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(More customer reviews)When discussing actors who have portrayed the character of Sherlock Holmes, most people will expound upon the merits of Jeremy Brett, Basil Rathbone, Peter Cushing, and Ian Richardson. However, there was another actor who brought Holmes to life in 1954, in a regular Sherlock Holmes television series that few remember and many have not seen. As such, Ronald Howard (son of the famous actor Leslie Howard), is probably the most unsung Holmes of all.
Howard was very competent, if a bit young, as Holmes, and really looked the part when clad in the traditional costume of the character, complete with deerstalker cap and pipe. Howard's Holmes is a bit less cold and freneticly focused than Brett, and therefore less accurate, but that is part and parcel with television adaptations of the time.
Watson is also competently portrayed by a somewhat Victor Buono-ish Howard Marion-Crawford. Crawford's Watson is both just serious enough and just slightly bumbling enough to be perfect. While not as serious as latter-day Watsons, but not quite as buffoonish as the much-loved Nigel Bruce version, Crawford can move freely between both extremes. Crawford went on to appear in such classics as "Charge of the Light Brigade" and "Lawrence of Arabia".
One of the hidden treasures here has to be Archie Duncan as Inspector Lestrade. Duncan plays the long-suffering detective with such deadpan grace and humor that the Lestrade character comes alive as never before. If anything, Duncan's Lestrade tends to remind one of Roland Young's Topper character.
The episodes on this set are not the complete series (which had 39 episodes in all), but there is a fair representation of the work. The stories range from excellent to mildly entertaining. At times, Holmes is less than effective (in one episode, he throws a coin away to keep from criminals from getting it, whereas the "real" Holmes would have palmed the coin and gave the impression he threw it away). Some of the mysteries are well-written, and in one, Holmes deduces a crime by the direction of fibers in a rope. Three of the episodes faithfully use original Holmes stories from the official canon, "The Red Headed League" being the most complete. The initial meeting of Holmes and Watson is also faithfully presented from Doyle's text, and in the third, a puzzle involving a pair of dumbells is inserted into an original story.
Best of all, the characters are more or less "in character". One of the most fun episodes revolves around Watson suspecting Holmes of being a criminal, and in another, Holmes seems to have vanished. In both, Watson and Lestrade try to use Holmes' methods to solve the mysteries.
One of the interesting things about this series is that, despite the obviously limited budget, several scenes were done on location (most notably in and around the Eiffel Tower, and what appears to be the Parliment buildings in London).
Besides being one of the earliest TV versions of Sherlock Holmes, this series has one other tidbit of note; the opening shot is remarkably similar to one later used by Granada for the Jeremy Brett series. A camera starts out high above the street on a sign that clearly reads "Baker Street", and proceeds to pan down to a policeman, carriages, and other activity.
As usual with Madacy, the prints are of questionable quality and sources. These episodes were obviously transferred from an inferior video source, and some of the prints used here are worse than others. That having been said, the episodes included are, for the most part, complete, and unavailable elsewhere. As such, the student of the master detective can't go wrong for the price.
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