Last night's film: "
SHERLOCK HOLMES" (1916), starring William Gillette, adapting his own stage play, which had been running since 1899 and by which point he'd done over 1300 performances of. He's the one who established Holmes wearing a deerstalker hat and smoking a curved "meerchaum" pipe.
This was considered lost for generations, until that negative was found, mis-filed, in France. It was restored and put out by an outfit called Flicker Alley. The box has 3 discs: a Blu-Ray, a DVD, and a 3rd one with multiple extras, including 3 silent shorts that I think should have been part of that "Archive" pair of boxes I got earlier.
I don't yet have a BluRay player (been planning to get one for months now), so as yet I can't say what the difference is. But the regular DVD, the film looks to me to be the sharpest, cleanest silent I've ever seen. The daytime tints border on almost making it a color film. And I agree with many of the IMDB reviewers who say the acting is far more natural than one might expect from a silent film this old. Plus, the directing may be unique for a film from this era. I've never seen slow fades from long shots to close-ups or back again in any other silent.
It must have been a bizarre thing, to take a live stage play and translate it into a silent film. It'll be interesting to compare this with the tape I have of Frank Langella's version of the play, done around 1980. That was actually done as a play, on stage, simply recording the live performance in front of an audience with a video camera. I'm of the belief that there should be at least one such recording made of every play, for posterity's sake. I wish I could see Julie Andrews in "
MY FAIR LADY". It's criminal she wasn't cast in the movie version.
The story includes elements of "
A Scandal In Bohemia" (a royal person trying to retrieve letters from an ill-advised romance), "
The Final Problem" (Moriarty contrives to get Holmes alone to confront him), "
The Retired Colorman" (NOT one reviewer mentioned this, it's where the gas-chamber scene came from, I only know if it because Douglas Wilmer did that story in 1965) and "
A Study In Scarlet" (Holmes captures someone posing as a cabbie by asking them in to pick up a valise).
Funny enough, parts of this are very familiar to me, as I believe they were used in the first Arthur Wontner film from 1931, "
THE SLEEPING CARDINAL" alias "
SHERLOCK HOLMES' FATAL HOUR". In both, Moriarty assumes a disguise, and comes to Holmes' office to kill him in person. Also, Moriarty's underground lair is nearly identical.
The play was filmed again only 6 years later, in 1922, with John Barrymore. I have that on order right now. It'll be interesting to see, even though apparently everyone feels it's a disappointment compared to the Gillette version.
