The British Film Institute has restored three of the short two-reel silent films in the Stoll Pictures Sherlock Holmes series from the early 1920s – and very witty, watchable and spirited entertainments they are too. The star is the English stage actor Eille Norwood, whose handsome, troubled, sensitive face looms out of the screen in extreme closeup in the first of these, A Scandal in Bohemia, from 1921. Dr Watson is played in all of the films by Hubert Willis.
In this first film, our hero demonstrates his talents as a master of disguise; Holmes is approached by the King of Bohemia at his rooms in Baker Street, wearing a mask (so concerned is he about being recognised), although Holmes’s powers of deduction (and of course his own superior mastery of this kind of imposture) allow him to rumble the king at once. He wants Holmes to purloin an incriminating photograph taken of him with a young woman – an “adventuress” is how he quaintly puts it – which could be embarrassing. This is the fashionable stage actor Irene Adler, played by Joan Beverley, and Holmes manages to get on stage with Adler mid-performance to carry out a daring stratagem. But very startlingly, Adler appears to be the one person who can outwit Holmes.
In The Golden Pince-Nez from 1922, a dead man is found with this object in his grasp, and Holmes brilliantly intuits exactly what sort of person would have worn these spectacles. And in The Final Problem from 1923, Holmes climactically confronts the Napoleon of crime, Moriarty himself (played by Percy Standing), for their colossal hand-to-hand combat, transplanted from the Reichenbach Falls in the original to Cheddar Gorge.
What is startling, especially in the first of these, is the use of real London locations – the city that Conan Doyle would have recognised. These movies were shot with the knowledge and approval of Conan Doyle, who was a big fan of Norwood’s performance, and it might have influenced his composition of the later stories, the way Sean Connery was said to have influenced Ian Fleming’s conception of James Bond in the last years of Fleming’s life.
• Silent Sherlock: Three Classic Cases is in UK and Irish cinemas from 12 December.
