"The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes" The Creeping Man (1991)

User Rating:

7.8/10   

Director:

Tim Sullivan

Writer:

Robin Chapman (dramatisation)

TV Series:

"The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes" (1991)

Original Air Date:

28 March 1991 (Season 1, Episode 6)

Genre:

Crime | Drama | Horror | Mystery | Thriller

Plot:

Holmes thinks a woman's claim to have seen a man at her upstairs bedroom window is related to the theft of several apes. |

Plot Keywords:

Sherlock Holmes | Private Detective | Victorian Era | Based On Short Story | Detective

Cast

Jeremy Brett	...	Sherlock Holmes
Edward Hardwicke	...	Dr. John Watson
Charles Kay	...	Professor Presbury
Adrian Lukis	...	Jack Bennett
Sarah Woodward	...	Edith Presbury
Anna Mazzotti	...	Alice Morphy
James Tomlinson	...	Macphail
Peter Guinness	...	Wilcox
Steve Swinscoe	...	Jenkins
Colin Jeavons	...	Inspector Lestrade
Anthony Havering	...	Secretary of the Zoological Society
Peter Elliott	...	Great Ape

Filming Locations:

Hatton Grange House, Shifnal, Telford, Shropshire, England, UK

Quotes:

Dr. John Watson: Mr. Holmes' memory is of a photographical order.
Jack Bennett: Quite so. Oh, dear.

Juiced Up

This is an extraordinarily good Holmes. And it is so, independent of Brett's jumpy characterization which sometimes works.

Usually these are dreadful, but the practice of passing them around to different adapters and directors means you will sometimes hit a gem. Oddly, this is packaged on a DVD with one of the all-time worst episodes.

What makes this good is the way the director performs two tricks. One is that he settles on objects. He examines them, even though they may seem ordinary. Its roughly what Holmes is described as doing. The second trick he pulls is misdirection. The story itself is rather simple and it itself is a matter of unintentional misdirection.

These two are combined in the an opening scene which begins with a slow pan around the room of a man of science. This is obviously Holmes' room, we think, all the way up to and even after the first few moments of seeing some unfamiliar characters. Then we see a stuffed monkey and get some lines that tell us this is the study of a zoologist, a biologist who studies primates.

This misdirection is done again in the beginning. We see a kidnapped gorilla and then we see a point of view shot with gorilla panting and a woman sees the outline of a gorilla on her window ledge. We obviously think these are the same. No no. Tut tut.

As a detective story, its weak; it was in the original. But it is one of the Holmes stories where Doyle dealt with matters of science.

The whole business of the invention of Holmes was the sudden appearance of rational science in the affairs of men. The belief was that if Darwin could bring science to evolution, a similar science could be brought to the governance of thought and behavior. Holmes was the extension of Darwin in London thought, a superscientist. No intuition, no guessing, just pure rational deduction.

This story is on the extreme end of that fantasy of science. I won't give it away, but lets say just that its rather brilliant in superimposing the deepest science on the needs of libido.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.