回复：【JB版福尔摩斯剧集】The Return of Sherlock Holmes

The Second Stain
Dramatised by John Hawkesworth
Designer: Tim Wilding
Directed by John Bruce
Supporting Cast:
Lord Bellinger: Harry Andrews
Trelawney Hope: Stuart Wilson
Lady Hilda; Patricia Hodge
Lestrade: Colin Jeavons
Eduardo Lucas: Yves Benneyton
Mrs Hudson: Rosalie Williams
This film has another memorable score, much of it based on a fine Elgarian march for Lord Bellinger. Unlike The Priory School, however, it is probably the most faithful adaptation in the whole series.
We even went so far as to recreate Watson’s visit to Holmes in retirement to seek permission to publish. We chose a cottage in Rostherne and imported the necessary beehives; we established the time difference by including a recruiting column for the Boer War. Jeremy dutifully adopted the veil and gloves of a beekeeper but was patently unhappy as the older Holmes. An elaborate disguise was one thing; real evidence of advancing years was quite another. For his sake, perhaps it is just as well that—for reasons of length—this sequence ended up on the cutting-room floor.
Instead the film begins with the Prime Minister leaving Number Ten to join Trelawney Hope on the short journey to Baker Street. As far as I remember we were not allowed to film in Downing Street, but the rest of the London exteriors were, for once, genuine London. We certainly shot Carlton House Terrace and Watson buying his evening paper on the south bank of the Thames. We located Godolphin Street in Westminster, within the sound of Big Ben, and shot the sequences there on a Sunday. If you look closely you can see strips of canvas at the sides of the road to conceal the yellow lines of parking restrictions. For a street with so few trees, there are also a surprising number of leaves in the gutters to conceal the strips of canvas.
There is a fascinating line of dialogue in the scene between Lady Hilda and the spy, Eduardo Lucas, which we see in flashback towards the end of the film. Lucas describes the letter which he has used to blackmail the lady as ‘Sprightly, very sprightly’ and describes the writer as ‘a charming correspondent’. Surely these are exactly the same words which Charles Augustus Milverton used on another occasion but in a similar situation. Perhaps we should conclude that Lucas obtained the bait he needed from ‘the worse man in London’.
Sadly, this was the last in the series which John Bruce directed, but he accomplished it with his usual flair. I admire the staging of Mrs Hudson’s dexterous exit with the breakfast tray as the distinguished clients arrive at Baker Street and Holmes’ careless disposal of a lighted match which sets a newspaper on fire. The whole mechanism of the rotated rug—Lestrade’s finest hour—is beautifully handled, and Holmes’ feverish examination of the wood-block floor has tremendous tension.
John Hawksworth introduced a small but sensible change at the climax of the story. Instead of allowing Hope to leave his precious dispatch-box in his bedroom while he is out, the gentleman has taken it with him. When he retires, bringing the Primer Minister with him for lunch, Holmes has to perform a minor conjuring trick to replace the vital document while Hope’s attention is distracted. He does this out of shot, but when he re-enters the frame, so very casually lighting a cigarette, we know he has achieved his purpose and that Lady Hilda’s reputation and the fate of nations are secure once more.
It is a considerable success, but I have never been very happy with Holmes’ triumphant leap and shout which provides the last image of the film. It has always seemed to me to be very characteristic of Jeremy Brett—whose idea it was—but hardly typical of Sherlock Holmes. 

Musgrave Ritual
Dramatised by Jeremy Paul
Designer: Michael Grimes
Directed by: David Carson
Supporting Cast:
Reginald Musgrave: Michael Culver
Brunton: James Hazeldine
Rachel Howells: Johanna Kirby
In Conan Doyle’s original story Holmes unearths the Ritual from a tantalising collection of his very early cases and recounts it to Watson. This makes for a thoroughly convoluted narrative: Watson is telling us what Holmes told him about events which happened a dozen years earlier. The result is a perfect thicket of inverted commas, sometimes three separate sets at the beginning of a line of dialogue when Holmes is telling Watson Musgrave’s report of a third person’s speech. It is a typographical nightmare and a severe challenge to the reader.
We solved the problems at a stroke by bringing the story into the present tense, a solution which also allows us to bring Watson into the investigation. After a provocative sequence which shows Brunton, the butler of Hurlstone, and his fatal involvement with two women, we begin with Holmes and Watson arriving to spend a weekend with Reginald Musgrave. Our location for his ancestral home was Baddesley Clinton, a beautiful, mediaeval, moated manor house in Warwickshire, perhaps the most attractive stately home in the whole series.
Holmes apparently needs a rest and a change from London but is not very happy at the prospect of hours and days in the company of an old college chum. To distract him he has brought a trunkful of notes on those early cases. This allowed Jeremy Paul to keep that wonderful litany about the ‘affair of the aluminium crutch’ and ‘Ricoletti of the clubfoot and his abominable wife’. He has also brought with him, as we discover later, another bulwark against boredom which includes a hypodermic syringe.
The whole story has, of course, been restructured, but the musical, philandering butler remains the central figure in it. We glimpse him playing the flute and watch him, to Holmes’ hysterical amusement, correcting his master on family history and a boot that was worn at the battle of Naseby. But over breakfast on the second day of the visit, we learn that he has disappeared overnight. The housemaid, Rachel, his abandoned mistress, collapses when the matter is discussed and Watson has to offer her medical assistance. An examination of the butler’s bedroom only adds to the mystery--he appears to have taken nothing with him. When Watson and Musgrave have left Holmes to go out shooting, the great eccentric stretches out and goes to sleep on the butler’s bed.
Returning from the shoot, Musgrave at last confesses to Holmes how he dismissed Brunton in the middle of the previous night after finding him studying the Musgrave family papers. One of these is the Ritual itself, a curious catechism which has been handed down from one generation to another. The Ritual exists in two versions, depending on which edition of the story you read. It is probably fortunate that Jeremy Paul uses the shorter of the two, which omits any reference to the time of year. Commentators have said that the remaining instructions are useless without this reference, but they are confusing in any case. They apparently depend on the height of two trees, one of which has been felled and another which has probably grown since the Ritual was written.


We decided to cut through this obscurity by making one of the trees a decoration on a weather vane. A close-up of the device shows that the top portion has been added to the original for our purpose. So this was not ‘an act of God’, as Jeremy Paul supposes in his introduction to the published script (Ian Henry Publications 1992), or the writer’s own invention as David Stuart Davies surmises in Bending the Willow (Calabash Press 1996). It was the inspiration of a very gifted production designer. We treated the rest of the Ritual as a blueprint for black comedy. When Holmes and his friends pace it out in the rain they eventually discover that one of the final instructions leads them across the moat--an unlikely route in a map measured in paces--but it provides a striking image. Holmes appears to be walking on the water which separates him from his objective until we realize that he is being rowed across in a small boat.
Meanwhile Rachel has made her panicky escape from the house, and although they are never mentioned in the film, her footprints presumably suggested a search of the lake on the next day. This produces only a bag containing the crumbling fragments, which are in the end the solution to the whole mystery.
The last segment of the film finds Holmes brooding over the spot to which the Ritual has led him and putting himself into the mind of Brunton, who solved the mystery before him but died at the hands of the woman he spurned. The final resolution, which sees the restoration of the crown of England, is a satisfying one; Holmes and Watson can leave Hurlstone having solved a memorable conundrum.
This is a particular favourite on account of Jeremy Paul’s radical but sympathetic adaptation—which deservedly won him the Edgar Allan Poe award from the Mystery Writers of America—and David Carson’s imaginative direction. I remember particularly the long shot of the three explorers with their umbrellas, gazing at the wrong oak; Holmes’ hand emerging from the depths of the cellar with a Cavalier coin; and, most of all, the final shot of Rachel’s body in the lake, which echoes exactly Millais’ painting of the death of Ophelia.


The Man with the Twisted Lip
Dramatised by Alan Plater
Designer: Tim Wilding
Directed by Patrick Lau
Supporting Cast:
Neville St. Clair: Clive Francis
Mrs. St. Clair: Eleanor David
Isa Whitney: Terence Longdon
Mrs. Whitney: Patricia Garwood
Mrs. Hudson: Rosalie Williams
Inspector Bradstreet: Denis Lill
Lascar: Albert Moses
The title sequence presents us with the ill-favoured beggar, Hugh Boone, selling matches to City gentlemen and entertaining them with quotations from English literature. With one exception all of the City gents are in a generous mood, looking as if they are on their way to expense-account lunches. The exception is a haunted fellow who ignores Boone and darts furtively into a miserable alleyway. This, we shall learn later, is Isa Whitney.
The original story begins with a rare glimpse of Watson’s married life. As a picture of domestic happiness it is slightly marred by the fact that Mrs. Watson appears to have forgotten her husband’s name, but it does offer a charming picture of the lady herself comforting a distraught visitor. ‘Folk who were in grief,’ says Watson, ‘came to my wife like birds to a lighthouse.’
As we had decided to deny Watson a wife in our films, this had to be changed, but we still needed the Watsons’ visitor to launch the plot. Alan Pater decided that, as Holmes had temporarily ‘disappeared without trace’ from 221B, Watson and Mrs. Hudson would look after the unhappy Mrs. Whitney, whose husband has been missing for two days. Whitney is addicted to 鸦片 and Watson know exactly where to find him.
Our locations for Upper Swandom Lane, the waterfront and the City of London were found in King’s Lynn, but the interior of The Bar of Gold was reconstructed in a Manchester warehouse. A new director to the series, Patrick Lau, reveled in these exotic and sinister settings and created perhaps the most truthful picture of Victorian squalor in any of our films. Watson threads his way through it to find the wretches Whitney and arranges to pay for two days of indulgence in 鸦片. On his way out of the den he is waylaid by a heavily disguised Holmes, urged to send Whitney home and join him in another investigation. Of course, he agrees, although it looks as if he will be asked to do no more than he did in The Crooked Man; listen to Holmes’ statement of the case and then witness the solution of it. 

Holmes is searching for Neville St. Clair, a respectable business man last seen in a room above the squalid 鸦片den, but Holmes has chosen to conduct his search from St. Clair’s home, seven miles away in Kent. This is the first of several puzzles which require a suspension of disbelief in the conduct of this case. Alan Plater, however, turned it to his advantage by allowing Mrs. St. Clair to retell part of the story and to involve Watson in some awkward questions about her husband’s habits. It is still hard to understand what on earth Mrs. St. Clair was doing in Upper Swandom Lane after a shopping expedition (presumably in the West End), lunch and a visit to a shipping office. As Watson says, no respectable woman would go within miles of the place. So why is the lady taking such a chance? We tried to explain her recklessness by giving her a scarf to return to a ragged child who dropped it, but this is easily overlooked.
By this greatest misfortune, St. Clair glances out of an upstairs window in The Bar of Gold at the moment his wife is passing below. He looks a little disheveled but is otherwise his normal self and is recognized immediately. Mrs. St. Clair does her best to investigate but is hustled out by the villainous proprietor and goes in search of the **. When all is finally revealed, we realize that St. Clair had two choices at this point. His escape at the back of the building was cut off by the Thames at high tide, but he could either make a run for it through the front entrance or stay where he was and replace his disguise as the beggar Boone. Surprisingly, he chose the second course, which involved and elaborate make-up job and the disposal of his respectable clothes. It seems that he shared with Conan Doyle a sublime faith in the power of greasepaint and false hair to fool our nearest and dearest. It worked for James Windibank in A Case of Identity and it works for St. Clair too.
Mrs. St. Clair returns with Inspector Bradstreet (Barton on the original, but he also ‘disappears without trace’ after starting the investigation) and finds some important evidence. Her husband’s clothes—with the exception of his overcoat—are hidden in the room. The overcoat is later recovered from the river, weighted down with copper coins. This is one of Conan Doyle’s neatest puzzles: who would use money as a mere ballast and who would have enough small coins to make it effective? A rich man or a beggar?


The Devil’s Foot
Dramatised by Gary Hopkins
Designer: Michael Grimes
Directed by Ken Hannam
Supporting Cast:
Reverend Roundhay: Michael Aitken
Mortimer Tregennis: Damien Thomas
Leon Sterndale: Denis Quilley
Brenda Tregennis: Christine Collins
Mrs. Porter: Freda Dowie
The opening sequence shows an unusual burglary—the thief takes only a small amount of powder from a glass jar which he dispenses into a snuff box. The setting provides a clue which will be valuable later: a substantial house set on a wild English coastline, but furnished with tribal masks and mementos.
In the light of day Holmes and Watson arrive in the same area, traveling in a dog-cart. They are on their way to Poldhu Bay, “at the further extremity of the Cornish peninsula”, to which Holmes has been sent for his health. He looks thoroughly disenchanted with the prospect and Watson’s insistence that they are on holiday has a desperate ring to it.
The great man is in some sartorial confusion throughout his stay, stubbornly wearing his town clothes in the middle of the country. Is this perhaps a protest against his banishment from London? He certainly does not adopt the casual wear provided for him in Gilbert Holiday’s unusual illustration for "The Strand Magazine." He makes only one concession to his surroundings, in the form of a long woolen scarf. As Nancy Banks-Smith said in her Guardian review, “Sometimes he wears his muffler under his hat and sometimes over. The first gives him a passing look of the Wife of Bath, the second Lady Bracknell. Sometimes he knots it artistically around his brow and lets it dangle. Women’s magazines used to have articles like that: 1001 ways to tie a scarf.”
Gary Hopkins made a number of small changes to the structure of the story but each one is justified by the text. For instance, Watson tells us that his friend’s constitution has been threatened by “constant hard work-- aggravated, perhaps, by occasional indiscretions of his own”. This is borne out on film when he returns to the holiday cottage after a brief walk. Holmes has the c0caine bottle before him and appears to have used the needle not just subcutaneously but intravenously. Similarly, Watson says that Holmes had made the acquaintance of the local vicar, Roundhay, and we see their first meeting. My only objection to this scene is that Holmes makes a string of observations about Roundhay which appear to be brilliant deductions but then undermines his performance by revealing that he has been reading the parish magazine. That is not the Holmes we all admire.
In this first, brief meting the Reverend Roundhay describes the nearby Tregennis estate and mentions the family dispute which has led Mortimer Tregennis to lodge at the vicarage, while his brothers and sister live at their own house, Tredannick Wartha. He also invites Holmes and Watson to dinner, a prospect which is greeted with surprising enthusiasm.


It is, however, a somber Holmes who explores the surrounding moors, fascinated by the stone monuments to the dead of forgotten nations. On one of these walks he breaks his dependence on drugs, burying the c0caine phial and his hypodermic on a sandy beach. It is an admirable resolution, although hardly an ecologically sound method of disposal.
The holiday is interrupted—as detectives’ holidays always are—by news of a sensational event. Mortimer Tregennis describes how he left his brothers and sister after a game of cards the evening before, only to be told in the morning that the men had been driven mad and the woman killed by some hideous shock. Incidentally, the doctor who examined the victims—and suffered a fainting fit himself—was played by John Saunders, a member of the Library Theatre company in which Jeremy started his career thirty years earlier.
On their way to the scene of the tragedy the three men encounter the closed carriage which is taking the demented brothers to Helston. On their arrival Holmes examines the ground outside the window through which Tregennis says he might have seen an intruder the previous evening. In the course of his investigation he manages to avoid upsetting a watering-pot but he does step on Tregennis’ foot.
Once inside the house Holmes is in his element, throwing hat, coat and gloves across the room to make a minute examination. Gary Hopkins supplies an extra clue here when Tregennis speaks of a “criminal” investigation, whereas up to this point a supernatural agency has been held to blame. Tregennis also introduces Mrs. Porter as “my housekeeper”, although he lives elsewhere. Is this a slip of the tongue or an anticipation of his inheritance?
In spite of an evident antagonism towards Tregennis, Mrs. Porter tells her story. Tregennis himself explains the presence of a fire because he suffers from “a mild blood disorder” and feels the cold. Nevertheless he walked back to the vicarage in the rain rather than stay the night in the house. While they are viewing the body of Brenda Tregennis, Watson expresses his disbelief in the “mild disorder.” Holmes’ very careful, almost sensuous examination reveals that around her neck Brenda wore on a ribbon a strange jeweled ring. This and the blood disorder are additions by Gary Hopkins, who also chose to set the next scene on the spectacular cliffs rather than in the cottage. Holmes and Watson rehearse what they have seen, including the trail of footprints left by Tregennis as he hastened back to the vicarage. These were, of course, identified by Holmes from the impressions he made when he trod on the man’s foot. They are interrupted by the arrival of a fierce, bearded figure who towers over them. Holmes immediately recognizes him as Dr. Leon Sterndale, the famous explorer and lion hunter who lives nearby. He explains that the Tregennis family were friends of long standing, but Holmes can tell him nothing.
The following day Holmes and Watson are summoned to the vicarage by a distraught Roundhay to investigate the death of Mortimer Tregennis, who appears to have died in the same way as his sister. Holmes literally throws himself into the hunt, collecting gravel from outside the vicarage and scraping a deposit from the oil lamp inside. 

Back at the holiday cottage Holmes embarks on the dangerous experiment which solves the mystery. He submits himself—and Watson—to the ordeal drug activated by fire, which has driven two people made and killed two others. Watson’s account of the experience is a splendid description of nameless horror, but one of the aspects of Gary’s script which particularly appealed to me was that he offered specific images for the nightmare which Holmes undergoes. They are all images of death which has obsessed Holmes throughout the episode—Cain, Oedipus, Nebuchadnezzar and his own nemesis, Moriarty—orchestrated by the director into a disturbing series of images. Readers who are particularly interested in this sequence might like to track down a book called It’s a Print!: Detective Fiction from Page to Screen, edited by William Reynolds and Elizabeth Trembley (Bowling Green State University Popular Press 1994), in which Dr. Trembley and Ken Hannam analyze the nightmare in depth. When, with Watson’s help, Holmes recovers he uses Watson’s first name for the only time in the series. Even when placed under such stress, would he have done that, I wonder? It does seem to be characteristic, however, that he should throw the oil lamp used to ignite the dangerous drug into the sea.
Holmes confronts Sterndale with his theory that Mortimer Tregennis used the drug against his sister and brothers and that Sterndale in turn used it to kill Mortimer. He produces the curious ring which Brenda wore secretly as a token of he love for the explorer. Sterndale explains that Mortimer stole what he thought was an undetectable poison and used it in an attempt to gain control of the estate. Once again Holmes assumes the role of judge and jury and, in sympathy with his motive, allows a guilty man to go free.
Throughout his script Gary Hopkins kept faith with the original story but introduced some flourishes of his own, which added to its success on television. Deservedly he won the second of our two Edgars from the Mystery Writers of America. 

Silver Blaze
Dramatized by John Hawkesworth
Designer: Alan Price
Directed by Brian Mills
Supporting Cast:
Colonel Ross: Peter Barkworth
Inspector Gregory: Malcolm Storry
Mrs. Hudson: Rosalie Williams
John Straker: Barry Lowe
Mrs. Straker: Sally Faulkner
Edith Baxter: Amanda-Jayne Beard
Ned Hunter: David John
Silas Brown: Russell Hunter
Fitzroy Simpson: Jonathan Coy
Both John and I had always wanted to include this famous story in the Granada series but had fought shy of it for two or three years. We agreed that it presented problems, but eventually John thought that he could solve them. Too late I realized that he was thinking of one set of problems and I was thinking of another. My concern was the cost of staging a Victorian horse race with all the animals, extras and costumes involved. The race for the Wessex Plate is not really the dénouement of a story which is about the disappearance of a horse and the murder of his trainer. But because of Holmes’ desire to teach his client a lesson and his addiction to the dramatic gesture, the case is concluded on the race course. As far as the mystery is concerned the outcome of the race is irrelevant, but no audience is going to forgive a film maker who takes the favourite to the stating gate and then refuses to show him romping home.

John’s concern turned out to be a fault in the horse-racing background to which Conan Doyle himself confessed in his autobiography, Memories and Adventures. “My ignorance cried aloud to heaven,” wrote Sir Arthur. “I read an excellent and very damaging criticism of the story in some sporting paper, written clearly by a man who did know, in which he explained the exact penalties which would come upon everyone concerned if they had acted as I described. Half would have been in jail, and the other half warned off the turf forever.” John felt that he would paper over these cracks and delivered a script as adroit as any that he wrote for the series, but it presented June and me with a financial problem. Nevertheless we went ahead. I suppose I made a mental note that we would have to economise later…
We certainly did not go to Dartmoor in search of King’s Pyland; our locations were in the north of England, but I think they caught the moorland atmosphere pretty well. The opening sequence—a man watching through binoculars the training of a string of horses—is not particularly exciting. (That is no excuse, however, for the misspelling of John’s name in his writer’s credit.) The scenes in Baker Street which follow are acceptable, but the film really engages our attention when Holmes cries, “We’re off to Dartmoor, Mrs. Hudson!” and, with a flamboyant flourish of his dressing gown, disappears into his bedroom to pack. From this point onwards the unfortunate haircut is usually concealed by the “ear-flapped traveling cap” which, on this occasion, is specified in the text.
Once on the train out of Paddington, Holmes performs his famous trick of calculating its speed with the help of his watch and a special knowledge of telegraph poles. Watson does not seem to be much impressed and appears to be filling in the crossword puzzle on the back of a newspaper. Of course, this could not be so because crosswords did not appear in the British press until the 1920s. Instead John has taken a hint from Shoscombe Old Place and shown us Watson the betting man, who is presumably calculating whether or not his wound pension will run to another wager. The fact that he is reading a sporting paper allows Watson to contribute to the exposition of the case. Instead of relying on Holmes to give a very lengthy “sketch of events” describing the mystery surrounding Silver Blaze, John has divided the narrative between Watson, Colonel Ross, Inspector Gregory and the servants who were directly involved. For a film of the story, it is a much better method.

Wisteria Lodge
Dramatised by Jeremy Paul
Designer: Tim Wilding
Directed by Peter Hammond
Supporting Cast:
Scott Eccles: Donald Churchill
Inspector Baynes: Freddie Jones
Miss Burnet: Kika Markham
Henderson: Basil Hoskins
Lucas: Trader Faulkner
Garcia: Arturo Venegas
“A chaotic case, my dear Watson … It will not be possible for you to present it in that compact form which is dear to your heart.” Holmes' judgment is certainly true of the original account—it appeared in two installments in both Collier’s and in The Strand—and it is hardly one of Conan Doyle’s best constructed tales. It also presented some difficulties to dramatist and director.
The first episode, The Singular Experience of Mr. John Scott Eccles, is set entirely in Baker Street—only in the very last paragraph do Holmes and Watson leave for the country. There were obvious opportunities to open out that structure. We began the film with the arrival of a family as Esher railway station. The woman in the group exchanges a look with a man in the waiting room, who is there to meet another passenger. The two parties set off separately and we concentrate on the second of them, a man called Garcia, and his guest, Scott Eccles.
In 221B Holmes is dramatically posed at the fireplace with his back to us. Watson is reflected in a convenient mirror (Peter Hammond signs his work early), and within minutes Scott Eccles bustles in to relieve the boredom of Holmes’ existence. In the original he has scarcely begun his story before he is interrupted by the inspectors Gregson and Baynes. Their arrival served no purpose in the film and the official investigation is quite properly postponed until we reach Esher. What we want is Eccles’ narrative and, after a slightly awkward start, that is what we get. The extreme close-up of Eccles and the sight of one dinner party while he is describing another is unsettling, but the direction soon recovers. The uncomfortable evening at Wisteria Lodge—Eccles desperate for more wine—and the nightmare which follows are faithfully done. The decision to take Eccles back to Esher is a good one and allows Holmes to observe the police search along the route, which is the first indication of a crime. Once at the Lodge, however, the direction becomes more fevered: mirror shots and big close-ups herald the arrival of Baynes. He reveals that Garcia is dead and that Eccles is involved in a murder inquiry.
Now what is one to say about Freddie Jones’ performance as the inspector? He certainly gives us the vain, ambitious character described by Conan Doyle. He embroiders it with a few actors’ tricks—the mittens, the outrageous hat and the boiled sweets—and sits up and begs for words like rich and ripe to be applied to it. I would describe it as smug. It is certainly such a big performance that it nearly throws the picture out of balance.
Baynes confirms Eccles’ story of a note received by Garcia during dinner and, having recovered it from the fireplace, reads the curious message involving colours and room locations. Almost as if throwing out a challenge to Holmes, he makes a series of deductions about the paper, the pen that was used and also reveals that the note is in a woman’s writing, although the address is in a different hand. Holmes manages to add to this display of detection and a competition between the two men has clearly begun. Then, in an absurdly staged two-shot with Holmes, Baynes describes the discovery of Garcia’s body on Oxshott Common. This provokes Holmes to a manic display of investigation, throwing books about, sifting the ashes in the fireplace and tapping a guitar. He discovers one of a pair of dueling pistols, apparently belonging to Garcia, and Baynes explains that the other is missing. All of this is observed from outside by an evil-looking mulatto; Watson spots the mulatto’s appearance because Conan Doyle’s reason for his return to the house—to retrieve a religious fetish—has been removed.


Holmes, Watson, Baynes and Eccles set off for the village and discuss the time of the murder on the way. Baynes has fixed it at one in the morning, but Eccles protests because he was woken by Garcia at exactly that time. Holmes appears to dismiss this by saying, “One must not confuse the unlikely with the impossible.” Curiously, there is no further reference to Garcia’s attempt to establish an alibi and, at this point, Eccles disappears from the story. So this central hinge of the plot, which depended on a servant altering a clock, together with Garcia’s reason for misleading Eccles, were included in Jeremy Paul’s script but—presumably for length—cut from the final film.
As Holmes and Watson attempt to analyse the crucial note, we are given a glimpse of the family we saw at Esher station. We have already seen the two girls at play and the woman who was with them imprisoned in an upstairs room. Now the woman is almost dragged to the dinner table to eat with the laughing children and two sinister-looking men.
Holmes and Watson go their separate ways to explore the surrounding countryside, but both men find themselves at High Gable, a splendid house occupied by a Mr. Henderson. This is the home of the children we have seen and they jump on Watson to drag him inside, where Holmes is already making inquiries under the pretence of being a cartographer. They are rebuffed and, back in their room at the local inn, Holmes retails the local gossip about the High Gable household and the children’s governess, who has not been seen since the night of the murder. Watson realizes that he has seen her desperate face at a window, and at this point they are interrupted by a commotion in the street below. All this replaces a long narrative by Holmes and provides some much-needed action. By now Baynes has discovered the missing pistol and decided to arrest the mulatto. Hence the commotion and this only press conference which I can remember in the whole Canon. Were there really so many reporters in Esher?
The last phase begins at the Lodge with Garcia’s servant taking the remaining pistol from its case, although I would have expected Baynes to impound it. Holmes and Watson set off for High Gable on bicycles, resolved to take the law into their own hands and rescue Miss Burnet. They arrive in time to see her being bundled off to the station and pedal off in pursuit. This brings us to the most difficult corner in the whole story: the rescue from the train. Conan Doyle attributed it to a gardener who had been sacked from High Gable. Jeremy Paul makes Holmes and Watson the knights-errant, which is more credible, although it seems very unlikely that Henderson would have allowed the lady to escape. In a fine flurry of action, however, the rescue is achieved and Holmes lashes at the train window with his stick. As it leaves the station we may, if we are very quick, spot Garcia’s servant and the mulatto in another compartment.
Back at the hotel once more, Baynes explains that he arrested the mulatto in an attempt to make Henderson drop his guard. The ruse was successful and Miss Burnet was saved from her employer, the infamous Tiger of San Pedro, Don Murillo alias Henderson. The governess herself takes up the story and the whole account follows Conan Doyle very closely. It gives us some remarkable images but probably explains why William Rees-Mogg, chairman of the broadcasting standards council, accused us of “gratuitous violence.” Flashbacks to the torture of Miss Burnet and the killing of Garcia are indeed bloodthirsty stuff, but hardly in the Nightmare on Elm Street league. And, of course, the word that hurts is “gratuitous.” These sequences belong to the original story and are necessary to show how Garcia’s plot to assassinate the Tiger was foiled and why the Tiger must die.


The Bruce-Partington Plans
Dramatised by John Hawkesworth
Designer: Alan Pickford
Directed by Jon Gorrie
Supporting Cast:
Mycroft Holmes: Charles Gray
Inspector Bradstreet: Denis Lill
Colonel Valentine Walter: Jonathan Newth
Violet Westbury: Amanda Waring
Mrs. Hudson: Rosalie Williams
Cadogan West: Sebstian Stride
Sidney Johnson: Geoffrey Bayldon
John chose this obvious starting point for his script: the frantic departure of Cadogan West from Woolwich and the discovery of his body later the same night at Aldgate, where he had apparently fallen from a train. In Baker Street two days later Watson is reading his morning paper while Holmes, clearly very bored, is humming some liturgical chant, presumably a fragment by Lassus, whose music he has been studying. Watson must be delighted at the arrival of Mycroft’s telegram, which promises some respite from the music.
The message which emerges from the London fog provokes Holmes into giving his fullest description of his brother’s role in the British government. Meanwhile Watson searches the newspapers for an item on the death of Cadogan West, the mystery which brings Mycroft to 221B only minutes later. He is accompanied by “our old friend Inspector Bradstreet,” who replaced Lestrade on this occasion because Colin Jeavons was not available.
Mycroft explains that West was a clerk at Woolwich Arsenal and linked to the theft of plans for the Bruce-Partington submarine. He appears to be surprised that Holmes and Watson have never heard of it, although it is “the most jealously guarded of all Government secrets.” John divided the exposition of the case between Mycroft and Bradstreet, but withheld one piece of information at this stage.
It is only when Holmes reaches the place where West’s body was found that he learns that the man who appeared to have fallen from a train had no ticket for his journey. Sitting cross-legged by the railway track, with complete disregard for his clothes, Holmes notes the lack of blood at the scene but the presence of points and a curve.
The chain of events seems clear: West stole the plans and attempted to sell them to a foreign agent, who boarded the train with him, murdered him and stole the plans before throwing the body from the train. On their way to visit the head of West’s department, Sir James Walter, Holmes suggests a different explanation which covers all the facts: West was murdered before the return journey began and his body fell from the roof of the train.
There is some confusion on arrival at the Walter home because Sir James has died suddenly and, in our version, Holmes and Watson are mistaken for the undertakers. When they leave, having learned nothing, Colonel Valentine Walter, the deceased’s brother, watches them with some suspicion.
The next step is an interview with West’s fiancée, Violet Westbury, which (apart from the absence of West’s mother) proceeds as it does in the original story. Violet is played by Amanda Waring, daughter of Dorothy Tutin and Derek Waring, who made her West End debut in the stage version of the musical Gigi. A couple of years later her father was playing Watson opposite Ron Moody in Leslie Bricusse’s rather less successful entertainment, Sherlock Holmes—The Musical.


Because Miss Westbury takes Holmes and Watson to the spot where West left her and plunged into the fog, Watson is deputed to take her home while Holmes crosses the road to the Arsenal alone. Here he talks to Sidney Johnson, the senior clerk. John Hawkesworth removed the curious anomaly about the keys to the office and the safe. IN the original story Sir Walter had all the necessary keys; Johnson had keys to the safe only and West had no keys at all. In our version, both Sir Walter and Johnson had complete access and only West would have had to copy the keys to obtain the plans. In this way suspicion is more evenly distributed.
When Watson returns, Holmes shows him that it is possible to see through the ill-fitting iron shutters into the room where the plans were kept. This seems to be a short-coming in “burglar-proof doors and windows” but allows us to guess that West glimpsed something in the office which led him to act as he did.
Back in Baker Street, John constructed an entertaining little scene about the arrival of Mycroft’s list of spies and Holmes’ jaunty departure for further research. This is some consolation for the loss of Holmes’ message asking Watson to join him—“Am dining at Goldini’s Restaurant, Glouchester Road, Kensington. Please come at once and join me there. Bring with you a jemmy, a dark lantern, a chisel, and a revolver. S.H.” –which one would have thought irresistible.
When Watson joins him, Holmes explains his belief that West’s body was placed on the roof of a train as it passed in a cutting between nearby houses, in one of which a spy called Oberstein resides. Watson is reluctant to take part in breaking and entering the house but is eventually persuaded. In his own account of Holmes’ reaction he says, “I saw something in his eyes which was nearer to tenderness than I had ever seen,” which is difficult to dramatise without mawkishness. Instead Jeremy gives us elation at his friend’s loyalty, which is fair enough.
In Obersteins’ absence Holmes and Watson break into the house and find proof of Holmes’ theory as well as a series of newspaper advertisements which point to a method of trapping the traitor who stole the plans. So with the help of the Daily Telegraph agony column, the bait is set. Somewhat to Holmes’ surprise the villain turns out to be Colonel Walter (rather than Sidney Johnson, presumably), but his confession clears West’s name and describes how the young man died trying to frustrate the theft. The colonel is persuaded to lure Oberstein back to England into the arms of the police at the Charing Cross Hotel, and the plans are recovered.
In the original, Holmes’ success was recognized by a gift from the queen. In our film Mycroft proposes a more modest celebration: oysters at the Diogenes Club. Students of the Canon may be surprised to discover that guests were admitted to the club dining room, and one wonders if their meal could be exactly festive in an atmosphere where all conversation was forbidden.
In September 1987, before these episodes were filmed, Jeremy Brett and Jeremy Paul tried out a play about Holmes and Watson for one private performance at the Mayfair Hotel. On that occasion Edward Hardwicke was not available and the part of Watson was played by Sebastian Stride, who stayed on to appear as Cadogan West in this film.