Of the well-over-200 Sherlock Holmes films produced since 1900, one you might not have expected to see was 1916's Sherlock Holmes. Before Benedict Cumberbatch, Robert Downey Jr, Ian McKellen and Jonny Lee Miller; before Jeremy Brett and Peter Cushing; before even Basil Rathbone, there was William Gillette, in the blockbuster 1899 stage play Sherlock Holmes: A Drama In Four Acts. Long thought to have been lost forever, a nitrate copy of the film adaptation has just been uncovered in the vaults of the French film archive the Cinémathèque Français.
Gillette toured the world with the play and became indelibly linked to the famous Baker Street detective. It was Gillette that popularised the deerstalker hat and the big pipe (though he in turn got them from Strand magazine illustrator Sidney Paget); coined the phrase "Elementary, my dear Watson"; and was the recipient of the famous telegram from a bored-of-Holmes Arthur Conan Doyle telling him that he could, on stage, "marry him, murder him or do anything you please with him".
Both play and film draw heavily from Doyle's A Scandal In Bohemia and The Final Problem, mashing up the story of Alice Faulkner with the schemes of Professor Moriarty. Alice has in her posession certain documents that might compromise people in powerful positions. Moriarty, of course, wants those letters for his own purposes.
Arthur Berthelot was the director, with H.S. Sheldon adapting the story for the silent screen. The Essanay Studio (previously in the business of Westerns and Chaplin comedies, among other projects) footed the bill. Edward Fielding played Dr Watson, Ernest Maupin was Moriarty, and Marjorie Kay swooned as Alice. Gillette would still be "reviving" the stage version 16 years later.
Far from a short, **Sherlock Holmes **runs to seven reels (well over an hour) and, happily, the Cinémathèque copy appears to be complete. The French archive has partnered with the San Francisco Silent Film Festival for a digital restoration, and the rescued version will premiere at the Tout La Mémoire Du Monde festival next January. The SFSFF will play it in May.
"It’s an amazing privilege to work with these reels that have been lost for generations," says festival president Robert Byrne. "William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes has ranked among the holy grails of lost film and my first glimpse of the footage confirms Gillette’s magnetism. Audiences are going to be blown away when they see him on screen for the first time."