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Wich2 wrote:

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Downey's chops, actor-wise and voice-wise, are sure up to the job.

As far as not looking exactly like Paget & Doyle suggest (though I love it when visual cues are honored!), heck, there's:

-Robert Stephens
-Chris Plummer
-Nicol Williamson

et al.

... all of whom matched the Paget visualization much closer than Jeremy Brett, especially in the later years, but that never bothered me a bit.

Downey's also a bit shorter than we picture Holmes, but again, so was Peter Cushing. The only time Cushing's height really came into focus (at least from my perspective) was in the Hammer Hound, when he had to crane his neck so far back in order to look Christopher Lee's Henry Baskerville in the eye.

I'm much more concerned about Ritchie and his "vision" of Holmes than I am about Downey's acting abilities.

Terry Pace
pillaroffire@bellsouth.net

"They're going to have to think up a lot of new adjectives when I come back!" -- Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) in King Kong (1933)

Christopher Lee certainly looks 6' 5" beside my average-height 5'10" self in a photo of the two of us from the Monster Rally in 1999. (And if I knew how to do those things, I'd post that photo, where I look like Lee's very happy pygymy sidekick).

The IMDB lists Cushing's height as 5'11.5." He doesn't look at all short to me in the BBC Holmes dramas or The Masks of Death (opposite Sir John Mills' Watson), but he definitely looks dwarfed by Lee and (and Francis DeWoolf, too, if memory serves me correctly) in the Hammer Hound, which is the height "difference" I had pointed out in my first post. Cushing did say at one time (I believe in an interview with David Stuart Davies) that as much as he loved playing Holmes, he was a little surprised that he was so warmly and widely accepted in the role because he was "a bit shorter and slighter of frame" than most actors associated with Holmes.

As for Brett, when I interviewed him in London in 1989 (one of my fondest memories), he said he originally thought that he was "the most unlikely choice imaginable" for Holmes because he looked "absoultely nothing" like the Paget drawings or any of the prototypical portrayers of the role (he specifically mentioned Wontner, Rathbone, Cushing and his friend Robert Stephens). The Paget drawings do vary in depiction here and there (Brett's forehead could easily pass for the forehead of the somewhat hidden Holmes posted here), but Brett's profile (to my eyes, at least) looks nothing like the image we see in Paget's famous profile portrait (I believe it was done for "The Man With the Twisted Lip") or the striking profile shot of Holmes leaning forward to make a point to Watson while they're traveling in facing seats on a train (I forget what story that one is from -- "Silver Blaze," perhaps). Those are the iconic Paget depictions that come to my mind when I think of the "original" image of Holmes that readers must have had in their heads when they first read the Arthur Conan Doyle tales with those accompanying illustrations.

Brett's a brilliant Holmes (again, we're only talking "exterior" aspects here, which never matter very much to me if I'm "convinced" by the performance of the actor in the role), but he doesn't have the pronounced cheekbones, jutting jaw, hawklike nose or other angular facial features of those particular Paget images -- and he seemed to be very, very aware of that (he was still even self-conscious about it in 1989). To me, though, the shape of Brett's face (nor Cushing's height difference with Lee) doesn't diminish the overall power of the performance in the slightest.

I believe that Gord mentioned earlier in this thread that Wilder originally intended to cast O'Toole and Olivier in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. That may very well be, but I do know that Murder By Decree director Bob Clark wanted O'Toole and Olivier to play the duo in his film. Clark talks about it at length on his commentrary track for the Murder By Decree DVD. Apparently there was bad blood between the two actors, but at one point in the negotiations they were ready to put those differences aside and do the film. Ultimately, though, the plan fell through -- and Clark moved on to the delightful duo of Plummer and Mason.

For the record, I'm in complete agreement with Bill Warren on this one: There may have been a better Holmes and a better Watson before or since, but Plummer and Mason perform those roles in Murder By Decree in perfect harmony. My second favorite teaming would have to be Brett and Hardwicke (I like Burke, but in some places he projected a bit too much of the "Gee whiz, Holmes -- are you a being from outer space?" astonishment for my taste), followed by Cushing and Morell (the most authentic Watson ever, in my opinion).

Terry Pace
pillaroffire@bellsouth.net

"They're going to have to think up a lot of new adjectives when I come back!" -- Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong) in King Kong (1933)