to Alice's late sister.
A criminal couple also covet them; to further their cause, they recruit Holmes's archenemy, Moriarty (Ernest Maupain). Drawing-room intrigue gives way to more gangsterly stuff, but Holmes is regularly shown in his study, hoisting a test tube.Despite a few bleak Chicago locations, "Sherlock Holmes" is unavoidably theatrical.
Still, the stage director Arthur Berthelet, making his first feature, keeps the acting restrained and the action fluid. No threat to D. W. Griffith, Mr. Berthelet nevertheless demonstrates better film chops than, for example, Frank Powell, who directed Theda Bara in the star-making sensation of 1915, "A Fool There Was.""Sherlock Holmes" was likely a good investment for Essanay, then absorbing the loss of its greatest attraction, Charlie Chaplin, to greener pastures.
It's a historical footnote that the teenage Chaplin once played opposite Mr. Gillette in a London revival of "Sherlock Holmes." In another coincidence, Flicker Alley has recently released a boxed set, with Blu-ray and DVD, of the two-reel comedies Chaplin made for Essanay in 1915.
It was with these 15 remastered films that Chaplin conquered the world. "Work" is still notable in its anarchic assault on middle-class propriety, and "The Bank" is the movie in which Chaplin perfected his persona. If, as Mr. Saler writes, Holmes was "one of the first characters to become ubiquitous through the new mass media," another, no less universal, was Chaplin's Little Tramp.
Although not quite Holmes or Chaplin, James Bond is one more seemingly indestructible mass-media titan."Thunderball" (1965), based on Ian Fleming's eighth Bond novel, starring Sean Connery (and reissued by 20th Century Fox in a 50th anniversary Steelbook Blu-ray), was the fourth Bond movie and, adjusted for inflation, most likely the series' greatest international success. Released for Christmas, it marked the apex of Bondmania, with Agent 007's license to kill more than equaled by United Artists' license to license 007 paraphernalia.
Publicity loss promised "the Biggest Bond of All!" Directed, like "Dr. No" and "From Russia With Love," by Terence Young, "Thunderball" was the most capacious Bond adventure to date; it was filmed in Panavision, ran over two hours and was markedly less taut than its predecessors. Insouciance rules: From 007's opening-scene jet-pack escape to a late exercise in color-coordinated underwater hand-to-hand combat, the movie ambles from impromptu boudoir to exotic battlefield against a backbeat of world-historical crisis as two NATO nuclear weapons are hijacked by the terrorist cabal Spectre.
With the nukes stashed in Spectre's Caribbean retreat, "Thunderball" wends its way to the Bahamas. Nassau (where the Beatles had just completed shooting scenes for "Help!") is conceived as a giant Club Med. The hairy-chested Mr. Connery spends half of his time in cabana wear or skin-diving gear.
The villain (Adolfo Celi) keeps a swimming pool stocked with hungry predators, contributing to the sense that "Thunderball" may have been the most shark-obsessed blockbuster before "Jaws."The real shark, of course, is 007, a sleek, highly functional and remorseless killer, who was often seen as the embodiment of Cold War moral relativism. The international tensions were such that by 1965 "Thunderball" was taken as a comedy.
(The Times critic Bosley Crowther compared it to Mack Sennett slapstick.)Bond circa 1965 was also — as argued by Alexis Albion in the essay "Wanting to Be James Bond" room (part of the collection "Ian Fleming & James Bond: The Cultural Politics of 007") — an ego-ideal for both men and women throughout the Western world and thus something of a virtual reality character as well.Newly ReleasedBRITISH NOIR The five titles in this set of British thrillers from the 1940s and 1950s, produced by the Rank Organization, are largely unknown here and extremely entertaining — none more so than "The Golden Salamander" (1950) which, directed by Ronald Neame on location in Tunisia, stars Trevor Howard as a two-fisted archaeologist and a very young, very beautiful Anouk Aimée as a damsel in distress.
(Kino Classics)FIVE FILMS BY PATRICIO GUZMÁN The dean of Latin American political filmmakers, Mr. Guzmán has also been the custodian of Chile's historical memory. This sturdy eight-DVD box includes "The Battle of Chile," his three-part chronicle of the military coup that brought down President Salvador Allende, and his more recent poetic essay "Nostalgia for the Light," as well as three other documentaries and five short films.
(Icarus Films)FORBIDDEN HOLLYWOOD VOLUME 9 For anyone, like me, who regards the early, sauna pre-Production Code 1930s as Hollywood's most fertile period, this series has been a reliable source of pleasure. The latest, with five films on four DVDs, is among the best — notable not only for the Broadway pizazz of "Big City Blues" (1932) but also two examples of Depression-era muckraking, the chain-gang drama "Hell's Highway" and the sharecropper melodrama "The Cabin in the Cotton," both released in 1932. (Warner Archive)THE RANDOLPH SCOTT ROUND-UP This set has five of the seven classic westerns that Scott made with Budd Boetticher in the 1950s, plus "A Lawless Street" (1955), directed by the extremely credible B-movie auteur Joseph H.
Lewis.
The price is right, but the color transfers are only fair, and the six films are crammed on two DVDs, which in my experience proved a bit glitchy. (Mill Creek)W. C. FIELDS COMEDY ESSENTIALS COLLECTION It's a gift, if a bit pricey. These 18 films, spread over five DVDs, include Fields's classic features like the hitherto scarce "Million Dollar Legs" (1932) and "The Bank Dick" (1940), as well as several noteworthy Paramount releases in which he's part of the ensemble, like "International House" and "Alice in Wonderland" (both 1933).
No ancillary material apart from an appreciation
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