I prefer Brett’s Holmes, principally because his sudden hoots, black moody fits and wild starts of athleticism (in short: his whole suite of manners) startle the viewer with their fidelity to Holmes as writ by Doyle. Rathbone plays a more straightlaced take, supremely so. No one could fault those who put Rathbone first. He is era-appropriate, and yet…and yet…our man Holmes was never era-appropriate, not in any era.
This alone would not be fatal or decisive. For me, the crashing miscue in the Rathbone dramatizations was casting Watson as a comedy relief buffoon. What the Brett series gets A+ right is: Watson is by far the more respectable of the two. Literally the only human being (apart from the odd villain) who makes light of Watson is Holmes, and Holmes does it relentlessly! In Brett’s Holmes, while two distinct actors play the Watson role, we’re never invited to laugh at any fault of Watson’s (indeed, only Ben Kingsley ever played a more all-’round competent John W.). It is simply that Brett’s Holmes astonishes us: a static dynamo of tics, blank affect and sudden, sweeping charge.
Neither Watson nor we the audience could keep up with Holmes.
Jeremy Brett inhabits the role like only he ever has. It is a pity for Holmes fans that his illness overtook him during production. The series unravels painfully over the final season, as brother Mycroft is suddenly pressed into service as the action figure crime-buster he surely was never meant to be.
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