Jeremy Brett: The Past as Prologue
Jeremy Brett: The Past as Prologue is an article written by R. Dixon Smith published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 6, 1995).
This article evaluates Jeremy Brett's portrayal of Sherlock Holmes in the Granada Television series, emphasizing its fidelity to Arthur Conan Doyle's original stories and its nuanced depiction of Holmes's complex personality. It argues that Brett delivered the most definitive and canon-faithful screen interpretation of the detective.
Jeremy Brett: The Past as Prologue
A scant twelve years ago, our perceptions of those who had most significantly shaped our impressions of Sherlock Holmes were circumscribed: Sidney Paget and Frederic Dorr Steele; William Gillette and Basil Rathbone; and but a few others — Eille Norwood, Arthur Wontner, Douglas Wilmer, and Ian Richardson chief among them.
But that was before Jeremy Brett and the Granada Television Sherlock Holmes series premiered on ITV on 24 April 1984 (and in the United States on PBS's Mystery! on 14 March 1985). And since that time we have never looked at the master sleuth in quite the same way.
The Granada series was the brain-child of producer Michael Cox, who, ever since reading the Conan Doyle originals in bound volumes of The Strand Magazine as a child, dreamed of filming faithful adaptations of the Sherlock Holmes stories. It had really never been done before. Gillette and Rathbone were commandingly self-assured, Norwood and Wontner congenial; Wilmer emphasised the arrogance, Richardson the charm. But these traits, taken together, were but one side of the complex coin that is Sherlock Holmes. Although many Sherlockians preferred to ignore the fact, their hero was also supremely neurotic, arrogant, patronising, and cruel. It took Jeremy Brett to stretch far enough to accommodate the detective's deficiencies — 'bending the willow,' he called it, exhibiting 'the cracks in the marble'.
Brett was able to personify Holmes's gentility as were Rathbone and Richardson. The fact that he possessed matinee-idol looks and that elusive, indefinable quality we call charisma — as anyone who ever met him or spent time in his presence can attest — made it easy for him to showcase the detective's charm whenever he felt it appropriate. But from the moment he agreed to star in the Granada series, Brett adopted a conception of the role that embraced the detective's less savoury side. In doing so, he gave us for the first time the Sherlock Holmes that Conan Doyle had created, whose ungracious, rude behaviour was but a mask designed to conceal a multiplicity of insecurities.
Sherlock Holmes is immortal, but Jeremy Brett was not, and our generation lost its Sherlock Holmes when Brett died on 12 September 1995. One had always hoped he would outdistance Eille Norwood's record of forty-seven adaptations, and wondered if he would reach his own goal of filming all sixty stories. Brett's contribution consisted of thirty-six fifty-two-minute films and five features, nearly forty hours of Sherlock Holmes — a record that is barely diminished by the admitted fact that the series was often of lesser quality after the departure of producer Michael Cox, after the best material had been filmed, and after Brett's health had begun to fail. Because what Brett, David Burke, Edward Hardwicke, and the Granada team accomplished during its ten-year run was a string of beautifully produced adaptations, the majority of which were unerringly faithful to the original Conan Doyle stories.
What treasures Brett bequeathed us. That wonderful moment in 'The Priory School', as Holmes and Watson are informed that the Duke of Holdernesse is being kept waiting. That will never do,' Brett intones, with just the right air of condescension masked as compliance. The ominous exchange between Dr Mortimer and Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles: 'Are you any closer to discovering what, if anything, the hound is?' asks Mortimer. 'I am.' 'Does it exist?' 'It does,' replies Holmes darkly. The first times Brett gave us the murky underside of Holmes's personality: in 'The Dancing Men' Watson accuses him of treating Hilton Cubitt unsympathetically. 'He doesn't come to me for sympathy,' murmurs Holmes. In 'The Solitary Cyclist', Watson returns to London with a report on mysterious activities near Chiltern Grange. 'You really have done remarkably badly,' Holmes observes, explaining what measures should have been taken. A chagrined Watson asks, 'Did I really do remarkably badly?' 'Yes,' the detective affirms. At the end of 'The Blue Carbuncle,' Watson expresses disapproval when Holmes allows James Ryder to go free. 'I am not retained by the police to supply their deficiencies!' the detective fairly screams.
Sherlockians owe Jeremy Brett an immense debt of gratitude. Doyleans, curiously enough, have even more for which to thank him. For here were Conan Doyle's originals come to life, as if the Sidney Paget illustrations for The Strand Magazine had suddenly been animated. Best of all, here were Holmes and Watson as Conan Doyle had envisioned them. Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes bore all the complexities that had lain untapped, at least on screen, within the stories for nearly a century. Even more important, perhaps, were Edward Hardwicke's and David Burke's capable, patient Watson — the Watson whom Conan Doyle had created. The series gave us, for the first time, the Holmes-Watson relationship as Conan Doyle had conceived it — a relationship in which, as Brett often stated, Holmes needed Watson more thanWatson needed Holmes.
But if it was Cox whose dream led to the Conan Doyle stories being brought faithfully to the screen, it was Brett who untiringly fought to maintain canonical fidelity whenever scenarists felt they had to 'improve' the originals. Brett told me in 1989 that, despite the series' reputation for faithful renderings, he had had to fight to have bits of dialogue reinstated into scripts that had strayed from the mark. I asked him if this had occurred often. 'Oh, yes,' he remarked. At one point in the first series, he went to Cox and complained, 'If you don't do this right, you're not going to keep me happy. And if I'm unhappy, you're going to lose me.' 'Did it work?' I asked. 'Yes,' he sighed, 'for a while. Until the next time.' And then he convulsed us both with laughter.
In 1985 I described Jeremy Brett's masterful evocation of the many sides of Sherlock Holmes in the following manner:
- As portrayed by Brett, Holmes is a fragile, brittle, reasoning machine; not as briskly self-assured as Basil Rathbone, he wears his loneliness and alienation openly enough for Watson... to recognize them for what they were, cloaking them with an air of aloof superiority that is frequently cold, inflexible, and cruel. ...
- On the other hand, Brett also exhibits great charm and expresses a wide range of moods through facial and physical mannerisms: the lean, ascetic face and piercing eyes; the indolent sweep of a hand; the use of both languid and staccato speech; the faraway, half-quizzical gaze of a man who lives within himself, as if he were searching for something he hasn't yet found; the enigmatic half-smile which plays upon his lips (as if smiling were a weakness); the almost manic glee with which he pounces on a new lead.
What made Brett's achievement so startling was its definitiveness. The Granada series, and Brett's contributions to it, will remain the most faithful treatment of Conan Doyle material we are likely to see in our lifetime. We mourn the fact that Jeremy Brett has passed into history, but we have much to be thankful for; as Holmes himself observed, 'It is only goodness which gives extras.'
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
