This is one of the duller tales from Conan-Doyle's later work, somewhat confusing, but it's so well adapted, acted, and presented that the weaknesses of the story itself are compensated for.
Holmes is visited by a distraught landlady who complains that her recent tenant never leaves his room and has all his meals and other necessary items delivered to him by leaving notes in print.
It isn't long before Holmes and his faithful Boswell determine that the lodger is, in fact, a young woman, not the man to whom the room was originally let.
The story gets complicated but basically the woman is the wife of an Italian immigrant from New York. Both are being pursued by The Red Circle, the equivalent of the Mafia, and the husband is trying to keep his wife safe by secluding her and maintaining her incognito.
Holmes and Watson team up with Scotland Yard and an American investigator from the Pinkerton Agency who is on the track of the chief of the Red Circle. It ends in violence.
Jeremy Brett as Holmes was by this time pretty ill and it shows. He looks pale and his eyes are rimmed with red. But he has a couple of good moments, joyously perusing the personal ads ("the agony columns") and carrying on about the banalities revealed therein. He also has his face slashed at one point by the villain's dagger. That's bad, but it's compensated for by the dark beauty of Sofia Diaz as a terrorized woman.
It's more of a noirish film than the tale of Sherlock Holmes. A dark tale full of shadows and night-time streets. Holmes doesn't do any detection of a spectacular sort. There are no footsteps to be analyzed, nobody's pocket watch is deconstructed, no trichinopoly ashes on the floor. It's all love, lust, betrayal and revenge. Yet it's exceptionally well done for what it is. One particularly dramatic moment has a dead body suspended over the stage of an opera, with the victim's throat slit.
Holmes throws in a couple of apt quotations from Shakespeare. "Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust", is from "Cymbeline." "Journeys end in lovers meetings (every wise man's son doth know)" is from "Twelfth Night."
Holmes is visited by a distraught landlady who complains that her recent tenant never leaves his room and has all his meals and other necessary items delivered to him by leaving notes in print.
It isn't long before Holmes and his faithful Boswell determine that the lodger is, in fact, a young woman, not the man to whom the room was originally let.
The story gets complicated but basically the woman is the wife of an Italian immigrant from New York. Both are being pursued by The Red Circle, the equivalent of the Mafia, and the husband is trying to keep his wife safe by secluding her and maintaining her incognito.
Holmes and Watson team up with Scotland Yard and an American investigator from the Pinkerton Agency who is on the track of the chief of the Red Circle. It ends in violence.
Jeremy Brett as Holmes was by this time pretty ill and it shows. He looks pale and his eyes are rimmed with red. But he has a couple of good moments, joyously perusing the personal ads ("the agony columns") and carrying on about the banalities revealed therein. He also has his face slashed at one point by the villain's dagger. That's bad, but it's compensated for by the dark beauty of Sofia Diaz as a terrorized woman.
It's more of a noirish film than the tale of Sherlock Holmes. A dark tale full of shadows and night-time streets. Holmes doesn't do any detection of a spectacular sort. There are no footsteps to be analyzed, nobody's pocket watch is deconstructed, no trichinopoly ashes on the floor. It's all love, lust, betrayal and revenge. Yet it's exceptionally well done for what it is. One particularly dramatic moment has a dead body suspended over the stage of an opera, with the victim's throat slit.
Holmes throws in a couple of apt quotations from Shakespeare. "Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust", is from "Cymbeline." "Journeys end in lovers meetings (every wise man's son doth know)" is from "Twelfth Night."