{"id":10950,"date":"2024-05-07T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-05-07T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10950"},"modified":"2026-01-04T13:24:20","modified_gmt":"2026-01-04T18:24:20","slug":"cumberbatch-or-brett-brett-or-cumberbatch-or-rathbone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10950","title":{"rendered":"Cumberbatch or Brett? Brett or Cumberbatch? Or Rathbone?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

This series of posts about the stories in the recent collection, Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery 1885<\/em><\/a>, edited by Richard T. Ryan, published by Belanger Books, began by asking the story authors\u2014and you, our Facebook friends\u2014which is your favorite on-screen Holmes\/Watson duo? I learned two things: Holmes fans have clear favorites, and their views are strongly held!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started recording your votes on a small notepad and was soon using both sides of the sheet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Garnering the most fans (about a third of the total) was the classic 36-episode Granada television series (1984-1994) starring Jeremy Brett, with equal votes to the Watsons of first David Burke, then Edward Hardwicke. Of course, fans did note Brett\u2019s deteriorating performance as the series wore on, due to a series of psychological and medical problems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman also garnered quite a few votes for the BBC Sherlock<\/em> series\u2014about a quarter of the total. People said they liked the modern energy of these productions, but I was disappointed to learn (thank you, gossip trade) that the two actors actually don\u2019t like each other. Cumberbatch is the better known, of course, but, in a complete aside, if you want to see Freeman in one of my favorite short comedic films, The Voorman Problem<\/a><\/em>, I think you\u2019ll enjoy it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There were almost as many votes for Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as for Cumberbatch and Freeman. Still, fans couldn\u2019t help but scoff at the poor characterization of Watson. I suspect it wasn\u2019t Bruce\u2019s fault; he was probably hewing to the instructions of the director, who may have feared audiences wouldn\u2019t understand how smart Holmes was without a dim Watson for contrast.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From here, we get into small numbers, five percent of the voting or so, but what\u2019s surprising is how many portrayals loom so memorably in our minds! Downey and Law, Miller and Liu (with lots of pushback on this one. A bridge too far for some), Caine and Kingsley (Without a Clue<\/em>), Ronald Howard and Howard Marion-Crawford (first American series, 1954), Peter Cushing and Andr\u00e9 Morell (The Hound of the Baskervilles<\/em>, 1959), Vasily Livanov and Vitaly Solomin (Soviet television, 1979-1986). I\u2019ve never seen most of these\u2014or heard of some of them!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And, finally, some respondents thought \u201con-screen\u201d portrayals was altogether too limiting a construct and proposed Sir Kenneth Macmillan\u2019s performance of both Holmes and Moriarty in the ballet The Great Detective<\/em> (1953), or the Clive Merrison and Michael Williams BBC Radio versions (1989-1998), and William Gillette, who portrayed Holmes on stage and in a 1916 silent film. And the very favorite depiction for one Holmes fan was the portrayal created in his own book. No one mentioned the various musical versions, probably for good reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Contemporary writers, who, in the case of the anthology mentioned, do adhere closely to the canonical conventions, have enthusiastically created adventures to fill in the time gap in which almost none of Conan Doyle\u2019s stories are set and the hundreds of film, television, radio, stage, and other portrayals of these enduring characters show there are many stories still to be had. Or, as Holmes himself said, \u201cOne\u2019s ideas must be as broad as Nature if they are to interpret Nature.\u201d And contemporary writers continue to explore those limits. Enjoy!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This series of posts about the stories in the recent collection, Sherlock Holmes: A Year of Mystery 1885, edited by Richard T. Ryan, published by Belanger Books, began by asking the story authors\u2014and you, our Facebook friends\u2014which is your favorite … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Fans named their favorite Sherlock Holmes characterizations. So many choices!","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[269,56,174,67,104],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10950","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-actor","category-film","category-first-draft-blog","category-television","category-the-morgue"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2QC","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10950","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10950"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10950\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10951,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10950\/revisions\/10951"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10950"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10950"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10950"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}