May 22: Sherlock Holmes (1922 -- Albert Parker)

★★★

Six years after Sherlock Holmes’ screen debut, Albert Parker revisits the detective, even using the same William Gillette play as his source material.  At a minimum, it makes for an interesting comparison with the 1916 serial.

It’s hard to say that Parker improves on Arthur Berthelet’s earlier version.  As in the earlier film, there are cohesion problems here with, for example, big gaps that make the Sherlock Holmes/Alice Faulkner romance hard to accept.  And while Parker brings a little more fluidity to his 1922 editing than Berthelet managed, this later film lets the character of Holmes sprawl from college youth to middle-aged crime solver, introducing us to a surprisingly simple kid as our embryonic detective but not giving us enough insight to understand or believe his later transformation.  And if that range isn’t enough, Parker adds Sherlock-as-loving-husband to the mix.  The ’22 Sherlock Holmes lacks the tight character focus of the ’16.

But Parker’s film has its strong points.  He cuts back the role of the Larrabees and foregrounds Moriarty, shaping him into a singularly vicious villain.  The film is also effective with some filmic elements.  At one point, Holmes leaves a dark foreground and is suddenly lit in the mid-ground as he crosses a street, an effective use of light that certainly attracts the eye.  The opening aerial shot is likewise compelling.  And actors like John Barrymore and William Powell know how to hold scene.  Even Hedda Hopper is effective in her very small role.

It’s hard to know why Goldwyn Pictures would have wanted to return to the same character and the same source material that a film had used only six years previously.  While this Sherlock Holmes warrants some comfortable appreciation as early cinema, it’s not a great step forward for the character, the theatrical script or for film.