![]() ![]() Barrymore does at least look like Holmes, but he doesn’t act like him. In fact, it’s a remarkably dull film, not helped by the overuse of intertitles – look away for just one and you’ll be completely lost (you might get lost anyway!) – and a rather vapid performance by Barrymore. None of this would be quite so bad if it was exciting, intriguing, mildly interesting, or if the plot even made sense. It starts off with Holmes and Watson at university, where they first encounter Moriarty, and ends (wait for it) with Holmes getting married – well, I guess that romantic lead John Barrymore could never be left single at the end of a film. John Barrymore stars in the 1922 film, which is likely to have purists running for the hills. My understanding is that the same can be said of the William Gillette Holmes film, which was found a few years back, but I have yet to see that. Hype generally gets built up about the famous lost films – most notably London After Midnight – and they are rather inevitably not as good as the myth would lead us to believe. It is very much a case of a lost film being found and turning out to be a very ordinary film. I have seen the DVD, which looks reasonably decent given the history of the film, although the screencaps online of the blu ray look decidedly better. And a further restoration of that is now on blu ray. ![]() This was then painstakingly restored over the years, and a restoration of that restoration found it’s way on to DVD in the early 2000s. The film was lost for a number of decades, only to be found literally in pieces in the early 1970s – not only were the sequences out of order, but multiple takes of each scene were also found. Both of them are slight, but never take themselves seriously.Īnyway, being in a Holmes mood, I thought it would be a good time to finally watch the 1922 Sherlock Holmes starring John Barrymore – and with early appearances by William Powell and Louis Wolheim, among others. I realise, thirty years on, that not all of the stories in the collection are classics, and oddly I have enjoyed more the ones that I had forgotten about, like The Blue Carbuncle and the very silly The Engineer’s Thumb. I have been treating myself over the last week to re-reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which I last consumed when I was about sixteen. John Barrymore looking for a decent film. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |