Saturday, March 17, 2007

Holmes on Film (Again)


According to Variety, Warner Bros. has just announced its intention to make another Sherlock Holmes movie with Neil Marshall slated to direct and Michael Johnson to write the screenplay. As for the plot, all anyone knows is that it is to be based on Michael Wigram's forthcoming comic book, Sherlock Holmes and that it will concentrate more on Holmes' potential as an action hero:

Wigram's vision has Holmes losing some of his Victorian stuffiness and being more adventuresome, including playing up his skills as a bare-knuckle boxer and expert swordsman as he goes about solving crimes.

If the film can do this without cheapening its protagonist, it should be most welcome by Sherlock Holmes fans, who haven't seen Holmes on the big screen since Christopher Plummer's turn in Murder by Decree (1979) or, to a lesser extent, Nicholas Rowe's in Young Sherlock Holmes (1985).

5 comments:

Burntdisk said...

They should dig up Basil Rathbone. Even a dead Rathbone is better than just about anybody Hollywood has now...

Mark said...

What's truly regrettable is that Rathbone only got to appear in one canonical story, "The Hound of the Baskervilles"--the rest were all pastiches "based" on the original tales (but set in the 20th century). It will be interesting to see how closely this one sticks to the original stories.

Burntdisk said...

Hell, I'd even take the Hammer Hound over most anything produced in the last 30 years.

Mark said...

Oh, yeah! You're absolutely right--it's going to be impossible to find a Holmes like Rathbone's or Cushing's (or Brett's, if we want to get into TV). Besides, the Hammer one has all those great idiosyncrasies, like the spider and the satanic cult. Come to think of it, even the Rathbone version inserted a superfluous seance.

"Watson, the needle."

Mark said...

BTW, speaking of digging up actors, wasn't Rathbone one of the guys who helped steal John Barrymore's body along with Errol Flynn?