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petejgarbett
Reviews
Sherlock Holmes (1954)
A marvellous find
I found a boxed set of 25 of these films on 5 discs in The Works, the British remaindered books outlet, a year ago. (I don't think you have remaindered books in the USA - they're pulped, due to different laws.) The DVD set was produced by a Dutch firm, and not re-mastered - but the films are in quite good condition. They were made first in the year of my birth, 1954, so I did some research to find out why I had never seen them. I had seen episodes from every other British TV Holmes series, and heard, through archive material, episodes from every British and American radio series.
All became clear: they were never shown in Britain! Even though most of the actors were British, with a handful of Americans and French - the series was shot in France - the series was made by an American producer for US TV.
Most stories are good, some are excellent, some are terrible, and some are from the canon, with altered titles for some unfathomable reason (The Engineer's Thumb becomes The Shoeless Engineer, The Greek Interpreter becomes The French Interpreter).
Nine marks instead of ten because of the three or four awful ones - a Red Indian sets up his wigwam inside 221B Baker Street in one of them! I'm glad I walked into that shop. I might never have known about this series otherwise! Enjoy.