A Film Canon

Despite being released several months after The Hound Of The Baskervilles, The Adventures Of Sherlock Holmes is the prototypical film in the Rathbone-Holmes cycle, insofar as it represents an amalgam of narratives and motifs from across Conan Doyle's short stories, rather than a (relatively) direct adaptation of one of his novels. As in those stories, character, location and tone are treated in a fairly functional manner, subordinated to an ingenious exposition of logic that can only conceive of music in algorithmic terms. That said, for a narrative that prides itself so much on completism, there are several threads that remain very unsatisfactorily explained, while Holmes' final comprehension is more inductive than deductive, based on the kind of associative reasoning that he would have contemned had it come from Watson (Nigel Bruce) - a much more bumbling figure than in Conan Doyle. What the film adds to the stories is an evocation of Holmes' mind, its "perpetual restlessness" and "constant struggle to escape boredom" encapsulated in the combination of rapid editing and an extremely mobile camera, as well as Rathbone's loping, stalking gait, which suggests nothing so much as thought in motion, and ensures that, despite immediate appearances, the final stand-off with nemesis Moriarty (George Zucco) is nothing more than two minds locked in battle; intellectual swashbuckling. In the same way, Rathbone's proclivity for intelligent evil sits nicely with Holmes' peculiar amorality; a scientist, rather than a moralist, for whom there is ultimately no qualitative difference between preventing a murder and distinguishing between two species. From this perspective, Moriarty's elevation of the life of a flower over the life of a man is little more than an perverse explication of Holmes' own philosophy, while his savage, contemptuous threats to his manservant are merely a starker version of "Elementary, my dear Watson!"