Own the rights?
I am a longtime fan of the hour-long Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes dramatizations, but the three longer ones I have seen -- this one, The Sign of Four, and The Hound of the Baskervilles -- have left me disappointed. I was going to give this one a pretty negative review, until I went on-line and read the original story, Charles Augustus Milverton. The faults are almost all in the original, which Doyle wrote in 1904 and which feels pretty rushed and mechanical. Holmes does hardly any deducing or reasoning in this, but then he doesn't in the original, either. The dramatists have done an excellent job in creating a new foreground story and interweaving the central blackmail plot from the original story into several other blackmail plots. They have also developed the Watson character much more, and have fleshed-out Holmes' romance-in-disguise with the housemaid (the ever-excellent Sophie Thompson). Robert Hardy gives a masterful performance as the villain. As to the core scenes of the original story -- they are all here, practically verbatim. A pet peeve of mine is when dramatists take a classic character from literature and in an attempt to modernize and flesh-out the character, have the character do and say things that contradict the values of the original character. I thought that a bit of that had happened in this version, but again -- the Holmes here is the Holmes in the original story. It seemed to me that Holmes here was a bit too quick to go along with the lady's desire to hide the embarrassing letters from her about-to-be husband. After all, she wrote the letters, so doesn't the groom have a fair claim, at least, not to be deceived about his future wife? If the letters are really not so embarrassing, but the groom would terminate the wedding anyway, doesn't that tell us that perhaps he isn't so very suitable? That maybe this marriage should not happen? Is she really marrying the man for money and title, and not for love? The Holmes in the earlier stories would at least have given some thought to these questions, and the Doyle who wrote the earlier stories would have re-shaped his plot to answer all these concerns. But not in this story. While the dramatists did a good job in expanding the story, it would have been even better had they expanded it by developing the moral and romantic issues in the impending marriage that the original story overlooked.
You may report errors and omissions on this page to the IMDb database managers. They will be examined and if approved will be included in a future update. Clicking the 'Update' button will take you through a step-by-step process.
