by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Speaking of Sherlock Holmes, the night before last Charles
and I watched a quite interesting download: Acquaintance, the pilot for an occasional series of Sherlock
Holmes TV productions made in the Soviet Union by Lenfilm Studios in 1979. It
turned out to be unexpectedly good, locating Holmes (Vasiliy Livanov) and Dr.
Watson (Vitali Solomin) in their proper setting in 1890’s London (represented
by some buildings from the old quarter of the city of Riga that may have been
built when Riga was still part of Germany; today it’s the capital and largest
city of the Baltic republic of Latvia) and drawing its plot from Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle’s original stories — the first half of the film portrays the
meeting and early days of the friendship between Holmes and Watson very much as
described in the first Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, while the second half adapts The Speckled
Band. The download we had included “hard”
English subtitles, and it was clear that whoever wrote them had simply
translated from the original Russian script by Yuli Dunsky and Valeri Frid, and
hadn’t bothered to cross-reference important phrases and proper names with the
Conan Doyle original. Dr. Grimesby Roylott’s home at Stoke-Moran became
“Stock-Moron” (as opposed to all those custom-built morons we’ve been dealing
with lately” and Julia Stoner’s (Mariya Solomina, real-life wife of the actor
who played Watson in the film) dying cry that she was being killed by “a
speckled band” — the source of the story’s title — became “a motley ribbon.” It
also didn’t help that everything looked so clear and bright; though director
Igor Maslennikov had a good camera eye, the London exteriors looked
unrealistically sunny (the next night, when Charles and I watched 21
Days and the first exterior shot was
properly foggy, I told him, “This is what I expect a movie set in London to look like”) and I suspect
this was shot during Riga’s “white nights,” the summer period in the extreme
north of Russia and the Baltic states when it’s daylight nearly 23 hours a day
because of where those countries are located on earth in relation to the sun.
Nonetheless, this was a surprisingly good adaptation of the Holmes stories, and
Vasiliy Livanov turned out to be a fine Holmes; he looked right (the height, the aquiline nose, the overall
air of imperiousness) and he projected the character’s authority effectively
even if he wasn’t quite as convincing as Basil Rathbone in the action scenes
(but then, as I repeated to Charles in my paraphrase of the opening of Conan
Doyle’s “A Scandal in Bohemia,” “To me, Basil Rathbone will always be the Sherlock Holmes” — to Charles, I suspect, it will
always be Jeremy Brett, who had the advantage of playing Holmes in the 1970’s
Granada TV adaptations of all the
Conan Doyle stories and thereby becoming only the second actor, after Eille
Norwood in the 1920’s, to portray Holmes in the entire canon). Once we got out
of London and out in the country to Dr. Roylott’s sinister manse, Maslennikov’s command of atmospherics got
considerably better, and Mariya Solomina, portraying both the doomed Julia
Stoner and her still-living sister Helen, whom Holmes and Watson spare from the
fate of her sister (to be attacked by an Indian swamp adder, an especially
poisonous snake which Roylott brought back from India along with a hyena and a
baboon — there’s an amusing exchange in which Holmes asks Helen if Roylott has
a cat, and she says no with an air that says, “You think someone that crazy would have as prosaic a pet as a cat?”), seems a bit bimbo-ish in Holmes’ office but
becomes a quite spunky damsel in distress in the later scenes when her life is
actually threatened. Lenfilm made quite a few of these Holmes adaptations for
Soviet TV in the early 1980’s, and though not a major addition to the canon of
Holmes on film this is certainly a quite entertaining one and avoids most of
the mistakes made by other adapters — though I was a bit disappointed that the
filmmakers included the famous scene in which Roylott, to demonstrate his
strength and the inadvisability of messing with him, bends Holmes’ fireplace
poker into a metal pretzel, and Holmes bends it back — only here he doesn’t
bend it back until after Roylott
has left, taking the edge off the famous confrontation. Still, this is good
enough that the other items in the series would be worth seeing — though while
trolling around imdb.com looking for information on this film I found that the
1916 Sherlock Holmes movie, a
feature from Essanay Studios with Arthur Berthelet directing and William
Gillette, the first actor to play Holmes on stage, as star, was rediscovered as
a negative in France last year and has been restored and reissued. Now that would be a major addition to the Holmes filmography!
