Introduction
Evolution is a process of gradual change over time. Chapter one focused on an examination of the pressures at work on the adapted Sherlock Holmes that contribute to steady changes in the character. This chapter addresses the mechanism of selection, which is the means by which particular changes become normalised within the character. While, as Bortolotti and Hutcheon note, ‘Cultural selection, like natural selection, involves differential survival through a process of replicating into future generations’ (449), and is therefore also a gradual process, it is possible to pinpoint specific moments in which particular readings of the character were selected and normalised. Selection can either be dynamic or conservative, and this chapter will consider both mechanisms: directional and stabilizing selection.
The case study I have chosen to illustrate directional selection—the mechanism by which ‘an environment changes in one particular identifiable direction’, and
‘adaptations move toward a new cultural norm’ (449), is 1939’s The Hound of the Baskervilles starring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce. I have chosen this particular case study because it represents the most significant discrete and quantifiable change in the adapted Sherlock Holmes character. This work seeks to focus particularly on changes that work across the network of intertexts and fundamentally re-imagine the character itself rather than those that merely influence specific texts, which demands a case study for directional selection that illustrates a significant change that has persisted since it was enacted. The Second World War, for example, re-authored Basil Rathbone’s
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Sherlock Holmes in 1942. The character was contemporised so that he could directly battle Nazis onscreen. This selection for a war-time Holmes lasted only as long as the war, however, and once the Nazis were defeated in reality, Holmes reverted to his nineteenth century milieu on screen in subsequent adaptations. These specific adaptations reacted to the war itself, but the character made what might be called a return to factory settings afterward. As this work does not seek to place individual texts under a microscope in isolation, I have chosen to analyse how and why selection for the version of Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) has left a lasting legacy on the franchise.
Although the Second World War directly influenced only half a dozen Sherlock Holmes adaptations in the early 1940s by including Nazi antagonists, and/or immediate or tangential references to the war,1 analysis suggests it triggered the selection for a periodised Sherlock Holmes. Despite the recent contemporary adaptations from the BBC and CBS, Sherlock Holmes remains, in the public consciousness, a symbol of Victorian England. It is significant, then, that until 1939 he was always a contemporary figure. Adaptations prior to Twentieth Century Fox’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and its equally lavish sequel The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes—released on the first of September, a mere two days before Chamberlain declared war with Germany—were, without exception, set during the time in which they were made. The first section of this chapter addresses the twin pressures of nostalgia and cultural preservation, which were arguably triggered by the trauma of the war and outlasted the war itself. These pressures
1As the contemporary films starring Basil Rathbone progressed, WWII played a smaller and smaller role in each. The first three, Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942), Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942), and Sherlock Holmes in Washington (1943), all pit Holmes against the Nazis. Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943) takes place in a manor being used to house convalescent military officers tended to by Dr. Watson. The Spider Woman (1944) includes a fairground game in which a prize is won by shooting targets painted to look like Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito. The Scarlet Claw (1944) ends with Holmes quoting Winston Churchill. The remaining six films do not refer to the war in any way.
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have exerted a lasting influence on the Holmes character, and have driven the prevailing conception of Holmes as a representation of not just an English protector, but of
England’s history. In his character, the romance of Pre-War England is preserved and can be relived.
The second section of this chapter examines the contrary selective mechanism:
stabilizing selection. In an environment where a particular vision of the Holmes character is thriving, stabilizing selection acts as a conservative pressure, rewarding
‘retelling’ rather than ‘reinterpretation’ (449). The case study I have chosen in order to investigate stabilizing selection is the cluster of current adaptations—the Warner Brothers film franchise including Sherlock Holmes (2009) and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011), BBC’s Sherlock (2012), and CBS’s Elementary. An examination of stabilizing selecting necessitates comparing disparate adaptations that operate within the same socio-cultural environment to determine whether the character is in flux, or is relatively uniform in its rendering in each. While Sherlock Holmes adaptations have been more or less continually created for the last century, there are relatively few periods in which several straight2 adaptations were in progress
concurrently. Other possible case studies could include the years 1929 through 1932, during which Clive Brook, Arthur Wontner, Robert Rendel, and Raymond Massey were all active in the role of Sherlock Holmes, and the years 2000 through 2002, during which Matt Frewer, James D’Darcy, and Richard Roxburgh all played Holmes. The first case study is problematic for practical reasons: Only one of Brook’s films survives, and Rendel’s film only exists as an incomplete reconstruction. In addition, while
instructive, such a study is obviously less topical than an examination of the current
2 I am discounting brief ‘cameo’ appearances of the character, parodies, and non-Anglo-American productions.
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trend in presentations of the Holmes character. The second option is less useful than my chosen case study because all of the adaptations are unpopular, and virtually unwatched.
An examination of the attributes of the Holmes character in failed adaptations would be interesting and valuable, but this project’s scope is limited to trends that contribute to the character’s success.
In analysing these two mechanisms for selection, this chapter highlights moments of rupture and change that represent either clear directional shifts, or a consolidation of meaning for the character of Sherlock Holmes. The case studies that follow bring us closer to an understanding of how and why such selection occurs, and thus how particular indices of the character become more or less essential as a
consequence of the circumstances of particular adaptations.
Periodisation and Directional Selection: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939) To ask an average member of the public in nearly any country in the world to describe Sherlock Holmes and his world is to ask for an invocation of Victorian London, complete with the rattle of hansom cabs on cobblestones, parading through grey and foggy gas lit streets. It is to ask for the image of a man in a deerstalker hat and an Ulster cape, smoking a pipe and scratching on a violin in the cluttered confines of 221B Baker Street; this is true in spite of the popular and pervasive contemporised adaptations Sherlock and Elementary.3 In the public consciousness, Sherlock Holmes belongs to a specific and definable historical moment, but this was not always the case, and that transition is an important aspect of the character’s evolution.
3 This claim is justified by the language used to discuss these two twenty-first century programmes, which generally includes reference to their modern setting; this suggests that rather than normalising a timeless or a modern Sherlock Holmes, they continue to represent a transgressive interpretation of the character.
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This section addresses the importance of period setting to the Sherlock Holmes character by analysing the film—1939’s The Hound of the Baskervilles—that first intentionally periodised Holmes. The periodisation of The Hound of the Baskervilles represents a defining moment in the evolution of the Holmes character; within Bortolotti and Hutcheon’s evolutionary model it is an illustration of directional selection, which occurs when ‘an environment changes in one particular identifiable direction...as adaptations move toward a new cultural norm’ (449). This section will focus on the motivations for periodisation, which are the impetus behind this shift in direction. Scholarly work on the importance of historical period to adaptations of Sherlock Holmes is scarce. In fact, the language that pervades the work on Holmes of, for example, Scott Allen Nollen, speaks about periodisation as though it is nothing more than an accepted measure of the quality of a Holmes adaptation. Nollen touts 1939’s Hound as ‘arguably the best Sherlock Holmes film and the most faithful adaptation of a Conan Doyle story produced for theatrical release’, and later adds, with reference to the twelve Basil Rathbone films that re-contemporised Holmes, that ‘Considering what came later, as a result of the story rights being sold to Universal, it is unfortunate that [Twentieth Century Fox] did not film at least one more period adventure’ (126, 134).
This is a testament to the degree to which the image of Holmes as a Victorian figure has saturated the popular perception of the character. Rather than addressing it as a measure of quality, this section analyses when, why, and how historical period became such an important aspect of Sherlock Holmes.
In order to properly situate a discussion of periodisation, this section
appropriates and engages with scholarship on heritage cinema. Although the critical term ‘heritage cinema’ is used to refer to films made in the final decades of the
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twentieth century, this section argues that The Hound of Baskervilles, with its literary origin, its melodramatic plot, its scrupulous attention to period detail, its focus on periodisation as a marketable commodity, and its production in a time of national crisis, may usefully draw from work done on heritage films of the Thatcher era. It engages with Andrews Higson’s work, which offers negative critiques of the political
motivations of the heritage cinema trend, as well as Claire Monk’s more positive, audience-focused scholarship. These readings of the film will be linked with Guy Barefoot’s analysis of a trend in 1940s cinema toward ‘Gaslight Melodrama’, a sub-genre of Victorian-set mystery and horror films, to which The Hound of the Baskervilles and perhaps even more so its sequel, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, belongs. The aim of this analysis is to establish how profoundly The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes affected the Sherlock Holmes character franchise, as after the films were made, periodisation became fundamental to the character, even surviving as the default position in the face of successful modern updates.
In order to understand how drastically The Hound of the Baskervilles diverged from the status quo, it is important to understand how Sherlock Holmes operated as an adaptational commodity before Hound was made. Arthur Conan Doyle never defined Holmes as the hero of a particular period; he introduced new inventions such as the telephone and the motorcar into Holmes’ world just as they were introduced into the real world. As Sherlock Holmes shared the moment of his birth with the birth of cinema itself, the notion of periodising the character seems not to have occurred to early
filmmakers—Holmes was, to them, a contemporary figure and the detective’s early cinematic outings reflect this: Eille Norwood was a mainstay as Holmes from 1921 through 1923, playing the character in 47 silent films, an astonishing one hundred reels
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of footage. No attempt was made to disguise the look of 1920s London, and this seems perfectly reasonable when one recalls that by the time Norwood hung up his deerstalker for good, as many as nine of the sixty Sherlock Holmes stories penned by Conan Doyle were still yet to be published. This lack of period awareness or privilege was not only acceptable to filmmakers and audiences, but it seemed to have been perfectly acceptable to Conan Doyle as well. As mentioned in chapter one, Conan Doyle’s appreciation of Norwood’s work is well documented.
In the first forty years of his life on screen, filmmakers treated Holmes much like they now treat the character of James Bond: despite the fact that Ian Fleming wrote the original Bond novels between 1953 and 1966, and despite the fact that the character was written to directly interact with contemporary world events—cold war politics in Bond’s case—the James Bond adaptations are set during the periods the films are made.
Bond is privy to 1960’s technology in the films made in the sixties, seventies
technology in the seventies, eighties technology in the eighties, and so on. This trend is so commonplace in the case of Bond that Casino Royale, a James Bond adaptation made and set in 2006, tells the origin story of a character defined by a career as a Cold War-era spy. Although this easy contemporisation actually creates something of a problematic timeline, the chronological cognitive dissonance does not seem to bother audiences and critics.
Just like today’s Bond, the Sherlock Holmes of the early twentieth century lived in a kind of temporal neverland. The first British Holmes talkie, The Speckled Band, made in 1931, gives Holmes a modern office complete with Dictaphones and an intercom for the detective to communicate with his busily typing secretaries. 1932’s eponymous Sherlock Holmes sees the detective battling Tommy Gun-toting underworld
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gangsters with the aid of an electric ray machine [fig. 25]. Many of these changes went unremarked, some garnered a negative reaction from critics for their clumsiness, but it was not until 1939, nearly forty years and at least a hundred appearances since he first graced cinema screens in 1901, that a film was made that intentionally resettled the character back in Victorian England. With one reverberating cinematic blow, Twentieth Century Fox’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, starring Basil Rathbone, caused all that came before, the lauded and the panned, the enshrined and the obscure, to fall away and set the foundation for all that would come after.
Fig. 25. Clive Brook and Miriam Jordan, 1932, Photograph, David Stuart Davies, Starring Sherlock Holmes (London: Titan, 2007) 28. Print.
The purpose of this work is to address the question of authorship across time and text, and as such, it has thus far avoided extended scrutiny of individual productions in an effort to focus on the process of the character’s evolution. However, this single film
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and its immediate sequel are such vital pieces of the larger picture, that it demands such scrutiny. The periodisation of The Hound of the Baskervilles irrevocably re-authored the Sherlock Holmes character. In order to dissect how and why these rewrites happened and what their legacy is, this section first examines the context of the film by analysing the historical moment into which it was born and how the periodisation reflects choices based on that historical moment as well as trends of Victoriana in cinema of the 1930s and forties. It also considers the text through the lens of paratextual marketing
materials, how they are rooted in the film’s periodisation, and how those materials forged a link between the perception of Holmes as a cinematic character and Holmes as a literary figure.
It is of no small import that The Hound of the Baskervilles was produced in the year 1939. Setting the film in opposition to nearly forty years of established tradition was a choice both practical and psychological. In the first few decades of producing Sherlock Holmes adaptations—the first brief ‘film’ starring Sherlock Holmes was made in 1901 and full adaptations were being made by several production companies before the first decade of the twentieth century was out4—the changes that would have to have been made to prevent Holmes from straying out of the Victorian and early Edwardian period would have been slight at first, but increasingly more costly. Shots of city streets, for example, would have to be stripped of motorcars and filled with horse drawn
hansom cabs and broughams. Fashion changed drastically following the Great War, particularly for women, and extras would have needed wigs to cover fashionable cropped hair styles and dresses with much lower hemlines and much higher necklines.
4Among others, Vitagraph produced an eight minute adaptation of The Sign of Four in 1905, Cresent produced Sherlock Holmes and the Great Murder Mystery, a riff on Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue’, in 1908, and the Danish company Nordisk created thirteen Holmes films between 1908 and 1911 (Davies 12).
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Gentlemen’s hat styles may have been only slightly different in early films, a homburg could suit the late nineteenth century as well as the 1920s, but as the thirties drew to a close, the soft fedoras in general use would have needed to have been exchanged for more traditional period headgear. Simply put, it was not financially viable for
filmmakers to worry about whether Sherlock Holmes existed on screen in 1891 or 1921;
production schedules were too fast to invest in the meticulous recreation of a period only a few decades past. Nostalgia of this type was not profitable.
Sherlock Holmes was, therefore, a perennially contemporary figure. It was more economical to make him modern, and in any case, the years of Edward VII’s reign were recent enough that without cries of attention to the present, the present might yet stand in for the past. However, by the end of the 1930s, the capacity of the contemporary world to be confused with the world of Victorian and Edwardian England had all but disappeared. Changes in fashion, decor, technology, and speech were drastic enough to force the tension between Holmes’ native period and the present day to its crisis: by necessity, filmmakers would have to choose whether Holmes would be intentionally and conspicuously modern, or whether it was worth the price to return him to his Victorian roots. Twentieth Century Fox, through the creative team of producer Gene Markey, director Sidney Lanfield, and screenwriter Ernest Pascal, decided it was worth the expense and proceeded to scrupulously reconstruct the bygone England of Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, originally set in 1889.
Time forced the crisis, but the easier and cheaper option was certainly simply to concede that Holmes was to be a man without a fixed temporal home. The question then becomes why Twentieth Century Fox chose the route that cost them effort and expense when precedent showed that a contemporary Holmes would bring audiences to the
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cinemas well enough. There are likely two main reasons for the decision. The first is that the choice was a psychological one: 1939 saw a world in distress, on the brink of war, and the production banked on some combination of a drive to preserve an idealised past and the draw of period escapism. The second is that the film was at the vanguard of a trend of renewed interest in Victoriana that bred the genre that Guy Barefoot calls the
‘Gaslight Melodrama’. Both are worth exploring.
There is a comfort intrinsic to Sherlock Holmes: he is an incorruptible hero who makes sense of chaos, a perfect hero for those facing the chaos of a world attempting to hold back the flood of war so soon after the end of the last conflict. The temptation to
There is a comfort intrinsic to Sherlock Holmes: he is an incorruptible hero who makes sense of chaos, a perfect hero for those facing the chaos of a world attempting to hold back the flood of war so soon after the end of the last conflict. The temptation to