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cimoreneSince the new Sherlock Holmes isn't out here for a while yet and the hype is constantly rising, today I felt moved to start to make screencaps of the remaining bits of Brett/Hardwicke Granada Holmes canon which I own, and have not heretofore screencapped. I watched the feature-length "The Eligible Bachelor" (based on "The Adventure of the Noble Bachelor" in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [book], but set instead between the episodes in The Return of Sherlock Holmes [tv]).
There are some excellent performances in this episode from the guest stars, some really beautiful photography, and a performance that was extraordinary even for Brett of Holmes distracted and haunted by his recurring nightmare. So far as it goes, this is pretty good, but the changes that were made to turn the short story into a 100ish-minute feature were a bit unfortunate. Not as unfortunate as that incredibly cracktastic and scummy later episode, "The Last Vampyre", but still fairly unfortunate.
Also there are a lot of screencaps in here.
The rest of the screencaps are in this gallery. (However, so are the rest of the Granada Holmes caps. There doesn't seem to be a good way to filter them. The first cap of this episode is this.)
Granada chose to expand and modify the story, setting it amidst the stories of The Return of Sherlock Holmes. The giant print of Reichenbach Falls from Sidney Paget's original Strand illustrations is in pride of place above Holmes's mantel, and he tells Watson that he regrets Moriarty's death in a fit of hysteria brought on by nightmares and boredom, but he hasn't yet completely given up cocaine - which in Granada canon occurs in the Return episode "The Devil's Foot". More prosaically, it's probably wise since Watson was recast between the Adventures and the Return, and that's strange enough without having a flashback episode set during The Adventures with the wrong Watson. Jeremy Brett had also aged noticeably in between. When the feature-length Holmes films were made, he was on lithium for bipolar disorder, and its side-effects had begun to take their toll in a slightly more haggard appearance and an undeniable puffiness due to water retention.
In the original short story, Lord Robert St Simon is a penniless nobleman who, it is hinted, wishes to marry Hatty Doran for her money, and he's rather stiff-rumped and condescending in his interviews with Holmes and then, in the final scene where Holmes reveals all and brings in Hatty and her pre-existing husband to explain their side of the story, he acts like a dickhead, maintains that he's very offended and was ill-used in the face of her apology, and then shakes her hand and storms off in a huff.
The theme of marriage for money and women as chattel is there, and the seed of Lord Robert being an asshole. This is expanded in the movie. For the length of it, scenes of two rather mysterious women are intertwined with scenes of Holmes and the scenes concerning Hatty and Lord Robert: Flora Millar, Lord Robert's old lover (who is expanded into a raving drunk slash desperate stalker in the movie), and a mysterious woman in an incredibly long and voluminous black veil.
However, the whole thing starts off with a fairly long period of atmosphere-building. At first there's an amazing quantity of London fog, and Holmes looks fabulous in it with his tophat during the credits.
Then we meet the premise of the investigation: Lord Robert with his American fiancée Hatty, taking a ride by his ancestral home to show it off.
And then we see Holmes in distress. He's having a nightmare: a waterfall and a chandelier; Holmes crawling out of a quagmire; a ripped-up red leather chair; what looks like a dead man lying on the ground; a muddy person with a Wild Thing vibe and long dirty talons reaching out for him; a big spiderweb that Holmes struggles through to wake up. He wakes up. His room is completely full of a drift of giant charcoal sketches of the images from the dream. Holmes sits up and starts to make more of them. As Hetty meets Lord Robert's family and prepares for the wedding, Holmes's insomnia gets worse, and he wanders around the city at night, at one point wandering straight in the back door of the theatre where, coincidentally, the red herring of the piece is rehearsing.
After Holmes stays out all night without his key, requiring Mrs Hudson to do the same, Dr Watson is called back from the conference he was attending to be the handler.
He fusses over Holmes and tolerantly puts up with a lot of babble about dreams (Holmes does, in fact, narrate the sequence of events for him, but requests him not to examine the drawings that are covering the entire room). He spends quite a while trying to convince Holmes to eat, but to no avail. And after refusing to eat for quite a long time, Holmes decides to take a nap right when Lord Robert calls - in person. He tells Watson to take the interview.
Shortly after Lord Robert's visit, Holmes manages to secure an interview with the veiled lady, who claims (though she doesn't really have definite proof) that Lord Robert is a Black Widower.
His first wife died shortly after their marriage and his second marriage was annulled in mysterious circumstances. (In fact he hired his wife's killer, whom he keeps as groundskeeper at his estate to this day, but that is only confirmed later.) His second wife he had declared insane though she wasn't by buying off a couple of doctors. First he institutionalized her; then he brought her back to his estate and she vanished, never to be seen again.
The veiled lady is the sister of his second wife. She lodged a complaint, and when the inspectors visited, his mistress Flora Millar, who is an actress, pretended to be his wife, so they would conclude she was well-cared-for. (In fact she was kept shackled with an ankle chain in a ruin not far from the main house where she was fed by the same groundskeeper who feeds Lord Robert's Surprise!Pet Leopard. Which for some unknown reason roams around the house freely, but apparently not the ruin as it has never eaten her.)
Intuition told the veiled lady that something horrible was going on at the mothballed estate; she snuck in to investigate and got mauled by the leopard, which caused the relatively minor disfigurement of a set of claw scars down half of her face; she was dumped for dead in the grounds, but rescued by some cottagers. And now she stalks Lord Robert.
Well, Flora Millar stalks Lord Robert all the time, so when the veiled lady takes a potshot at him the day before the wedding, it's F.M. who gets the blame. She appears at the wedding banquet, drunk as a skunk, to throw herself on him and try to claw his eyes out, as well, so when his wife disappears later she gets arrested. She tells Holmes about half her story, and the veiled lady then tells him hers.
Holmes solves the other part of the case fairly normally, but when he confronts Hatty's old husband with the truth, he learns that she's gone to confront Lord Robert. However, instead of going to where he actually lives, she's gone out to his estate. ~Where the leopard roams.~
(She's done this with her hair down. I guess she rolls like that because she's American and her daddy was a miner until he struck it rich.)
Holmes remarks that this was a bad move, not that it needed any particular intelligence to deduce that after the confessions of Miss Millar and the veiled lady. In fact, the leopard locks eyes with her, then deliberately turns and wanders away, apparently recognizing one of its own; so Lord Robert's henchman comes in, intending to finish her off with a pitchfork. Holmes arrives at the last possible moment to save her. Watson shoots the henchman and Holmes takes off after Lord Robert, but fails to catch him before his second wife uses some incredible arm muscles to collapse half the stonework in the ruin on him just from jerking on the chain attached to her ankle. This entire sequence of events explains all the repeated images from Holmes's recurring nightmare. In order. He discovers in a moment of epiphany that the fearsome, muddy creature grasping for him was Lord Robert's second wife reaching out for help.
He helps her up and gives her a bit of a cuddle before lending her some nail clippers and a blanket. (Then she sells the place to Hatty and her American husband, but not before inviting Holmes and Watson for a picnic and to the opera.)
There are some excellent performances in this episode from the guest stars, some really beautiful photography, and a performance that was extraordinary even for Brett of Holmes distracted and haunted by his recurring nightmare. So far as it goes, this is pretty good, but the changes that were made to turn the short story into a 100ish-minute feature were a bit unfortunate. Not as unfortunate as that incredibly cracktastic and scummy later episode, "The Last Vampyre", but still fairly unfortunate.
Also there are a lot of screencaps in here.
The rest of the screencaps are in this gallery. (However, so are the rest of the Granada Holmes caps. There doesn't seem to be a good way to filter them. The first cap of this episode is this.)
Granada chose to expand and modify the story, setting it amidst the stories of The Return of Sherlock Holmes. The giant print of Reichenbach Falls from Sidney Paget's original Strand illustrations is in pride of place above Holmes's mantel, and he tells Watson that he regrets Moriarty's death in a fit of hysteria brought on by nightmares and boredom, but he hasn't yet completely given up cocaine - which in Granada canon occurs in the Return episode "The Devil's Foot". More prosaically, it's probably wise since Watson was recast between the Adventures and the Return, and that's strange enough without having a flashback episode set during The Adventures with the wrong Watson. Jeremy Brett had also aged noticeably in between. When the feature-length Holmes films were made, he was on lithium for bipolar disorder, and its side-effects had begun to take their toll in a slightly more haggard appearance and an undeniable puffiness due to water retention.
In the original short story, Lord Robert St Simon is a penniless nobleman who, it is hinted, wishes to marry Hatty Doran for her money, and he's rather stiff-rumped and condescending in his interviews with Holmes and then, in the final scene where Holmes reveals all and brings in Hatty and her pre-existing husband to explain their side of the story, he acts like a dickhead, maintains that he's very offended and was ill-used in the face of her apology, and then shakes her hand and storms off in a huff.
The theme of marriage for money and women as chattel is there, and the seed of Lord Robert being an asshole. This is expanded in the movie. For the length of it, scenes of two rather mysterious women are intertwined with scenes of Holmes and the scenes concerning Hatty and Lord Robert: Flora Millar, Lord Robert's old lover (who is expanded into a raving drunk slash desperate stalker in the movie), and a mysterious woman in an incredibly long and voluminous black veil.
However, the whole thing starts off with a fairly long period of atmosphere-building. At first there's an amazing quantity of London fog, and Holmes looks fabulous in it with his tophat during the credits.
Then we meet the premise of the investigation: Lord Robert with his American fiancée Hatty, taking a ride by his ancestral home to show it off.
And then we see Holmes in distress. He's having a nightmare: a waterfall and a chandelier; Holmes crawling out of a quagmire; a ripped-up red leather chair; what looks like a dead man lying on the ground; a muddy person with a Wild Thing vibe and long dirty talons reaching out for him; a big spiderweb that Holmes struggles through to wake up. He wakes up. His room is completely full of a drift of giant charcoal sketches of the images from the dream. Holmes sits up and starts to make more of them. As Hetty meets Lord Robert's family and prepares for the wedding, Holmes's insomnia gets worse, and he wanders around the city at night, at one point wandering straight in the back door of the theatre where, coincidentally, the red herring of the piece is rehearsing.
After Holmes stays out all night without his key, requiring Mrs Hudson to do the same, Dr Watson is called back from the conference he was attending to be the handler.
He fusses over Holmes and tolerantly puts up with a lot of babble about dreams (Holmes does, in fact, narrate the sequence of events for him, but requests him not to examine the drawings that are covering the entire room). He spends quite a while trying to convince Holmes to eat, but to no avail. And after refusing to eat for quite a long time, Holmes decides to take a nap right when Lord Robert calls - in person. He tells Watson to take the interview.
Shortly after Lord Robert's visit, Holmes manages to secure an interview with the veiled lady, who claims (though she doesn't really have definite proof) that Lord Robert is a Black Widower.
His first wife died shortly after their marriage and his second marriage was annulled in mysterious circumstances. (In fact he hired his wife's killer, whom he keeps as groundskeeper at his estate to this day, but that is only confirmed later.) His second wife he had declared insane though she wasn't by buying off a couple of doctors. First he institutionalized her; then he brought her back to his estate and she vanished, never to be seen again.
The veiled lady is the sister of his second wife. She lodged a complaint, and when the inspectors visited, his mistress Flora Millar, who is an actress, pretended to be his wife, so they would conclude she was well-cared-for. (In fact she was kept shackled with an ankle chain in a ruin not far from the main house where she was fed by the same groundskeeper who feeds Lord Robert's Surprise!Pet Leopard. Which for some unknown reason roams around the house freely, but apparently not the ruin as it has never eaten her.)
Intuition told the veiled lady that something horrible was going on at the mothballed estate; she snuck in to investigate and got mauled by the leopard, which caused the relatively minor disfigurement of a set of claw scars down half of her face; she was dumped for dead in the grounds, but rescued by some cottagers. And now she stalks Lord Robert.
Well, Flora Millar stalks Lord Robert all the time, so when the veiled lady takes a potshot at him the day before the wedding, it's F.M. who gets the blame. She appears at the wedding banquet, drunk as a skunk, to throw herself on him and try to claw his eyes out, as well, so when his wife disappears later she gets arrested. She tells Holmes about half her story, and the veiled lady then tells him hers.
Holmes solves the other part of the case fairly normally, but when he confronts Hatty's old husband with the truth, he learns that she's gone to confront Lord Robert. However, instead of going to where he actually lives, she's gone out to his estate. ~Where the leopard roams.~
(She's done this with her hair down. I guess she rolls like that because she's American and her daddy was a miner until he struck it rich.)
Holmes remarks that this was a bad move, not that it needed any particular intelligence to deduce that after the confessions of Miss Millar and the veiled lady. In fact, the leopard locks eyes with her, then deliberately turns and wanders away, apparently recognizing one of its own; so Lord Robert's henchman comes in, intending to finish her off with a pitchfork. Holmes arrives at the last possible moment to save her. Watson shoots the henchman and Holmes takes off after Lord Robert, but fails to catch him before his second wife uses some incredible arm muscles to collapse half the stonework in the ruin on him just from jerking on the chain attached to her ankle. This entire sequence of events explains all the repeated images from Holmes's recurring nightmare. In order. He discovers in a moment of epiphany that the fearsome, muddy creature grasping for him was Lord Robert's second wife reaching out for help.
He helps her up and gives her a bit of a cuddle before lending her some nail clippers and a blanket. (Then she sells the place to Hatty and her American husband, but not before inviting Holmes and Watson for a picnic and to the opera.)
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Date: 13 Jan 2010 12:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 13 Jan 2010 06:07 pm (UTC)