It was once a long-held belief that no Sherlock Holmes film was set in the correct Victorian or Edwardian period until 1939’s The Hound of the Baskervilles with Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson. This idea was disproven with the discovery and release of the “lost” William Gillette film, Sherlock Holmes (1916). Rediscovered in 1914 and subsequently restored, this masterpiece had scenes showing Holmes and company in correct clothing, as well as making use of proper horse-drawn conveyances:
However, other Holmes films produced in the early decades of the Twentieth Century did, in fact, update the settings so that the stories didn’t seem to take place in the times in which they were originally set. This wasn’t an intentional or smugly clever effort on the part of those long-ago film-makers to “update” Holmes by bringing his adventures kicking and screaming into their “modern” times. Rather, they were simply making films on tight budgets that didn’t allow for such extras and fripperies such as Victorian-period costumes and settings. Their thinking was certainly, “What would adding these aspects do to enhance the story?” Many of those early films were only a generation or so away from when the original adventures were set, so perhaps it wasn’t too jarring for audiences of that time to see them placed in contemporary settings.
But . . . a number of those early films did include the regular use of automobiles. Did that go unnoticed by film-goers of the time, who were also willing to ignore modern-day clothing in their Holmes films? Or did seeing a car in a tale that was clearly set in the late 1800’s throw them out of the story, even for just a moment?
Automobiles in The Canon
Although there have been quite a few traditional pastiches set around the beginning of the 1900’s that make use of the automobile in a correct and proper way (such as the radio show “The Adventure of the Horseless Carriage" starring Tom Conway, February 24th, 1947), the only Canonical story to mention a car is “His Last Bow”, published in September 1917, in the midst of World War I. Watson is the driver, arriving with a disguised Holmes at Von Bork’s Essex estate on 2nd August, 1914. The evil German watches them arrive . . . .
He was just in time to see the lights of a small car come to a halt at the gate. A passenger sprang out of it and advanced swiftly towards him, while the chauffeur, a heavily built, elderly man with a gray moustache, settled down like one who resigns himself to a long vigil.
Later, following his defeat, Von Bork is unwillingly placed into that same vehicle:
After a short, final struggle he was hoisted, still bound hand and foot, into the spare seat of the little car. His precious valise was wedged in beside him.
A bit earlier, Watson mentions the car to Holmes, giving no indication of its make or model, or whether it’s his own or one that has been leased for the occasion:
“I feel twenty years younger, Holmes. I have seldom felt so happy as when I got your wire asking me to meet you at Harwich with the car.”
I’m no automobile expert – to me they’re useful devices to get from here to there, and as long as they work correctly and have a way for me to listen to my favorite music, I’m satisfied. But there are people who love cars, and some of them are Holmesians, and they have no doubt spent a great deal of time thinking about just what kind of car it is that Watson would have driven on this most urgent of missions. A quick glance through some of my go-to reference materials – Baring-Gould’s The Annotated Sherlock Holmes, both versions of Klinger’s annotated editions, and the notes in The Oxford Sherlock Holmes – doesn’t show that anyone has ever felt that the question of Watson’s car was worth addressing. No doubt there is some research about it somewhere – in an old issue of The Baker Street Journal or The Sherlock Holmes Society of London Journal, perhaps? – that answers the question definitively, but for right now, the fact stands that this car in “His Last Bow”, whatever type that it was, is the only automobile to appear in The Canon.
In his autobiography Memories and Adventures (1924), Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the first Literary Agent, commented obliquely on the use of automobiles in connection to Sherlock Holmes when referring in general to the filming of the Holmes stories, and specifically of his enjoyment of the silent films starring Eille Norwood. Doyle writes:
My only criticism of the films is that they introduce telephones, motor cars, and other luxuries of which the Victorian Holmes never dreamed.
Perhaps Sir Arthur is forgetting that the telephone was regularly used in The Canon, having been mentioned in The Sign of the Four, “The Man With the Twisted Lip”, “The Illustrious Client”, “The Blanched Soldier”, “The Three Garridebs”, and “The Retired Colourman”.
Here’s an illustration of Holmes using the telephone, by Howard K. Elcock from “The Three Garridebs” (The Strand Magazine, January 1925):
But alas, there doesn't seem to be an original illustration of Watson’s car from “His Last Bow”.
And Now . . . The Cars!
[Author’s Note: For illustrative purposes, I’m including example screen-shots with the following discussion, but these are not necessarily the only or the best of these to be found. Part of the fun will be for the reader to examine the films mentioned. Also provided are some – but not all – YouTube links for a few of the represented films, but viewing these films on DVD is recommended in order to provide much better clarity. YouTube links were verified at the time of posting, but those things come and go . . . .]
A quick examination of some of the pre-1939 Holmes films shows that there were numerous times that automobiles appeared. For example, in The Man with the Twisted Lip (1921) . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM27uaF31CU
. . . one of many silent films starring Eille Norwood, there are several shots of automobiles in establishing shots of London, sometimes alongside horse-vehicles:
The same is true in the next year’s Sherlock Holmes (1922) with screen legend John Barrymore . . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt_tFWp3bmg
Here’s one of my favorite quick location shots from the Barrymore film, showing vehicles passing quickly back and for the in front of New Scotland Yard, on the Embankment across from Westminster Pier:
As an aside, here’s a photo of Holmes and Watson going into New Scotland yard at some undated visit in the late1880’s or mid-1890’s . . .
. . . and here is me and my deerstalker at New Scotland Yard on one of my many visits there - this time in September 2016, on my third (so far) Holmes Pilgrimage:
But I digress.
Holmes and Automobiles in the Sound Age
As Holmes films entered the sound age, standard operating procedure was maintained in that no attempts would be made to place the films in the period in which the stories had been originally set. The Speckled Band (1931), starring Raymond Massey, incorporated a vast amount of additional material from Doyle’s later play version of the story, which had premiered at the Adelphi Theatre in the spring of 1910. In addition to the events of this most famous of adventures, there was an extensive story grafted on relating to various characters and events at Stoke Moran.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwMpJ8_wpr8&t=2404s
Also included in the Massey film is a most jarring introduction to Sherlock Holmes, whom we meet when Watson arrives at 101 (?!?) Baker Street, where Holmes employs a staff of frantically typing secretaries, apparently transcribing dictation through headphones while other modernistic (for the times) machines help Holmes keep track of the details of every criminal case and the whereabouts of every criminal at any given date. (One has to wonder what Literary Agent Doyle, who had died a year earlier, would have thought about this if he didn’t like the idea of telephones and automobiles!)
Although much of the action of this film takes place in Baker Street or at Stoke Moran, there is a scene with an automobile, indicating that the devices in Holmes’s “office” aren’t the only modern aspects of this film:
Next up is Clive Brook, who played Our Hero in the first Holmes film with sound, The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1929). This film still exists, but it’s held at the U.S. Library of Congress. More easily seen is Brook’s subsequent effort, Sherlock Holmes (1932).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBqhRsTempY&list=PL4NotralLFJMecej0ZSzSKLRH7Hbhkx8r
Again, one should not be surprised to see a motorized vehicle make an appearance:
Then there is A Study in Scarlet (1933) starring a heavy-set Reginald Owen as Holmes, after he had played Watson to Clive Brook’s Holmes in the previous year’s Sherlock Holmes. This film has nothing to do with the original Holmes adventure, which was set in 1881 and first published in 1887. That one relates Holmes and Watson's first meeting. Rather, this story a variation on the "Ten Little Indians" theme that would later be copied by Agatha Christie in And Then There Were None (1939). (She gets all the credit - but Holmes did it first!)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ot5CmymbIoo
The opening shot of the film, establishing the initial action at Victoria Station, involves a passing vehicle, showing that events are taking place in a contemporary setting:
The next Holmes for the 1930’s was Britain’s Arthur Wontner, a personal favorite of mine, if only because he looked like Holmes, straight out of The Strand Magazine. He starred in five Holmes films: The Sleeping Cardinal (1931), The Sign of Four (1932), The Missing Rembrandt (1932, considered a “lost” film, so someone should please find it), The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935), and Silver Blaze (or U.S. title Murder at the Baskervilles 1937). Here’s a link to the latter film:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3JeaVqzSvI&t=2300s
Of course, there were automobiles involved:
Basil Rathbone, Sherlock Holmes, and Cars
This brings us to one of the greatest Holmes portrayals of all time, Basil Rathbone – although sadly he was saddled with the well-meaning Boobus Britannicus Nigel Bruce as Watson. They both starred in two 1939 films from Twentieth-Century Fox that made every effort to place Holmes in the correct Victorian setting, in terms of both costume and vehicles, The Hound of the Baskervilles . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1rQU6ty9LvA
. . . and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5Xcen4Go0E
As mentioned, it was long believed that these were the first to show Holmes in the correct period, before it was determined that the 1916 Gillette film had already done so. Still, placing Holmes in the 1880’s was a wise choice, as by 1939, fifty years after the actual events had occurred, there was a considerable timespan between the true events of The Hound and when the tale was being filmed.
Sadly, after the second offering, The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes, there were to be no more Holmes films from this studio, although Rathbone and Bruce did continue in the roles on radio, portraying Holmes and Watson in adventures that were still set in the correct time period. This continued even as they began making new Holmes films at Universal, which were not set in the correct time period.
The twelve Universal films, from 1942 to 1946, all feature Holmes in modern settings, initially involved in plots related to World War II, and then in more general 1940’s stories. The first three of these Universal films, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942), and Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943), are clearly set in World War II – there’s no possible way that they could be taking place at any other time with their aspects of modern warfare, such as radio broadcasts, bombsights, and microphotography. I’ve explained elsewhere that, in fact, these first three Universal films weren’t Sherlock Holmes adventures at all, but rather Solar Pons adventures, with Pons’s name changed to Holmes in order to avoid confusion with modern audiences.
Holmes, in his nineties during World War II, was only marginally involved in the war effort, and when Hollywood wanted to show England’s Greatest Hero fighting Nazis, they had no choice but to pivot to the adventures of Solar Pons, a relative of Holmes who was active in the British War effort. (This is explained in greater detail in an entry of this blog, specifically titled “Basil Rathbone’s Solar Pons Films”:
http://17stepprogram.blogspot.com/2016/11/basil-rathbones-solar-pons-films.html
The final nine films that Rathbone filmed for Universal were, in fact, based on Watson’s original notes, related to cases that did occur during World War I or immediately afterwards. Although they seemed to be set in the 1940’s in terms of clothing and automobiles shown, it must be remembered that the true underlying cases took place much earlier, and had only been dressed up by the filmmakers to be seemingly set in contemporary times.
After Rathbone
After Rathbone’s films, Holmes seemed to be ignored for a time. Except for a couple of television pilots in the late 1940’s and 1950’s, the next film effort was the curious Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962), starring Christopher Lee, the first of several times that he would play Holmes (as well as Mycroft and Sir Henry Baskerville, the only man to have played all three parts.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miGKmVc3Ihg
Oddly, this film, which was made by an international conglomerate, removed the original vocal tracks, including Lee’s, and dubbed them right back in again with different actors. This film, which seems to indicate that the story is set in the 1880’s, includes a variation on the events of The Valley of Fear. In spite of the attempts to look as if it’s in period, however, it inexplicably uses automobiles, as seen in various shots, such as on a dock or in passing on a street, and outside Baker Street when Watson is retrieving his bag from his car, and later when an ambulance is called:
As mentioned, the intervening period between Rathbone and Lee had contained a couple of television pilots, one in 1949 (The Speckled Band starring Alan Napier, who also played Alfred from the 1960’s Batman television show) . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3SoFr_j3aok
. . . and another with John Longdon as Holmes, The Man Who Disappeared (1951), based closely upon “The Man With the Twisted Lip”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD9NOnjRT3I
Each of these is set in the correct period, but what is fun to notice about The Man Who Disappeared takes place around 7:18 to 7:326 of the film. At that point, Holmes has been following a man, with various scenes of horse-drawn carriages interspersed into the immediate action. At the scene in question, Holmes sees his prey go into a building located with Tower Bridge clearly in the background. And while we watch Holmes’s quarry unlock a door, there are numerous modern vehicles - cars and trucks - passing back and forth over the bridge. Carelessness on the part of the film makers? Probably. It’s not the only time that such a thing will happen.
More Recent Examples
One of the most revered versions of Holmes on film is the Granada series, starring Jeremy Brett. The producers went to a great deal of effort to make this one of the most authentically well-produced Holmes shows ever. However, accidents do occur. In the closing moments of The Dancing Men (1984), during Watson’s final voice-over, there is a shot of the house of Ridling Thorpe Manor, in Norfolk. (Actually, it’s Leighton Hall in Lancashire.) Between approximately 52:30 and 52:59 of the complete episode, just after Holmes says, “How absurdly simple,” we watch men approaching a carriage from the manor’s doorway. They climb into it. The camera pulls back, showing the carriage, the men, the house . . . and in the top left corner, a busy modern road, with fast-moving cars and trucks traveling across it, reminiscent of the vehicles we saw on Tower Bridge in 1951’s The Man Who Disappeared.
Once seen, it cannot be unseen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-g8iw7ZOYfs
A glance at a map shows that Leighton Hall, where this scene was filmed, faces the southeast, and that the road behind it and to the northwest is possibly Storrs Lane or Red Bridge Lane, near the Leighton Moss Nature Reserve and the Silverdale train station. (Clearly, someone in the area needs to do some field research, and it isn’t quite convenient for me to do so just at the moment, but I’ll go over there and do it if I have to.)
The Granada series did include an automobile that could have rightly been in a Canonical story, even if it wasn’t specifically mentioned in the original text. Granada’s The Problem of Thor Bridge shows The Gold King, Neil Gibson, tooling around in a vehicle that is appropriate for the time in which the adventure took place, October 1900. (Knowing nothing about cars, I can't say for sure, but someone knows . . . .)
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x13o0dy
In skipping to the Granada series, I neglected to mention a few other Holmes efforts that were thankfully and carefully set in the correct time period. From 1954-1955, Ronald Howard starred as Holmes . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEk6aElkfT4
and in the 1960’s, the BBC did an excellent job in in two different series starring Douglas Wilmer (1964-1965), whose episodes are sadly not currently represented on YouTube, and Peter Cushing (1968):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDF430yEQ-s
Prior to Cushing's television Holmes, he played the Great Detective in the first color Holmes film, Hammer's The Hound of the Baskervilles(1959) Curiously, Cushing would make a second version of The Hound during the 1968 television show. And later, he would star again as Holmes in 1984's The Masks of Death:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m58-uS1CJVc
Although the film indicates that it's set in 1926, this is clearly a mistake, as the narrative, with Holmes and Watson still in Baker Street, must actually occur at the turn of the century. Here's a photo of Holmes and Watson arriving at a train station in a car. (And thanks to George Mann, who pointed out that I had originally missed this one!)
For the most part, Holmes has continued to be presented in the correct settings ever since. There have been some exceptions, such as two films and a cartoon series wherein Holmes was revived in modern times, awkwardly dealing with being in our present and his future: The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1987) starring Michael Pennington . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsOy5X6mDl0
. . . 1994 Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes Returns (1993) with Anthony Higgins . . .
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFcoK75Riq4
and Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxmoOUsZzOs&list=PL0ACFBC09C84127E7
There have been films wherein a person with a mental illness believes that he is Sherlock Holmes in modern times: They Might Be Giants (1971) with George C. Scott (not for free on YouTube)and The Return of the World’s Greatest Detective (1976) with Larry Hagman:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ETr-j3yLV9g
Additionally, there have been some modern versions wildly set in some Alternate Universe, wherein Holmes is portrayed both as a rude sociopathic murderer or as a tattooed New York-dwelling drug addict. These all have modern day appurtenances grafted onto them, but that would be expected, since they are all modern day simulacrums, and have nothing to do with the true Sherlock Holmes.
The future . . . .
As of right now, the film version of Sherlock Holmes has to pin its hopes on the promise of a possible third offering starring Robert Downey, Jr. as the consulting detective. The first two Downey films, while treading into some absurdities in tone – Holmes as a sloppy alcoholic who drinks embalming fluid, for instance – are at least set in the correct time period, and even if Mr. Downey doesn’t look like Holmes, he is in good company, as a great many previous portrayers didn’t resemble Our Hero either. While the Downey films (produced in 2009 and 2011) have been criticized for being too action packed, in many cases they actually show events that were previously only described on the pages of The Canon and “off stage” – for instance, bare-knuckle boxing.
To conclude this essay, I’ll point out that the second Downey film, A Game of Shadows (2011), has a scene that, while criticized by some as being too Steampunk, does relate to this essay. Early on, Holmes and Watson travel to Watson’s make-shift bachelor party in some sort of steam-powered automobile. While it seems a little out of place for the late 1880’s, the film makers do attempt to make it look as if it’s part of the that world, unlike so many of those earlier films that made no effort at all, making do with contemporary cars instead of hansom cabs and growlers. I appreciate that they made the effort.
My question still stands: Were movie watchers of yesteryear thrown out of the story, even if just for a moment, when a contemporary (to them) vehicle appeared on the screen, which would not have been correctly included in a true Canonical adaptation, or did they accept it, from their position in time so much closer to the true Holmesian Era?
We may never know.
©David Marcum 2018 – All Rights Reserved
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David Marcum plays The Game with deadly seriousness. He first discovered Sherlock Holmes in 1975 at the age of ten, and since that time, he has collected, read, and chronologicized literally thousands of traditional Holmes pastiches in the form of novels, short stories, radio and television episodes, movies and scripts, comics, fan-fiction, and unpublished manuscripts. He is the author of over sixty Sherlockian pastiches, some published in anthologies and magazines such as The Strand, and others collected in his own books, The Papers of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes and A Quantity of Debt, and Sherlock Holmes – Tangled Skeins. He has edited over fifty books, including several dozen traditional Sherlockian anthologies, such as the ongoing series The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, which he created in 2015. This collection is now up to 21 volumes, with several more in preparation. He was responsible for bringing back August Derleth’s Solar Pons for a new generation, first with his collection of authorized Pons stories, The Papers of Solar Pons, and then by editing the reissued authorized versions of the original Pons books. He is now doing the same for the adventures of Dr. Thorndyke. He has contributed numerous essays to various publications, and is a member of a number of Sherlockian groups and Scions. He is a licensed Civil Engineer, living in Tennessee with his wife and son. His irregular Sherlockian blog, A Seventeen Step Program, addresses various topics related to his favorite book friends (as his son used to call them when he was small), and can be found at http://17stepprogram.blogspot.com/ Since the age of nineteen, he has worn a deerstalker as his regular-and-only hat. In 2013, he and his deerstalker were finally able make his first trip-of-a-lifetime Holmes Pilgrimage to England, with return Pilgrimages in 2015 and 2016, where you may have spotted him. If you ever run into him and his deerstalker out and about, feel free to say hello!
His Amazon Author Page can be found at:
https://www.amazon.com/kindle-dbs/entity/author/B00K1IKA92?_encoding=UTF8&node=283155&offset=0&pageSize=12&searchAlias=stripbooks&sort=author-sidecar-rank&page=1&langFilter=default#formatSelectorHeader
and at MX Publishing:
https://mxpublishing.com/search?type=product&q=marcum&fbclid=IwAR12tH4SUvE9nmEnnuqeI5GC7Tv69-NagPgmAZlxcz0vr2Ihza5_6jP-fXM
