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Released by: Severin Films
Released on: July 30th, 2024.
Director: Various
Cast: Peter Cushing, Nigel Stock, Madge Ryan, Ann Bell, Nick Tate
Year: 1968
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Sherlock Holmes – Movie Review:
Although Cushing first played Sherlock Holmes in Hammer Films’ 1959 feature length production of The Hound Of The Baskervilles, but in 1968 he reprised the role for a series of television episodes produced by the BBC in which Cushing was cast along the equally entertaining Nigel Stock as Doctor Watson. Unfortunately, when the BBC’s rights to Holmes expired, many of the master tapes were wiped clean and at this point in time, only six episodes of the fifteen episodes produced for the show have managed to survive.
Severin has included those six episodes, each roughly an hour long each, in this 2-disc collection (which was previously included in their Cushing Curiosities boxed set, released in 2023). Here’s how things shape up…
Disc Three:
A Study In Scarlet – The first episode gets moving when Holmes finds a corpse on a train and deduces that the victim was murdered. The man's widow requests that Holmes work the case, and he connects the killing to The Scarlet Ring, a criminal organization led by a lawyer named Thaddeus Merrydew based out of London and heavily involved in blackmail schemes. When the members of The Scarlet Ring start dying under increasingly strange circumstances, their estates are divvied up between the surviving members which is obviously suspicious. After her father is murdered, Eileen Forrester joins The Scarlet Ring much to the dismay of her fiancé, who brings Holmes and Dr. Watson on board to help where Scotland Yard cannot.
The Hound Of The Baskervilles Part 1 and The Hound Of The Baskervilles Part 2 - When Sir Charles Baskerville is killed out in the remote moors that surround his massive estate, there are many that believe he was the victim of the fabled hound that roams the countryside and kills any man it comes across. The heir to the estate is an American named Henry Baskerville and when he arrives to take over the estate, Holmes and Watson are called to the scene by Doctor Mortimer in an attempt to uncover the truth about Sir Charles' unusual death.
Disc Four:
The Boscombe Valley Mystery - A woman named Alice Turner comes to Holmes for help and so desperate is she that Holmes feels obliged to bring Watson in off of vacation to assist. It seems her friend James McCarthy has been accused of murdering his father and she believes him to be innocent though she knows that the two men were arguing before the killing took place. As Holmes looks into the case, he finds that all of this ties back to the past shared not only by James and Alice but by their fathers as well.
The Sign Of Four - A woman named Mary Morstan has puzzlingly received a pearl in the mail annually ever since her father vanished and she has no idea who has been sending them. Holmes and Watson investigate the case and find that during a war in India that took place in 1857, four convicts made amongst themselves a pact that in turn relates to buried treasure and murder most foul!
The Blue Carbuncle - This case begins on Christmas Eve when Holmes and Watson are tasked with sorting out how a blue carbuncle wound up being found inside a goose. The inspector in the area brought Holmes on to help and as details emerge, it seems to tie into an event wherein the officer prevented some thugs from accosting an old man. When this happened, the old man left the goose behind, and this in turn ties into news stories about the theft of the carbuncle. Obviously it's complicated but Holmes is on the job.
These six episodes are all quite entertaining, with Baskervilles the stand out. As it was in the Hammer Film version of the story, once again Cushing does a great job playing the world’s greatest detective, bringing a sense of manic intensity to the part that really goes a long way towards making this run as enjoyable as it is. He shows really strong range in this role and not only looks the part but handles the dramatic side of things perfectly. He and Stock have a great chemistry together, playing off of one another as each case plays out and making for a very entertaining duo.
As to the production values, reportedly this series was shot fast and on a pretty demanding schedule and sometimes this shows. The camerawork is very much designed for the 4x3 television sets on which the material would have been originally shown on, and things can look a little cramped at times for this reason. The music is a bit on the generic side but the sets and locations typically work pretty well, as does the costuming work.
Obviously it would have been great to get the entirety of Cushing’s work on the series included and preserved but what’s here (all that survives) is very good and definitely worth your time, whether it’s for Cushing’s work or just the chance to appreciate some well-written and very strongly acted takes on some genuinely classic tales of mystery and suspense.
Sherlock Holmes – Blu-ray Review:
The Sherlock Holmes content is all scanned from BBC tape protection masters and framed at 1.33.1. Presented upscaled at 1080p and in AVC encoded high definition. These look pretty decent given the elements that were available. They don’t look as nice or as detailed as the film-sourced productions in the collection do, and there is some tape roll here and there, but soft or not, the transfers of the episodes included here are perfectly watchable, if not especially remarkable looking.
Each entry in the collection gets a 24-bit DTS-HD Mono track in English with optional English subtitles.
Since the episodes are taken from lesser quality elements, they don’t have as much depth as you might hope for but this is likely the best we’re going to get and, realistically, they sound fine.
Extras for the two Sherlock Holmes discs include audio commentaries for every episode featuring Kim Newman, Barry Forshaw and David Stuart Davies, the Author of Starring Sherlock Holmes: A Century Of The Master Detective On Screen. These are quite interesting and nicely detailed, covering the cast and crew that worked on each episode, where Cushing’s career was at during this period, detail on the crew members that worked on the pictures, the directors associated with it, how the filmed adaptations compare to the source material and other versions of the stories that have been told over the years and lots more.
All episodes are available to watch with or without the BBC Countdown Clock enabled.
This release also contains an illustrated Peter Cushing audio interview with David Stuart Davies recorded on August 29th, 1974 during the filming of Legend Of The Werewolf. This eighteen minute discussion covers Cushing’s thoughts on playing Holmes and on the character himself, the different facets there are to the part, his experiences in Hollywood, getting the period detail right, his work on The Hound Of The Baskervilles, how his work as Holmes was received, his wardrobe for the character and other details related to his work as Sherlock Holmes.
We also get some Lost Segments available to watch with an optional commentary by Jonathan Rigby and Kevin Lyons. There's eight minutes of material here, beginning with a text preface that explains why some of the episodes were wiped when the BBC's contract with the Conan Doyle Estate didn't allow for further screenings. The six episodes included in this boxed set obviously survived, but six more did not though some black and white clips were found in the archive of VRT, a Flemish broadcaster, and the color was 'recovered' by a British company called Kaleidoscope. Rigby's commentary offers some context to the clips, explaining what episodes they are from, the source material used for the episodes and details on the cast members that appear in them.
Sherlock Holmes - The Final Word:
Severin Films’ Blu-ray release of Sherlock Holmes does what it can with lackluster elements, but even if the presentation isn’t going to blow your mind, the content here is really good. Cushing is perfect in the role of Holmes and each of the stories contained in this set is well-told and intriguing. Throw in some solid extra features as well and this winds up being very much worth your time.
Click on the images below, or right click and open in a new window, for full sized Sherlock Holmes Blu-ray screen caps!
