brett / everett
I think Jeremy Brett IS holmes.

This is brilliant.

Rupert convinced me.

Full stop.

If you like holmes give it a go.

I loved it...


Pretty ghastly stuff
Starting from the fact that I don't like Rupert Everett as an actor, this one can't win as far as I'm concerned. And the idea of inventing another Holmes mystery simply to create a slightly camp vehicle for its 'star' is frankly tedious, like those 'in jokes' that nobody except the production team understands.
And any Holmes fan HAS now to compare anyone playing the detective with Jeremy Brett. It's not a question of needing to 'get a life' as one reviewer has suggested, but the simple fact that Brett is a superb actor, one who creates a role and makes it his own - and Everett simply ain't. There is no comparison. Chalk and Cheese.
Brett speaks better than Everett, too. And is less in love with himself.
Stick with Brett as Sherlock, you can't go wrong. And as a runner-up, good old Peter Cushing.


Cubitt strikes again
This was an opportunity sadly missed. Cubitt, after messing around with The Hound of the Baskervilles just for the sake of it, decided to pen an original screenplay. The basic idea was good but it simply wasn't Holmes. What on earth was he thinking by having a female American profiler / psychoanalyst when Freud had only just come on the scene. Talk about anachronistic.

Hart and Everett were well cast although I do agree with some of the misgivings about the portrayal of Holmes.

Let's hope that Cubitt doesn't do anything else with Holmes. He clearly doesn't understand the character.

A fine Sherlock Holmes with Rupert Everett, along with fog, the privileged class and a dangerous fetish
"Stocking in the throat. One tied about the neck. Signs of bondage. These are the killer's calling card. This man leaves his mark on his work like a painter leaves his signature upon a canvas." Sherlock Holmes says this while studying the corpse of a young woman...a girl, really, born of a wealthy, aristocratic family who had gone missing. She was the second, and now Holmes has been brought out of his bored lethargy. He will find the killer, and the hunt will take him into some of London's noblest families, where arrogance and concern over position is found far more often than love or even much affection, where the butlers are as much snobs as their masters, where hanky-panky with the servants can be excused as long as it's discrete.

Traditionalists who are fond of a Holmes who looks like Basil Rathbone and mysteries which definitely do not include a dose of sexual fetishism may not be thrilled with this version of The Great Detective. Holmes is played by Rupert Everett, a fine actor, but who is younger than we're used to. Holmes is easily bored, we all know that, but here we don't just hear about his fondness for the seven-percent solution, we watch him shoot up. Mary Moran, Dr. John Watson's wife-to-be in The Canon, has disappeared. In her place as Watson's fiancee is Dr. Jenny Vandeleur (Helen McCrory), an American who doesn't hesitate to call Holmes 'Sherlock.' "I'm a trained psychoanalyst. Surely you knew that," she says to Holmes while she, Watson and Holmes are at dinner. "I didn't know that," Holmes murmurs. "I find it so strange," she says, "that you two could be such close friends and yet not talk about someone as significant as a fiancee." "I take no interest in such matters," Holmes says. "No," she continues, "but as I understand it, Sherlock, you dislike and distrust women." "Women are one of the necessary evils." "I take it you've never been in love," she asks. "My brain has always governed my heart," he replies. She beams at Holmes and says, "Would you submit to analysis? You'd make a fascinating study."

To my way of thinking, a Holmes story can work if the actor playing Holmes is first-rate at his craft, if the mystery (and the writing) is clever, if the actors give performances that are detailed and authentic, and if the production values capture the mood and look of the period. Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking works on all four levels. Rupert Everett's Holmes comes off as a bit dissipated because of boredom. He also is intense and honorable when he's on a case, even a little vulnerable. Ian Hart is very good as Watson. The mystery is well mounted, well played and well written, with lots of condescension coming from the upper classes. The story also is off-beat sexually, and not just games with a handy footman or two. There's plenty of attention to feet along with deep inhalations of slippers. Production values are very high, with much fog in the streets and graveyards, a chilly stone morgue, the clip-clopping of horse-drawn carriages and immaculate, bespoke clothing. When the upper-class English dress for dinner, the presumption of inherited privilege almost seems reasonable.

Holmes is such a vivid concept that any number of actors have been able to make him interesting. Rathbone is one, although I think seeing what Hollywood did to Watson would make Conan Doyle retch. Ian Richardson, Jeremy Brett, Peter Cushing, Christopher Plummer...all have done fine jobs. I'd add Rupert Everett to the list now.

And with the case solved and Watson and Jenny Vandeleur married and set to leave for their honeymoon in Paris, the three of them are finishing lunch. "What will you do with yourself, Sherlock, now that your Boswell's away," Jenny asks. "For me," he replies, "there's always the needle." "Holmes!" Watson says sharply. "Good old Watson," Holmes says with a slight smile, "you're the one fixed point in a changing age. No, I shall sit and stare at the wall like Whistler's mother, a study in gray. And now, it's time you left."

Perhaps while they're gone he'll encounter Irene Adler.

The DVD looks just fine. For extras there are cast biographies and a commentary by the director and producer.

An improvement over the same team's Hound of the Baskervilles, but Everett is no Holmes
After the crashing disappointment of the BBC's recent version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, the producers have taken a positive step in replacing the truly dreadful Richard Roxburgh as Holmes. Unfortunately, Rupert Everett is only a mild improvement. Less of a crashing ham than Roxburgh, instead he comes across as a rather narcissistic and disinterested confirmed bachelor rather than a master detective, constantly striking brooding poses but never once convincing that there's either a human being or a brilliant deductive machine beneath them. Always an extremely limited actor, he brings little to the part beyond a reminder of how desperately uninteresting an actor he is when given centre-stage.

Thankfully, Ian Hart's Watson has been retained and improved, and he's given a much better part than the moody, petulant and antagonistic reading in Hound. Similarly, the ill-advised mutual distrust and barely submerged hatred grafted onto Holmes and Watson has been dropped in favour of a relationship more akin to the cut 'Case of the Upside Down Room' section of Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, with Watson trying to save his friend from his drug addiction by interesting him in a baffling case (unfortunately they have also carried over Robert Stephens' horrendous white-as-a-corpse makeup job for Sherlock).

The case itself isn't overburdened with originality, at times playing like a more refined Dario Argento giallo without the gore, but it moves along at a decent pace and makes for an entertaining if undemanding 99 minutes despite an abundance of anachronisms. It's just a shame that once again they've come up short one Sherlock.

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