I So CBS’s Elementary has been running for a while, and I keep meaning to catch up with it and give it a proper review—“this works,” “this doesn’t”—the whole nine yards. And yet, somehow, I can’t manage to keep up. I watched the pilot—sampled an episode or two—and yet, Thursday after Thursday passes and I […]
Before continuing with my exploration of detective film (leaving, at last, Sherlock Holmes and moving on to more contemporaneous examples), I want to take a moment and re-iterate something that has been implicit in my posts here, but which might get lost in the shuffle when we narrow our focus to individual films. This post, […]
In most of these essays, I try to keep a pretense of critical distance. That is, I point out whatever loose sally of thought the movie in question inspires and then proceed from there, without venturing much comment on the quality of the movie itself. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, however, must stand as […]
Crime fiction has both the opportunity and the obligation to be the most political of any writing or any media, crime itself being the most manifest example of the politics of the time. We are defined and damned by the crimes of the times that we live in. The Moors Murders, the Yorkshire Ripper, and […]
There are a number of different directions one can go when reviewing Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. We could protest (again) that Robert Downey, Junior is no Sherlock Holmes. He does not look like Holmes or act like Holmes. On the other hand, neither does any other portrayer of Sherlock Holmes, for in a […]
The Hound of the Baskervilles was Basil Rathbone’s first turn as Sherlock Holmes—and one of only two Rathbone Holmes movies set in the Victorian era. The casting is perfect; Rathbone has all the lean intensity of the original Sidney Paget illustrations, and his cool acting style embodies the man Watson once described as “the most […]