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Sherlock in Hollywood. . .

The movie industry chews up and spits out a lot of talented folk. One minute they’re at star status, on top of the world – the next they’ve vanished from sight, appearing in made-for-TV productions on backwater cable channels. And these days Sherlock Holmes seems to be among them.

Our favorite consulting detective seems more like a has-been character actor than a major star these days, a point brought home by recent web gossip about the film adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

A script review I bumped into on-line seems to demonstrate that the Sherlockian aspects of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen comic book series may be being dropped from the film version. Instead of an underworld war between Professor Moriarty versus Fu Manchu, the plot seems to now focus on European political manipulations of someone called "the Fantom." And if Moriarty’s gone, one would suspect his lieutenant Mycroft and the Reichenbach flashback are gone as well.

Sad as it is, one can almost understand the move. How recognizable is any of the Sherlock Holmes legend to the average movie-goer in 2002? Professor who? Reichenbach what?

But it isn’t the first time Sherlockian allusions have been pulled from a movie adaptation. When The Ninth Gate was adapted from The Club Dumas by Arturo Perez-Reverte, the mystery woman who went by "Irene Adler" in the book was suddenly just "the girl," even in the credits of Ninth Gate. As the book was a mystery, allusions to Holmes were plentiful, and the characters understood just who the mysterious Irene Adler had taken her name from. Did we hear of Holmes at all in the movie? Nope.

And while die-hard fans might try to find solace in Grade C cable movies, everyone knows a real movie is something that appears first in a theater – on the big screen.

And look at Holmes’s record on the big screen in the last few decades:

1970 – The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (Holmes admits that Watson might have over-glorified him in the sixty stories)

1975 – The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’s Smarter Brother (Holmes "babysits" an idiot younger brother)

1976 – The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (Sherlock Holmes as cocaine addict

1979 – Murder By Decree (Sherlock Holmes deals with Jack the Ripper in a previously untold tale)

1985 – Young Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as boys at school, involved in an adventure of Spielbergian proportions)

1986 – The Great Mouse Detective (A mouse living under Holmes’s nose solves crime in the animal world)

1988 – Without A Clue (Sherlock Holmes is really just a drunken actor taking credit for Watson’s genius)

Between 1970 and 1988, we see Holmes slowly discredited, reduced to children’s entertainment, and finally, totally absent from the theaters of the 1990s. What happened? Did Without A Clue destroy Sherlock Holmes on screen once and for all?

You can’t say that Hollywood or movie-goers are less literate than they used to be, not when The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter are both raking in the box office bucks. The Three Musketeers is still adapted for the theaters on a regular basis. Movies from books still make money. Period pictures still make money. Mystery movies still make money. So what’s up with Sherlock?

The thing that makes Sherlock different is his brains, I think. Smart guys in movies all seem to be evil these days, like Hannibal Lechter. The ideal movie hero is the ordinary Joe, who through luck, some cleverness, and non-mental skills, overcomes the genius serial killer, the genius stalker, the genius terrorist. In the movies, it’s almost like genius is now seen as a mental aberration that only comes when some other part of the brain is defective (Anyone see the Oscar-winning A Beautiful Mind?) – something to make the less-intellectually endowed feel better about themselves.

The age of the Basil Rathbone big screen Sherlock might be long gone. Our only hope may be Dr. Watson as main character . . . his discovery that he has a peculiar and somewhat amazing room-mate in A Study in Scarlet could be the jumping-off point for a terrific modern movie. Throw in Grimesby Roylott, some chases, a little single-stick martial arts . . . there’s a great movie there somewhere.

I think our old friend Sherlock just needs a better agent in Tinseltown than he's had of late, or at least an enthusiastic writer/producer/director of some ability and salesmanship. Even has-beens have been known to make some pretty big comebacks . . .

Your humble correspondent,
Brad Keefauver