Tag: Jeremy Brett

His Last Bow by Arthur Conan Doyle

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His Last Bow, published in 1917, is the final case of Sherlock Holmes, chronologically, if not actually the last time he appeared in print. The stories collected in the 1927 volume, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes, were set earlier. Conan Doyle was quite careless about continuity, but this has never affected the enduring popularity of the Holmes stories.

It is somewhat shorter than most of the other Holmes stories and is subtitled An Epilogue of Sherlock Holmes. It is also unusual in that it is not narrated by Dr Watson, but written in conventional third-person style.

The action takes place very specifically on the evening of 2nd August 1914, just before the first world war was to begin, an evening with “an awesome hush and a feeling of vague expectancy in the sultry and stagnant air”. The seaside setting on the eve of war gives the story something of the same feel as the final chapter of John Buchan’s Thirty Nine Steps, published in 1915.

Holmes has long since retired, given up Baker Street for the South Downs, and devoted himself to beekeeping. He has written a book entitled Practical Handbook of Bee Culture. We learn in retrospect that in 1912, Holmes was asked to come out of retirement by the Foreign Secretary and the Prime Minister, to investigate the German spy ring believed to be operating in Britain.

The story depicts the climax of this operation, as Von Bork, the German spy chief, prepares to return to Berlin. He is discussing how things have gone with Baron von Herling from the German Embassy. There is some doubt as to whether Britain will declare war, but in any event, the two Germans consider that a reckoning between the countries can only be postponed, rather than called off altogether.

Von Bork has been an effective secret agent because he is a keen sportsman, which means that no-one has taken him seriously or suspected his real motives. He is awaiting the arrival of Altamont, an Irish-American who has been gathering information for him. Let’s just say that the evening does not go quite as he expected, and that both Holmes and Watson appear in disguise.

The final exchange between Holmes and Watson, as Watson prepares to return to the army, is quite moving. It’s clear that Conan Doyle was bringing down the curtain not only on the career of the great detective, but also on the pre-war Victorian world with which he was so identified.

If you are reading the Holmes stories, it’s a good idea to leave this short farewell tale to the very end.

I’ve been enjoying all over again the excellent TV series with Jeremy Brett. I don’t think I’m alone in regarding him as the definitive screen Holmes, the actor who was the most faithful to the original stories. It’s a great shame that his early death meant that they did not get around to filming this story. It would have been a great way to go out, but unfortunately, it was not to be.  

The Good Soldier: a good film

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I finally watched the DVD of The Good Soldier the other week. This is an adaptation of the 1915 novel by Ford Madox Ford, much admired for the unreliability of its narrator. My partner is not altogether a fan of the book, but she enjoyed this as much as I did. We both thought it was really excellent. Everything just seemed to come together to produce an adaptation that was faithful to the feel of the book.

It is quite rare that you have an ensemble piece like this where the actors playing the main characters are all perfect for their roles, but in this the four principals were all dead right. Jeremy Brett, Susan Fleetwood, Robin Ellis and Vickery Turner all seemed to be the characters from the book as I remember them.

The locations were dead right, too. I think they may have used the actual German spa town, Bad Nauheim, in which the early part of the book takes place. These parts of the film had the same sense of leisured ease, with nobody in too much of a hurry, that comes across in the film of Death in Venice.

The screenplay adaptation was a masterclass, really, in how to take quite a complex, literary novel and make it work on screen. It’s a long time since I read the book, but I think the major change was the flashback structure. We knew from the beginning that Ashburnham was going to be dead at the end, and this worked really well.

Scenes were repeated, as the both the audience and the character Dowell gained more knowledge about what had really been going on. The look on Dowell’s (Robin Ellis’) face when Leonora told him that Flora and Edward had been having an affair was quite something. These repetitions gave the film something of a Nicolas Roeg feel.

Jeremy Brett was magnificent as Ashburnham, perhaps the best thing he ever did on screen, even better than his Max de Winter. I always thought he was a bit wasted as Sherlock Holmes. I have the feeling that Susan Fleetwood was sometimes a bit hard to cast, because she seemed to radiate strength of personality all the time and that wasn’t always what was called for, but here it was exactly right.

Going back to the screenplay, it was of course by Julian Mitchell and quite the equal of Pinter’s scripts for the Losey films, I thought. The only thing I can say against this film is that it is in need of a good restoration and clean up; the print on the Network DVD is a bit faded. I suppose it is not well-known enough to get the full digital upgrade treatment, which is a great pity.

I was unaware that this film had been made until I found it on DVD. I had seen the text of a stage adaptation, so I assume that is derived from his screenplay. I can’t think how I managed to miss this. It was first broadcast in 1981, at around the time Granada were making some really good TV drama. It may be that I had not actually read the book at that point and therefore did not notice it in the schedule.

It is a great pity that it was not released in the cinema first, like the films that Channel 4 made later in the 1980s. I think that, if it had been, it would quite rightly be regarded as a classic today. It is not for nothing that Robin Ellis has devoted a whole section on his website to this film. And of course, the highest compliment I can pay is that it has made me want to read the book again. I read a fascinating piece online that suggested that John Dowell is not quite the innocent he portrays himself as. I shall have to read it once more to find out.