Ian Richardson stars as Sherlock Holmes, David Healy as Dr. Watson, and Cherie Lunghi as Mary Morstan in Arthur Conan Doyle's second tale of the Great Detective. It's full of the stuff of penny novels, witha. Beautiful and virtuous heroine, a fantastic treasure, a savage dwarf, and vengeful villain, and all that good stuff like that.
Although the Holmes canon contained vivid and outre elements throughout their writing, the real wonder was the clearing away of the supernatural and the explanation of the mysteries in a logical and realistic manner. The earlier works had more exotic elements, usually with a long discourse showing some foreign locale. When the series of short stories began in The Strand magazine, the length of such excursions was curtailed, and so we got shorter details of the world as the British knew it then; instead of Mormons in Utah, we got the Cornish moors.
Great care was taken to make sure that it looked like 1890 in this movie; if it all looks a little cleaner and more freshly painted than it actually was at the time, well, this is not the first movie to do that. Some alteration to the story's structure has been made, making it less a mystery and more a tale of suspense. If the tale is familiar to me from more than half a century's acquaintance, it's still a pleasure to watch Holmes & Watson, in whatever form, working as well as they did more than a century ago.
Although the Holmes canon contained vivid and outre elements throughout their writing, the real wonder was the clearing away of the supernatural and the explanation of the mysteries in a logical and realistic manner. The earlier works had more exotic elements, usually with a long discourse showing some foreign locale. When the series of short stories began in The Strand magazine, the length of such excursions was curtailed, and so we got shorter details of the world as the British knew it then; instead of Mormons in Utah, we got the Cornish moors.
Great care was taken to make sure that it looked like 1890 in this movie; if it all looks a little cleaner and more freshly painted than it actually was at the time, well, this is not the first movie to do that. Some alteration to the story's structure has been made, making it less a mystery and more a tale of suspense. If the tale is familiar to me from more than half a century's acquaintance, it's still a pleasure to watch Holmes & Watson, in whatever form, working as well as they did more than a century ago.