At the Movies with Sherlock Holmes

From almost the beginning of the movies, Sherlock Holmes was there. And he still is.

Our friend Regina Stinson, BSI, reviewed the 115-year “Screen Life of Sherlock Holmes” in a presentation at the beginning of the Tankerville Club of Cincinnati’s first annual Sherlock Holmes Film Festival on Aug. 24.

In a reprise of her delightful talk at the “Holmes, Doyle, & Friends” conference in March, she surveyed more than 50 films and television programs from Sherlock Holmes Baffled in 1903 to Holmes & Watson in 2018. You may have seen the minute-long Baffled, which astonishingly features trick photography. Regina showed all of it, along with many film and TV clips.

Fortunately, none of those clips was from the cringe-worthy Holmes & Watson.  

Regina covered good movies and bad, humorous and serious, movies that were actually about Holmes and some there were about men who thought they were Holmes or prevented to be Holmes. There's a lot of variety out there -- enough for every taste.  

A film festival is a lot of fun. We watched the hilarious Daffy Duck cartoon parody “Deduce, You Say,” Rathbone-Bruce in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Brett-Hardwicke in “The Man with the Twisted Lip,” and Cushing-Morrell in The Hound of the Baskervilles.

We all have our favorite screen Holmes, but Basil Rathbone, Jeremy Brett, and Peter Cushing would certainly be high on most lists.

So, how do we top that lineup next year? I don’t know yet, but we 115 years of material from which to choose!