The Films of Arthur Conan Doyle
The Films of Arthur Conan Doyle is an article written by John Weber published in the A.C.D. - The Journal of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (Vol. 8, 1998).
This article surveys film adaptations of Arthur Conan Doyle's non-Holmes works, Conan Doyle's own appearances on film, and screen portrayals of him by actors. It gives special attention to The Lost World, especially the history, restoration, and reconstructed screening of the landmark 1925 film.
The Films of Arthur Conan Doyle
I. The Non-Holmes Stories
From its inception a century ago, the cinema has turned to the works of Arthur Conan Doyle to provide material for its photoplays, usually in the form of the Sherlock Holmes stories. But what of Conan Doyle's other stories: tales of sport, romance, and mediaeval adventure? The film industry has been incredibly short-sighted in its neglect of these tales. Entries are few and far between, and there is little more one can do other than catalogue the titles and release dates, as most of these films no longer exist. Still, one lives in hope that somewhere, somehow, a long lost print of a particular film will be rediscovered. To this day, titles are surfacing that were once believed to be irretrievably lost.
Films about Sherlock Holmes started being produced on an almost regular basis from 1900, but it is not until thirteen years later that we find the first non-Holmes title. The honour goes to The House of Temperley, based on ACD's stage play of the same name. It was released in September 1913, and reissued five years later. A promising beginning, but a gap of two years passed before the next title, in which the grand Etienne Gerard made his screen debut when his rôle was filled by famed Shakespearian actor Lewis Waller. Brigadier Gerard was released in September 1915, and had an American release the following year, through Universal Pictures. A few months later, in December 1915, The Firm of Girdlestone had its premiere, later released in the U.S. through Vitagraph Pictures.
Five years then elapsed before Rodney Stone was filmed, and released in 1920. The following year, in September 1921, The Croxley Master reached the screen. It is interesting to note that the last two titles involve the sport of pugilism, and were filmed in a comparatively short span of time.
July 1923 saw the screening of The Fires of Fate, based on ACD's Egyptian adventure The Tragedy of the Korosko. There are intriguing associations with this film: featured in the cast are Percy Standing and Arthur Cullin, both of whom appeared in the Stoll Sherlock Holmes films with Eille Norwood at the same time that Fires of Fate was in release. Standing portrayed Moriarty in The Final Problem, and Cullin was seen as WatsonWatson in The Sign of Four. Cullin's character in The Fires of Fate was Sir Charles Rodin, and there was another character called Rev. Samuel Roden. It is rather startling to see these names in a film based on a Conan Doyle story, as two of the present leading Doylean scholars are Alvin Rodin, and, of course, our own Christopher Roden.
1925 saw the release of the U.S. production of The Lost World, which I will deal with in a separate section later. In Britain, a series of twelve short films, entitled Twisted Tales, commenced in November 1925. The first film in the series was ACD's How It Happened. This series was produced by G. B. Samuelson, whose first film production was A Study in Scarlet in 1914; he later presented a film version of The Valley of Fear in 1916.
Back in America, in 1927, came the Cecil B. DeMille production of The Fighting Eagle, again based on the exploits of Brigadier Gerard, and starring matinée idol Rod LaRoque as the Brigadier. This film still exists in a Kodascope version (this term will be explained later) and is great fun. One wishes that a series had been made.
And that is it for the silent film era-just nine titles. In the years since the movies learned to talk, the film industry has been even more neglectful of Conan Doyle's rich variety. The first sound production of a non-Holmesian Conan Doyle story was the 1932 remake of The Fires of Fate. Almost all of the character names have been changed, so we no longer have the Rodin/Roden connection, but there is now a Sir William and a Rev. Mark Royden. The wheel goes round.
Over on the American shore that same year, Universal Pictures presented a twelve-part serialisation of The Lost Special, directed by Henry McRae. This action-packed marathon featured in its cast Francis Ford, a silent screen Sherlock Holmes in A Study in Scarlet in 1914, but not the Samuelson version. This was a distinctly separate entry which was also directed by Ford, who was the older brother of legendary film director John Ford. Also appearing was Joe Bonomo, a silent-screen Tarzan, and later owner of a very successful candy corporation. We have all seen how some modern writers have tried to pad out some of the Sherlock Holmes stories to fill two-hour time slots, usually with disastrous results, but it would be most interesting to see what twists the battery of four scripters created for this serial to last for twelve weeks!
It would be 1960 before another non-Holmesian Conan Doyle title reached the screen, in the form of the Twentieth Century-Fox remake of The Lost World, about which the less said the better. The most humane course of action appears to be to dismiss this fiasco, simply and summarily, as an aberration on the part of everyone involved, including the venerable Claude Rains, who was sadly miscast. Most incredibly, the authors of the book The Films of Twentieth Century-Fox actually state in their entry for this mishap that the special effects were an exciting improvement over the 1925 original. Well, there's no accounting for taste, I suppose, and anyway, everyone is entitled to their own ridiculous, erroneous opinion.
Nine years later, a further reincarnation of Etienne Gerard arrived in the form of Peter McEnery. The 1969 film The Adventures of Gerard was produced by Sir Nigel(!) Films, and featured an international cast which included Claudia Cardinale, Jack Hawkins, John Neville as Wellington, and Eli Wallach as Napoleon. It was met with a chorus of indifference, and quickly faded from the theatres.
Tales from the Darkside: The Movie, made in the style of a wraparound story with three segments, each self-contained, the first of which was based on ACD's story 'Lot No. 249' with its vengeful mummy, was released in 1990.
The most recent appearance of a Conan Doyle title came in 1993-another remake of The Lost World, probably designed to cash in on the Jurassic Park craze. As it did not have a wide release, one may safely assume that it had little effect on the box-office receipts of the Spielberg film. Reviews of the film, when you can find them, are alike in that they liked John Rhys-Davies as Challenger, and David Warner as Summerlee. However, all reviewers I have read seemed to think that the rest of the cast, the script, the direction, and the so-called special effects were, not to put too fine a point on it, lousy. I believe that 'amateurish' was the kindest word employed. Another sad example of someone looking for a fast buck at the expense of Conan Doyle.
As far as I have been able to ascertain, that is the extent of the list. I do not believe it to be definitive, as resources I have been able to utilise have been slim to say the least. By the time you read this, Scott Allen Nollen's Sir Arthur Conan Doyle At The Cinema will have been published by McFarland, and I hope this will be an exhaustive account of the subject.
Looking over the list of films, one is struck by the title that is not included, namely The White Company. If any of ACD's historical novels cried out for a decent screen treatment, it is that one but I have been unable to find any record of production in either Britain or the U.S. There is, however, one more film which I believe belongs on the list, one which owes more than a trace of its inspiration to Conan Doyle, and I append it here in case readers may wish to check out the video release and make their own judgment. Anyone who has read the stories 'Lot No. 249' and 'The Ring of Thoth' will be struck by the many similarities between them and the 1932 Universal film The Mummy, which starred the great Boris Karloff and was directed by the superb cinematographer Karl Freund. The story is credited to Nina Wilcox Putnam and Richard Schayer, with final screenplay by John L. Balderston (who was script-doctor on the stage play Dracula by Hamilton Deane). However, despite other horrific elements which were added to the film, it is difficult to believe that the writers involved were unaware of the original Conan Doyle stories.
II. ACD on Film
Conan Doyle himself appeared on screen at least twice. The first time was in 1925, at the beginning of The Lost World, a sequence which showed him writing the story about to be unfolded on the screen. Photographs still exist which show ACD with the film's director, Harry Hoyt. It would have been interesting to ask if Dame Jean Conan Doyle had any recollections of this occasion: alas, we shall now never know.
The second Conan Doyle appearance was in 1928 with the filming of the Fox Movietone News Reel, which was released the following year. If Conan Doyle appeared in any other newsreels, or any in-studio production reels, such as the filming of the Sherlock Holmes stories for Stoll, with Eille Norwood, I am not aware of them, and it is difficult to ascertain whether any such footage ever existed.
There are a handful of instances when ACD has been portrayed by an actor. The first occasion of which I am aware was in a curious. 1937 film from Germany by the famous Ufa Studios, titled Der Mann, der Sherlock Holmes War, translated to The Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes. During the course of the film, every time Holmes makes a deduction, a man walks by and laughs at him. At the end of the film the laughing man is revealed to be Conan Doyle, who says he laughs because there is no such person as Sherlock Holmes. The star was the popular German actor Hans Albers, and ACD was played by Paul Bildt.
In 1972, from Czechoslovakia, came an odd piece titled Touha Sherlock Holmes, or The Desire of Sherlock Holmes. In this picture 'ACD' is portrayed by Josef Parocka, and he introduces the strange story in which it is revealed that Holmes's secret desire is to try his hand at being a master criminal: he is stayed by Watson in the nick of time. About the same time, in Britain, there was a series called The Edwardians, which focused each episode on an aspect of different personalities of the era. Nigel Davenport turned in a superb characterisation as Conan Doyle in an excellent drama based upon the George Edalji case. Maria Aitken portrayed Jean Leckie. Frank Finlay also portrayed Conan Doyle for BBC Television in a short drama presentation, The Other Side, screened in 1992.
In 1976, a U.S. television film titled The Great Houdinis featured. Peter Cushing as ACD. Cushing, of course, had portrayed Sherlock Holmes in the Hammer production of The Hound of the Baskervilles in 1959, and in the BBC television series, and a TV film, The Masks of Death. He became the first of a select group of actors to have portrayed both the creator and the created. This honour now includes Edward Hardwicke, Granada's Dr. Watson, who played ACD in the film Photographing Fairies, and Peter O'Toole (who voiced Sherlock Holmes in an animated Australian series in 1981), who portrays ACD in FairyTale: A True Story. Both of these 1997 films are based on the Cottingley Fairies incident.
There is one other 'portrayal' to be mentioned. In 1948, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in its Educational film series, released a very heavily edited 1-reel version of The Lost World, interspersed with commentary. This condensation, titled A Lost World, Told by A. Conan Doyle, has 'ACD', in a club-like setting, narrating a segment of the novel to two friends. The actor portraying Conan Doyle is not credited, but he has a very English accent, and has obviously never been north of Watford in his life! He wears a smoking-jacket that would turn William Gillette green with envy, and sports long side-whiskers which make him look more like Sir Arthur Sullivan than Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!
III. The Lost World Resurrectus
Always one of the most popular of Conan Doyle's works, The Lost World has been filmed three times: the First National production of 1925, a classic by any standard, and the ludicrous remakes of 1960 and 1993. Any immediate future filming of the novel seems to have been effectively stonewalled by Michael Crichton's shameless appropriation of the title for his Jurassic Park sequel. One would have thought that someone with a talent like Crichton's could have crafted a title that did not impinge on another author's well-known work. Most reprehensible is the fact that he does not even acknowledge his debt to Conan Doyle.
The 1925 production is one of the landmarks of the cinema. The casting is uniformly excellent, with Wallace Beery as a most vivacious Challenger, nicely realising Conan Doyle's description of a 'great roaring bull of a man'. Lloyd Hughes affably portrays Ed Malone, Arthur Hoyt defines a pedantic Summerlee, and Lewis Stone is a stolid, if somewhat older, Lord John Roxton. The rôle of Maple White's daughter Paula was developed by screenwriter Marion Fairfax, and enacted by the ever delightful Bessie Love. The magical photography was done by the pioneer cinematographer Arthur Edeson, who had already lensed Robin Hood and The Thief of Bagdad for Douglas Fairbanks, and who would go on to shoot such classics as All Quiet on the Western Front, Frankenstein, Mutiny on the Bounty, and Casablanca. The direction by Harry O. Hoyt, a studio contract helmer, was competent, if unexceptional.
The real star of the film, however, was Willis H. O'Brien, whose stop-action techniques in animating the dinosaurs set the standard for the industry that would last for almost seventy years. O'Brien's masterpiece would come a few years later, in 1933, with the legendary King Kong.
When originally released, The Lost World ran almost ten reels. Prints of the film which exist today are only about half that length, being prints from the Kodascope library. Created in 1925, the Kodascope library was a division of the Eastman-Kodak company, and was designed to both rent and sell 16mm films and equipment to universities and the general public for home viewing. Much of the production was one- and two-reel subjects, running from five to twenty minutes in duration, and comprised of comedy shorts, cartoons, travelogues, and documentaries, but a good number of feature films were available in condensed format, usually abbreviated to five reels, running from forty-five minutes to an hour.
Film preservation was not a priority in the U.S. in the 1920s and '30s, and the advent of sound in the cinema meant that as far as the studios were concerned, silent pictures were no longer a viable commodity.
The negatives were often simply destroyed for their silver-nitrate content. Silver-nitrate is a highly unstable compound, and is exceedingly inflammable, and many of the films that were not destroyed have merely decomposed through nitrate deterioration. Safety film stock was not mandatory until about 1949, and it is estimated that at least 75% of all films made before that date no longer exist! Many feature films of the twenties are sadly no longer extant, but some titles do survive as five-reel Kodascope versions, so we can at least see what some of these productions look like. Such has been the case with The Lost World-until now.
A few years ago, a print of The Lost World was found in the then-named Czechoslovakia by Chris Horak, who was at that time the curator of the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. At first assumed to be another Kodascope, it was eventually revealed to be a much more complete version than had been previously thought. There were several scenes in the Czech print that were not in the Kodascope, and some sequences were edited differently. Other sequences then turned up in a stock-footage library in New York City; the Library of Congress in Washington, DC provided some 35mm footage; and the UCLA film archive in California found it had an original trailer (a 'teaser', or 'coming attractions' reel) running about two minutes, from whence the animated sea voyage route came. Private collectors also contributed bits of material.
After six years of intensive labour by archivist Ed Stratmann of Eastman House, and his team of interns, the work print was previewed on Friday, 8 August 1997 at Eastman's Dryden Theatre to a full house. Live piano accompaniment was provided by Philip Carli, also an archivist at Eastman. The response was so tremendous that a second screening was added!
There remained some work to do on explanatory inter-titles, in addition to adding colour tints to match the original. This work was carried out by Hagefilm in the Netherlands. The film had its European premiere at the Pordenone film festival in Italy last autumn, and the American debut at Cinefest 18 in Syracuse, New York on 7 March 1998, again with music provided by Phil Carli. A British screening was made at the National Film Theatre as recently as 26 July 1998. Appreciative audiences gave the film a rousing ovation. Even with the addition of the love interest, it remains one of the most faithful adaptations of a Conan Doyle novel.
The restored film opens with Ed Malone, 'a fool in love', proposing to Gladys Hungerford, just as in the book, and with Gladys telling him that she wants to marry a man who has faced death. Other recovered scenes include Malone being introduced to Mrs Challenger, who has a slightly enlarged rôle. We see the route of the rescue party from England to Brazil via an animated sequence from the aforementioned trailer. There is a substantial segment at the trading post on the Amazon, in which we learn that Challenger has not been allowed to accompany the group, so he has his instructions in a sealed envelope, to be opened at the outpost. Malone is writing despatches as Paula is preparing breakfast. A native girl, played by Virginia Brown Faire, strums a guitar in the background. Summerlee and Roxton sit at table, reading, while a parrot sits near the edge. During the sequence, Summerlee is smoking a curved pipe and wearing a deerstalker! He spies a rare insect on the table, and turns away for a moment to prepare a lens. Whilst he does so, the parrot ambles over and gobbles up the bug, much to Summerlee's dismay. The others laugh, but it is now time to open the letter of instruction from Challenger. The paper in the envelope is blank. Suddenly Challenger appears. (Literally! He seems to instantly manifest in the doorway, because there is a brief missing fragment here.) He tells the group that they would be helpless without him. When Summerlee objects, Challenger tells him that Jocko the monkey would be a more valuable member of the group, as he could show them where the edible fruits and berries are, and which plants are poisonous. The party then advances deeper into the jungle, and Challenger spots the section of the river rushes that conceal what he calls his private. doorway into the unknown. As the group passes from the pinnacle to the plateau, Summerlee spies another insect on the log he is crossing, and stoops to investigate. Once the group is firmly camped in the Lost World, there is an amusing sequence in which Challenger is building a catapult. (The very first part of this scene remains in the Kodascope prints.) He and Summerlee argue over whether the trajectory of the rock will describe a curve or a parabola. Summerlee sits on the catapult as he is making his point when, to the surprise of absolutely no one in the audience, the restraining rope comes undone, hurling Summerlee through the air and landing him in a pool. 'You described a curve!' cries Challenger, triumphantly. Roxton is searching the caves for a way down from the plateau and passes by flaming volcanic pits. He discovers the remains of Maple White, Paula's father, and returns to inform her. There is a very brief shot of Paula praying by candlelight over her father's remains. After the allosaurus attack, Malone climbs a tree to see where the dinosaur has gone. As he does to, he is stalked by the Ape Man, or the Missing Link (Bull Montana). Roxton spots the creature about to ambush Malone, and fires, hitting the Link in the shoulder, sending him jumping down from the tree to glower at the group before leaping into the bush. The dinosaur stampede during the volcano eruption is more than twice as long, and we see Major Hibbard and the geodetic survey team observe the smoke on the plateau and set off to investigate. Ed and Paula have an intense and passionate discussion about Ed's promise to Gladys. Paula tells him she has no right to another woman's happiness, and that he must be true to Gladys.
When the group has returned to London, there is a shot of Mrs. Challenger sitting proudly in the audience in the museum. There are also a number of additional scenes of the Brontosaurus rampage. A drunk comes staggering out from a pub, sees the Brontosaurus, and staggers back inside. (There is a missing fragment here-according to the shooting script, the drunk staggers back out again holding a saucer of milk, saying 'Here, kitty, kitty...') The Brontosaurus also pokes his head through a window, breaking up a card game. Towards the end of the chase, Malone happens to cross paths with Gladys Hungerford, who is accompanied by a rather foppish-looking fellow. He is her new husband, Percy Bumberry, who is a city clerk and has never been outside London in his life. Greatly relieved, Malone exclaims, 'Excuse me!' and runs off in search of Paula.
At the very end, Challenger sits on the edge of Tower Bridge, and the closing shot shows a ship at sea, and, in the foreground, the Brontosaurus swimming back towards his home in the Lost World.
The restored film runs about 100 minutes, roughly eight to ten minutes short of its original running time. There are still a few gaps: we do not know what became of the native bearers who started with the expedition from the outpost; we do not know why Zambo (Jules Cowles, a white actor in blackface) wears his arm in a sling; the rest of the missing footage is primarily that which has been described herein, together with other fragments, such as reaction shots, reel ends, and inter-titles. Most regrettably, the very first sequence of the film is still missing: that scene of Conan Doyle writing in his study. Someday, perhaps.
In the interim, it can truly be said that one of the Grails of the early cinema has been re-discovered. We can now say, as did Ed Malone, 'Our eyes have seen great wonders!'
References:
Blum, Daniel and Willis, John. Screen World. Crown, various years 1949-89.
Brosnan, John. Movie Magic. St Martin's 1974.
Everson, William K. The American Movie. Athenaeum, 1963. Fitzgerald, Michael G. Universal Pictures. Arlington, 1977.
Gifford, Denis. British Film Catalog 1895-1970. McGraw-Hill, 1973. Goldner, Orville and Turner, George E. The Making of King Kong.
Ballantine, 1976.
Hollywood Reporter. Motion Picture Production Encyclopaedia. 1949
Rovin, Jeff. From the Land beyond Beyond. Berkeley, 1977.
Thomas, Tony and Solomon, Aubrey. The Films of Twentieth Century-Fox. Citadel, 1979.
The best video release of the Kodascope version of The Lost World is available from Milestone Video. Produced by Scott McQueen, who now works for the Disney organisation, the tape includes photos of the missing sequences, several pages from the original music score, the original coming-attractions trailer, and four early stop-action shorts by Willis O'Brien, containing much of the pioneering animation that he would later perfect in The Lost World. I am unaware of a British distributor, but here is the U.S. address:
- Milestone Video
- 275 West 96th Street
- New York, NY 10025
- Tel: (212) 865-7449
- Fax: (212) 222-8952
The tape is produced in cooperation with the George Eastman House. No arrangements have yet been made to transfer the restored version of the film to video.
Internet users can share a treat: special pages carry some stunning restoration images and, in addition, reproduce posters from the film and record blow-by-blow activity in a special Restoration Diary from Ed Stratmann, the Supervisor of Restoration for George Eastman House. Check out these pages at http://www.users.interport.net/~dinosaur/lostworld.htm
- Article courtesy Christopher Roden, founder of The Arthur Conan Doyle Society (1989-2003).
