elaborates elements Doyle hints at (an army officer, abandoning a male lover to make a society marriage, shoots himself when his fiancée learns the truth) and com- plicates characterizations (even Milverton is given some depth, psycho-analyzed by Watson). Brett isn’t yet the complete burn-out of his last Holmes performances, though when the detective asks Watson to bury, rather than chronicle, this particular case, we’re inclined to agree.
Holmes is even more ve- hement at the end of BACHELOR that this story should be suppressed—no surprise, since adaptor T.R. Bowen chooses to bulk out a Bluebeard/JANE EYRE anecdote about a much-mar- ried aristocrat (Simon Williams) with a very un-Doyle-like first half in which Brett’s Holmes is a complete basket case,
seen in a nightshirt flounder- ing in a filthy gutter, troubled by dreams that flashback to his tumble from the Reichen- bach Falls but are prophetic of (and indeed give away) the solution to this melodrama. Apart from the leap into MIL- LENNIUM territory as Holmes’ intuitions are linked to an un- specified psychic power rather than pure reason, the set-up prods Brett, always the most fevered of Sherlocks, to a dis- play of mad twitches and neu- rotic face-pulling that make you wonder why any client would put up with him. It’s a murky, ugly picture—some- times deliberately nerve-jan- gling as London’s sounds (and presumably smells) overwhelm the hero. The sincere Hard- wicke is sidelined (it’s sug- gested that, with Watson away
at a seminar, Holmes cracks up like an abandoned wife) but Anna Calder-Marshall has a showy double-role, even having double-dates with Holmes and Watson!
The films are available separately on R1 DVDs, and in a R2 PAL set with THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, THE SIGN OF FOUR and THE LAST VAMPYRE. The cream of Brett’s work is found in R1 and R2 box sets of THE ADVENTURES OF SHERLOCK HOLMES and THE RETURN OF SHERLOCK HOLMES. THE CASE-BOOK OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, col- lecting the same-named se- ries and THE MEMOIRS OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, avail- able only on R2, complete the run. Doyle liked to quote the reader who opined that Holmes might not have died when he
Jeremy Brett forms a strange pieta with Anna Calder-Marshall and Simon Williams in this image from the case Holmes wanted suppressed: THE ELIGIBLE BACHELOR.
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