Cinema
Some of the earliest films use Holmes as a character, notably the early films of William Gillette, the American actor who played Holmes in various plays, and an early 'talkie' was produced in 1929 called The Return of Sherlock Holmes. During the Second World War American producers linked Holmes with the Allied war effort, defeating Nazi villains and Moriarty who sells his skills to the Germans, e.g. Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror (1942). Later films would blur the lines between canon and non-canon however. In the sci-fi film Time After Time, H.G. Wells uses a time machine to go to 1979 America; he tries to use Sherlock Holmes as a false name, thinking that the literary character would be forgotten by then. From 1984 to 1985, Japan's Tokyo Movie Shinsha and the Italian TV station RAI released 26 episodes of Sherlock Hound, a show featuring anthropomorphic dogs in various roles in the Sherlock Holmes world. On July 2, 1986, Walt Disney Pictures released The Great Mouse Detective. where the character of Holmes is borrowed by a mouse. The name "Basil" is no mere coincidence: one of Holmes's aliases in the original Conan Doyle stories is "Captain Basil". Also, the actor Basil Rathbone was one of the first to portray Holmes on film. Continuing the print tradition of good natured irreverence the 1988 comedy Without a Clue presents the premise that Holmes was a fictional creation of John Watson's, who was the true deductive genius. Once the character becomes popular, Watson is forced to hire an out-of-work actor to play Holmes.
Read more about this topic: Popular Culture References To Sherlock Holmes
Famous quotes containing the word cinema:
“Strangers used to gather together at the cinema and sit together in the dark, like Ancient Greeks participating in the mysteries, dreaming the same dream in unison.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)
“Compare ... the cinema with theatre. Both are dramatic arts. Theatre brings actors before a public and every night during the season they re-enact the same drama. Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual. The cinema, by contrast, transports its audience individually, singly, out of the theatre towards the unknown.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)
“Talking about dreams is like talking about movies, since the cinema uses the language of dreams; years can pass in a second and you can hop from one place to another. It’s a language made of image. And in the real cinema, every object and every light means something, as in a dream.”
—Frederico Fellini (1920–1993)