I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere

Episode 147: Sherlock Holmes and Silent Films

Burt Wolder: Support for this episode of I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere is

made possible by the Wessex Press, the premier publisher of
books about Sherlock Holmes and his world. Find them online
at Wessexpress.com. And the Baker Street Journal, the leading
publication of Sherlockian scholarship since 1946. Subscribe
today at bakerstreetjournal.com.

Scott Monty: I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, Episode 147: Sherlock Holmes

and Silent Films.

Mycroft Holmes: I hear of Sherlock everywhere since you became his chronicler.

Narrator: In a world where it's always 1895, comes I Hear of Sherlock

Everywhere, a podcast for devotees of Mr. Sherlock Holmes,
the world's first unofficial consulting detective.

Dr. Roylott: I've heard of you before. You're Holmes, the meddler, Holmes
the busybody, Holmes, the Scotland Yard Jack-in-office.

Narrator: The game's afoot as we discuss goings on in the world of

Sherlock Holmes enthusiasts, the Baker Street Irregulars, and
popular culture related to the great detective.
Dr. Watson: As we go to press, sensational developments have been
reported.

Narrator: So join your hosts, Scott Monty and Burt Wolder, as they talk
about what's new in world of Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes: You couldn't have come at a better time.

Scott Monty: And welcome once again to I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, the
first podcast for Sherlock Holmes devotees, where it's always
1895. I'm Scott Monty.

Burt Wolder: I'm Burt Wolder.

Scott Monty: And you hear the sound of that? [Moments of silence]

Burt Wolder: Oh, I like that.

Scott Monty: It's nothing. This is an episode about silent film, so you'll be
hearing a lot of that in this particular episode, but in between
the voices, so listen very carefully.

Burt Wolder: I like the way you've hidden all that silence.

Scott Monty: It's my penchant, what can I say.

Scott Monty: Well, just a reminder, if you would like the show notes for this
episode, they are available at ihose.co/ihose147, that's
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Burt Wolder: Fabulous. We need to hear from you people.

Scott Monty: Yes, and you know what else we need? We need money. We're
not going to be ashamed to ask for it. It would help, because
 we are spending pretty significant sums of money every
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Scott Monty: And as long as you're finding things, how about finding out
more about our friends at Wessex Press?

Burt Wolder: Friends, the ancient Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex is

working to secure our border with Mercia. We're building a
wall. Unfortunately, people in Chippenham grouse about
needing a passport to go to Gloucester. They are small-
minded, but thankfully, you have wide interests. You're curious
about the architecture Yoxley Old Place. You have questions
about the problem of Thor Bridge. You wonder about Sherlock
Holmes and Jack the Ripper. That's why you cherish your copy
of Unmitigated Bleat, selected writings by Paul D. Herbert, and
marvel that its 221 page are a mere 19.95.

Burt Wolder: Friends, winter is coming, when around, above, a world of

snow, the light-heeled breezes breathe and blow. The perfect
time to reach for the pleasure only a volume from the Wessex
Press can provide. Choose yours today.

Scott Monty: Ah, always good to hear the dulcet tones coming out of
Wessex.

Burt Wolder: They're so busy planting and hoeing and selling and thatching
their roofs, and I don't know how they find time to operate the
printing presses.

Scott Monty: Incredible people over there.

Scott Monty: Well, speaking of incredible people, we're about to hear from
one more, so Burt, why don't you tell us all about him?

Burt Wolder: Perfect. What a guest he is. Professor Russell Merritt has
taught at Cal Berkeley in the department of film and media for
more than 30 years. He publishes and teaches courses on art-
house cinema, international animation, D. W. Griffith, Sergei
Eisenstein and silent film. He's published three books on Walt
Disney's early films: Walt Disney's Silly Symphonies in 2006 and
Walt in Wonderland in 1993, Disney's Pinocchio. He's also
produced and directed the Great Nickelodeon Show, which
recreates turn of the century Nickelodeon programs, which has
played at the Telluride Film Festival. He's been awarded a
lifetime achievement award by the Denver Silent Film Festival
and received the Jean Mitry Award by Le Giornate del Cinema
Muto, which is an international prize awarded annually to
individuals distinguished for their contribution to the
reclamation of silent cinema.

Burt Wolder: And he comes to us as a fellow member of the Baker Street

Irregulars, invested as "The Trepoff Murder." He's been writing
since he was a teenager on Holmes and Conan Doyle for the
Baker Street Journal and a variety of other publications. Most
recently, he's edited the 2016 Christmas annual on Gillette's
film version of Sherlock Holmes, and in 2016 he was associate
producer for the restoration of the Gillette film, and among
other things he'll tell us today about a restoration of the lost,
the thought lost, 1929 German version of Der Hund von
Baskerville. Russell Merritt, welcome to I Hear of Sherlock
Everywhere.

Russell Merritt: Oh, glad to be here. Let me put out my cigarette.

Burt Wolder: Keep that ashtray away from all that nitrate. What are you
doing? What are you doing?

Russell Merritt: Very nice save.

Scott Monty: Well, that is quite a CV there, Russell. Why don't we go even
beyond that and if you could share with us when you first ran
into this guy we know as Sherlock Holmes?

Russell Merritt: Well, I would have been about 14 years old and I owe the
discovery to a bunch of people, starting with my grandmother.
Actually, my first encounter was before I could read, when my
step-grandfather said that I would play Sherlock Holmes to his
Hawkshaw, a famous cartoon character at the time, and we
were going to discover the mystery of the pencil caught in the
drain of the bathroom, and I was convinced that it was
something my sister had done, possibly the dog, but as the
clues unraveled, it became suspicious that I might have been
the culprit, and so Sherlock Holmes goes down in defeat, but
as I say, this is all before I could read.

Russell Merritt: Now, the official entry point comes with the intersection of
two events. The first is the publication and appearance of Edith
Meiser and Frank Giacoia's comic strip in the New York Herald
Tribune in 1954, and at about the same time, the Rathbone
films were being televised for the first time, not in the New
York area where I was from, but in Philadelphia, and if you
stayed up late enough, this would have been at 1:00 in the
morning, you could get what were called ghost stations coming
long distance after the New York stations had shut down for
the night, and the transmission was terrible, but it was all that
a kid could ask for. This is long after bedtime and so it was
something of an outlaw activity. It involved the great Rathbone
and Nigel Bruce and it seemed to be coming from another
world, so I was hooked.

Russell Merritt: Then was sent to a private school that I absolutely hated, and
the one salvation was that I found a book by Arthur Conan
Doyle called The Complete Sherlock Holmes, and so
surreptitiously ... these days of course, school teachers are
encouraged to include Holmes in student activities. In my day,
Sherlock Holmes was considered not worth of being taught in
school, and so this had the added appeal of being outlaw
 literature, of being something like rock and roll that you knew
was incredibly great but which you were told was not worth
your time. So what more could a kid ask for? And that got me
hooked.

Russell Merritt: I should add just as a little note that it was a very strange first
encounter with the real Sherlock Holmes, in that the story is
referring to someone named Professor Moriarty, Sherlock
Holmes is recovering from the dead, and it was only much later
that I discovered in this two-volume Doubleday set, that I had
checked out the second volume first, but that didn't deter me.
With this odd introduction, he was irresistible.

Burt Wolder: Well that is, Russell, that is such a unique set of introductions
really to Sherlock Holmes. We have done almost 150
interviews, podcasts about Sherlock Holmes, and we always
ask people what was your first meeting with Sherlock Holmes. I
don't believe we've ever had anyone say, "Oh, it was a comic
strip."

Russell Merritt: Oh yeah. And indeed it was. I in fact was then and am now
fascinated by puppets, and I turned the comic strip into a script
for my puppet theater, and so then, after all this, my father
took me to Boston with him and having nothing to do, I went
to Harvard's rare book library, and they had just finished
cataloging the Harold Wilmerding Bell collection of
Sherlockiana. Talk about a kid who had discovered gold. So I
pride myself that my one claim to fame is that I read A Study in
Scarlet for the first time in the Beeton's Christmas Annual of
1887. It was Bell's copy, because I hadn't gotten that far in
actually reading all the Sherlock Holmes stories. I started with
volume two.

Russell Merritt: And so I believe I am the last person alive that ever was
introduced to Study in Scarlet in the Beeton's Christmas
Annual, and what a discovery that was. It's not that fog,
romantic image of Victorian London that we now associate
with Holmes. It was this lurid, cheaply printed book with these
 grotesque Victorian ads and on the cover, something that
seems silly now it's seen differently, that has nothing to do
with Sherlock Holmes.

Burt Wolder: So I have to ask you about a couple of things here, but let me
just make sure I understand it. So there you are, at what
sounds like the Houghton Library, sitting, reading A Study in
Scarlet for the first time in H. W. Bell's Beeton's Christmas
Annual.

Russell Merritt: That's right. That's right. And another thing, you just can't
believe it, no gloves, no book wrap. I'm picturing myself licking
my thumb and then turning the page, so I was just in another
world at that point. But Bell had so much, he had all those
Frederic Dorr Steele illustrations and those Colliers and some
other late appearances. And then of course all that
correspondence.

Burt Wolder: Well, we want to talk to you about the films, but I have to ask
you about your puppet theater. I mean, puppets are also an
interest of mine. I'm curious. So what did you do, what did you
create and carve and have puppets of Holmes and Watson?
Did you have a Baker Street set? Did you ... and did you put
this case on for an audience?

Russell Merritt: Well, it didn't get that far. Now remember, I'm in the eighth
grade, and so sophistication is not the first word that would
come to mind. What happened was, I mentioned my
grandmother as being a very important part of this story. She
was the one who, in a used bookstore, had found these old
Baker Street Journals, that very first series, and included was
an article about what the 221B would look like, and so I used
that as my blueprint and so created the set out of that. And I
still have photographs of that set.

Russell Merritt: The original was given away when I was given away to private
school, this boarding school, and so that has not survived, but
then I bought some puppets and then had them anatomically
 corrected so that they would look like Holmes, Watson and the
other characters. This was the Meiser story of Tregennis Castle
that she and Giacoia had created in 1954 based on a radio
script, and so we had a haunted castle, we had other
characters, and my original idea was to create an animated, a
puppet animated film, with my 8mm camera, which had the
capacity of single frame advancement. That went nowhere
because I couldn't get the lighting right. So I got about as far as
maybe the first 120 seconds, maybe. I mean it sounds like, you
know, two minutes, that's nothing, but in animation, that's
quite a lot of work, and then abandoned it, and so I'm afraid it
never saw the light of day. I performed it for my sister, who
was a highly critical audience. She told me, "Never do this
again."

Burt Wolder: Now, so were these marionettes, or were they hand puppets?

Russell Merritt: I know what you're saying. They started as puppets with
armature-

Burt Wolder: Oh, right.

Russell Merritt: ... so they were stand-alone puppets, but I then ... when you're
13, you do these things, but I took out the armature and then
put strings on them so they could be used as marionettes, and
I would say that's what my sister saw, and mercifully no one
else.

Burt Wolder: Oh, right, yeah, because you wanted to do stop motion, so you
needed the armature.

Russell Merritt: That's right. That's right. And so now that I teach animation, I
realize how much I had to learn, but that was not my attitude
back then. I thought this was going to change the world.

Scott Monty: Wow.

Russell Merritt: That was, in some ways, that is a kind of introduction to film,
because as I say, along with the Rathbone series, that was
 going to be quickly followed by the Ronald Howard series. That
kind of entertainment was always an important and exciting
part of it. Remember too that I later would become part of
Chris Steinbrunner's world. In fact, he got me my first real job,
and that involved going to his screenings of Rathbone and
other films and seeing silent films at something called the
Theodore Huff Memorial Film Society. So that was all in the
mix, learning about films and learning about Holmes was at the
same time.

Scott Monty: And for listeners who aren't familiar with Chris Steinbrunner,
he was a member of the Baker Street Irregulars, he worked
WOR in New York, and was a film buff, and literally wrote the
book on Sherlock Holmes in the Movies.

Russell Merritt: Right, as I say, he got me my first job and that...this probably
should be deleted because it's not the proudest connection
with film. He was helping script write ... copy write, that is,
writing copy, for Zacherle the Cool Ghoul.

Russell Merritt: And Zacherle the Cool Ghoul's specialty was showing movies,
horror movies, late at night on WOR, and then appearing in the
movies in these little vignettes, the idea being that as the mob
is ready to storm Frankenstein's castle, we'd cut away to
Zacherle the Cool Ghoul as one of the mobsters, and he would
have some choice things to say, and we'd get back to the
movie, but it would be apparently invisible.

Russell Merritt: My job was to go through such classics as The White Gorilla
and the others, the horror films, and find the spots where
Zacherle the Cool Ghoul could make his appearance. That was
my introduction to movies, and that was Chris' work. Chris got
me that job for the summer.

Scott Monty: Well, I mean, when you look across the breadth of your
multiple intros or reintroductions to Sherlock Holmes, it really
is multimedia in nature, you know-

Russell Merritt: Absolutely.

Scott Monty: ... from comics to books to an original Beeton's to television
and movies and puppetry. I mean, that encapsulates just about
every medium that Sherlock Holmes was in, with the exception
of stage.

Russell Merritt: Yeah, that came later.

Scott Monty: Yeah, but it makes great sense as to how you would get into
filmmaking.

Scott Monty: So let's fast forward a few years. Tell us about silent films and
your first interest in that era of filmmaking.

Russell Merritt: That's a great question for me because I believe the first time I
saw a silent film, certainly the first one I can remember, comes
from that screening of the Theodore Huff Memorial Film
Society that someone named William K. Everson had created,
and I was introduced to Everson by Chris Steinbrunner into
that whole world, and once I saw these silent films, I was
absolutely fascinated by how you tell a story without sound,
and one of the questions I love asking students is what do you
think was lost when we introduced sound into motion pictures,
because the end of that story is that I'm now on the board of
the San Francisco Silent Film Festival and that I still ask that
question.

Russell Merritt: When you see these films magnificently restored and in their
original prints and with an orchestra or a group performing for
them, you realize it's an art form that's been cut off from what
we know about movies today, and that gets started at all
about the same time, and I never lost my interest in silent film,
that as I did with Sherlock Holmes, there was a period in which
I dropped Holmes and didn't come back until the 21st century.

Scott Monty: Why was that?

Russell Merritt: You know, it was just oddly enough, it was at the
encouragement of another iconic Sherlockian named Nathan
Bengis, who was a high school teacher of Latin, and I met him
 at my first Baker Street Irregulars dinner, which was in 1957, I
think. 1957 or 1958. And when I went off to college and was
moving from the New York area out into Illinois to go to
Northwestern, he said, "Put Holmes on the back burner while
you focus on other things," and I did. So that's when I started
really becoming a much better student. I was a terrible high
school student. I just became fascinated by the world of
literature and of serious literature, and I had just wonderful
teachers at Northwestern, and they encouraged me to get to
graduate school, and so through graduate school, I was
majoring in Renaissance literature, met my wife who was in
Medieval literature, and so we just went off in a different
direction.

Russell Merritt: Not until I moved to Berkeley and to San Francisco that I took a
chance on the Scowrers, and there were some people there
that just made me realize that I can go home. I can go back to
my high school and pre-high school days and pick up where I
left off and be fascinated by what has happened to Sherlock
Holmes in the meantime. So I'm not even sure what your
question was, but that was the arc, and that-

Scott Monty: No, yeah, that was it, about how you dropped out and what
brought you back at that point.

Russell Merritt: As I say, what brought me back was some remarkable

Irregulars, or I should say Sherlockians. June [inaudible
00:26:08] was one of them. I became something of an oddity
when it was discovered that I had been around and that I
might be the last person that you talk to ... no, no, Peter Blau
would be another one, who knew Edgar Smith and who knew
Vincent Starrett and so I became this kind of dinosaur who
could talk about when there were giants. And so when--

Scott Monty: If I may, Russell, it sounds like you were the "Cool Ghoul" of
the BSI.
Russell Merritt: I know about the ghoul, I don't know that my high school
playmates would have said cool, but you never know, and so ...
but I got to say, that I love attention, and so when they just
found this curiosity in me, that I reciprocated and just got
fascinated by what was happening with the Irregulars and so
have been active with the Scowrers and through them, when
Mike Whelan called to the Baker Street Irregulars themselves
and so I, as I recall, I attended my first new Baker Street
Irregulars meeting in 2009. As I like to say, Julian Wolff was
after my time, and so that's about when I dropped out, and
have been going ever since.

Scott Monty: That's amazing. That's almost a 50 year gap there.

Russell Merritt: You could say.

Scott Monty: Yeah.

Russell Merritt: Right.

Scott Monty: Yeah, yeah. So tell us about when you first encountered
Sherlock Holmes in the silents? Who was the actor that you
remember?

Russell Merritt: Oh, yeah, that's a great question, too. Let's see, let's see. You
know, I'm not sure. It probably was Barrymore in the Goldwyn
film, but that was ... the reason I worry about is that it hadn't
been restored. That was Kevin Brownlow's restoration and I
don't know how I could have seen it, except that Everson
might have had a bootleg print. The first silent Sherlock
Holmes. That's a toughie, because it certainly wasn't Eille
Norwood, and it certainly wasn't Sherlock Holmes Baffled.

Scott Monty: Do you remember the first viewing that you saw? Was it ...
were you exposed to Norwood first or was it someone else?

Russell Merritt: No, no, no. No, Norwood is rather recent.

Scott Monty: Okay.

Russell Merritt: But boy, what he hits, he hits with full power. No, that was an
event.

Scott Monty: Let's talk about that, then, because we had occasion to be with
you and to see a screening of some Eille Norwood films at the
BSI Chautauqua event in, I guess it was in the fall of 2016, if I'm
not mistaken.

Russell Merritt: That sounds right.

Scott Monty: Yeah.

Russell Merritt: And that comes in the wake of visiting the British Film
Institute, the BFI, and asking to see the films that they had of
Eille Norwood in their vault. They have virtually every one of
the 45 Eille Norwood short films, and the two features that he
made. They were donations by the film's producer, Oswald
Stoll, who created a successful film production company to
service his theater, Stoll Theater, and so, but they were very
reluctant to let these films out of the vault.

Russell Merritt: Now before that, and this may well have been my introduction
to the Norwood, UCLA had included Sign of Four among the
films that they were showing as part of their Holmes on screen
retrospective, and I forget what that year was. No, I've just
forgotten what year that was, but it's the one that Les Klinger
helped organize, and so that was an occasion, Phil Carli played
the piano for that one, and since that is arguably the best of
the Norwoods,

Russell Merritt: it's just a remarkable film. Comes late, it's the last Norwood in
the series, a feature that has in some way modernized the
Holmes story. You'd still recognize it as Sign of Four, but much
revamped with its thrilling finale taking place on motorboats
zipping down the Thames. That was a vivid kind of game
changer, but as I say, I was invited to speak on another subject
over in England on color and said as long as I'm over here, let's
see what else you have, and was blown away.
Russell Merritt: I've become ever since a kind of crusader for trying to liberate
the Eille Norwoods from the BFI's vault. There is a legal
problem that they have and it may be just sorted out now. We
thought we were going to be able to distribute them in the
United States. My colleague, David Shepard and I, who is a
very accomplished entrepreneur in restoring and distributing
silent films, got interested, but if you want, I can go into that
legal argument, but in any case, it never happened and so we
... the films still remain in those vaults, and only a handful have
been ever shown publicly.

Russell Merritt: Most famously, you'd mentioned in the intro the Pordenone
Silent Film Festival. The wonderful director of the Pordenone
Film Festival, his name is Jay Weissberg, is also a Sherlockian
and a fascinator, someone, he's a fascinator, but he's
fascinated by detective films, and he created a program of
detective films centered on those Eille Norwoods. And as I'm
talking, it occurs to me I may have seen those before I saw the
ones at UCLA. But that was maybe four or five out of the 45.

Russell Merritt: And then because of the relationship I developed with the BFI,
I was able to bring a bunch of them to Chautauqua and, oh my
gosh, that was quite an adventure. That caused, between the
BSI, Chautauqua, and the British Film Institute, three
somewhat incompatible institutions, that was an adventure.
The endpoint came when, remember, these are precious,
unique prints, and they had been loaned to us under very strict
conditions, and to show you what can happen, as Peter Blau is
checking out, he's discovering that his luggage is weighing a lot
more than it should, and it's discovered that the Chautauqua
hotel has put the films in his luggage, where if he hadn't
noticed that it was a little heavy, 35mm films being somewhat
heavy, we would have had them gone astray. That would not
have done well.

Russell Merritt: But this adventure was filled with those kind of last-minute nail
biters. Chautauqua didn't know what 35mm was, and assumed
these were video tapes, and so they didn't have a theater that
 was ready for them, and so when it was discovered that no,
these were not video tapes, that they had to fly in the owner
of a 35mm theater especially for this event. That gives you a
taste of the chaos, that creative chaos, that circulated around
it. But, any case, it happened and I was delighted that it did.

Burt Wolder: It was certainly worthwhile. It was a major-

Russell Merritt: Oh yeah.

Burt Wolder: ... it really was a major event to see these films, and for our
listeners who might not be up on the chronology, you know,
generally William Gillette was the first big success as Sherlock
Holmes in the silents in 1916, but Norwood, Eille Norwood
starred in a series of 45, 47 films from about 1921 to 1923.
Most were 20 minutes shorts. He was 60 years old when he
first played Holmes on screen. Doyle, who was still living, loved
his performance, and among other thing, they're characterized
by brilliant disguises. You know, Norwood made a lot of
Holmes' use of other identities, just like Lon Chaney was doing
in the States around the same sort of time, and the first short
was Dying Detective.

Burt Wolder: And as you mentioned a bit ago, these have been tied up
forever and ever. Through basically, not to get into it too
deeply, but basically what happened is that the rights of these
films traveled from one corporate entity to another and
wound up in a very unlikely place, in the possession of people
for whom it was sort of an odd footnote, you know, they had
no idea that they really had this in their possession, if I
remember your recounting the story in general.

Russell Merritt: Right, that's exactly right, you have it perfectly. Andrew Lloyd
Webber bought the Stoll studios, the theaters, because he just
wanted the theaters in order to put out his own musical
production. Had no idea that Stoll had made movies, but he
discovered that indeed Stoll had made these movies and that
they were in possession of the British Film Institute and the BFI
 was very shy about perpetuating any kind of restoration as
long as the legal status of these films were in doubt, and so
this is being resolved right now.

Burt Wolder: Wonderful.

Scott Monty: And we're just going to pause here a minute for a brief word
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Burt Wolder: And it was, you know, when the program that you put on in
Chautauqua, it's a shame to describe this to people who
weren't there, but it really was a wonderful opportunity to
spend several hours I was going to say revisiting these films,
but as you pointed out, they'd never been seen in the United
States.
Russell Merritt: That's right, that's right. They had been shown once in the
United Kingdom and then put back into the vault. That in itself
gets to be an interesting story, but that was the fact, and so
that was ... and when we say that they weren't shown, I had
never seen them before. These were not among those that I'd
seen, and so to see them on a big screen as opposed to a
monitor was in itself a revelation.

Russell Merritt: As you say, Norwood is remarkable, both for his ability to
project thought from a silent screen and for, as you pointed
out, the multiplicity of disguises. He was a master of these
disguises. Even when you think you know what's coming,
you're never quite sure whether that's Norwood under the
wig, and so that's part of the fun.

Russell Merritt: But also, the very well adapted to the requirements of the
silent medium, and as you say, two reels, 20 minutes, and
Conan Doyle just loved it. Many have said that Conan Doyle
revived Sherlock Holmes in the stories that became the
casebook on the basis of the success of these films and I can
believe it.

Scott Monty: That makes a lot of sense. At that point it was the canon in
multimedia, where you had from magazine to book to back to
magazine to film, back to magazine and book. Fascinating.
Fascinating.

Scott Monty: So you mentioned Gillette as having been the icon and for
pretty much forever, we thought that the stage or the film
adaptation of Gillette's famous play, which was made in 1916,
we thought it was lost, but it was eventually found, and we
helped publicize that on ihearofsherlock.com, but why don't
you tell everybody kind of behind the scenes how this all
worked out and what you saw from your very unique
perspective.

Russell Merritt: This was one of those days you live for. I got a phone call
saying that the Cinémathèque Française, the great film archive
 in Paris, had discovered this negative 35mm work that they
thought was by William Gillette. Would I be interested in
corroborating this? What can I say? I think before they finished
the question, I had said, "Are you kidding?"

Russell Merritt: And so, sure enough, it was a version of the Gillette film with
French titles, and it had been discovered by a routine
investigation of this enormous backlog that any large film
archive has, but which the Cinémathèque has in particular.

Russell Merritt: One of the questions that gets asked by people who don't
know about archives is, how could it have been lost for all
these decades? No one involved with archives asks the
question, because they know exactly what happens, that you
get an enormous contribution, a donation, and there's more in
it than you can catalog, and so you push it. You do what you
can, and then another collection comes in, and another
collection comes in, and the stuff that hasn't been properly
cataloged gets pushed further and further back into the
bowels of the cellar, and that's exactly what happened to this
box.

Russell Merritt: The box in question was all Sherlock Holmes, and it had The
Man Who Was Sherlock Holmes in German, talking picture
from the '30s. It had a couple of reels from the Ronald Howard
film. And so the catalogers just assumed, "Oh, we already have
this. In fact these are not unique prints, so onward to the next
one." They never looked at the bottom of the carton, which is
where the gold was. That was the negative of the French
release of Sherlock Holmes, but sure enough, it finally was
unearthed and they just wanted confirmation of what they
had.

Russell Merritt: So at that point, they got in touch, and they means Céline
Ruivo, from the Cinémathèque Française, with my colleague,
Rob Byrne, at the silent film festival, San Francisco Silent Film
Festival, who'd already developed a sterling reputation in
restoring silent films and who had a relationship with the
 Cinémathèque Française, whether he would be interested in
pursuing this, and he contacts me and the ball gets rolling.

Russell Merritt: So the Cinémathèque and the silent film festival become the
co-producers of this, and I become an associate producer. The
fascinator about this material is that the titles are in French
and they're what are called flash titles, only two or three
frames, the idea being that it was expensive to transport
subtitles and intertitles over across the sea, and so since they
were going to have to be translated anyway, you just clipped
out two or three frames to represent the title and shorten the
amount that has to copyrighted.

Russell Merritt: So that's what we had. These were in French, but there was
another thing, that this was the French version, which meant it
was identical to the American release, except it was being
released as a serial, and that leads to the final discovery we
made, which is that this film is not shipped until long after it
had finished its American release with this failing company
called Essanay, and is now being put together by a fly-by-night
French serial company that has no knowledge of Sherlock
Holmes, no knowledge of Conan Doyle, and very little
knowledge of the English language, so when they are
translating into French, it is comic. They keep on referring ...
other characters calling Sherlock, Sherlock, instead of Holmes.
They get Watson's name wrong and so he's not either James or
John in this version, and they just have kind of those sort of
tongue twister hilarious mistranslations of the English
language.

Russell Merritt: That creates an amazing dilemma for us. You are ethically
obliged in film restoration to restore the film, not to create a
new one that you would prefer, that you would like. So what
to do with intertitles that are so preposterous and yet are part
of the original text that you have been given. And so we gave
ourselves some leeway in trying to go back to the original
Gillette play, not to mention the Conan Doyle stories, and tried
to figure out what the English language original would have
 read like that had been mangled by the French. And so that
was my job, to create the English language titles, and that
became fascinating and sometimes difficult.

Russell Merritt: The good news is that the film was otherwise identical to the
American release, and what you're watching on the DVD
produced by Flicker Alley is exactly what American audiences
would have seen, with the exception of these rejiggered titles
and the fact that it was released as a serial, one episode per
week, and so we preserved those introductory titles, you
know, "When last seen, this is what was happening." You'll see
that that's in there as well.

Russell Merritt: That's a long version of how we were working on it. The film
was wonderfully restored by Rob and debuted, what was that
now, 2016 in the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, and then
over in France at the Cinémathèque Française, so that, we
established our spurs with film restoration and Sherlock
Holmes with that one.

Scott Monty: Now, for folks who get a chance to see it, the restoration oddly
shifts between two color schemes. There's the classic sepia
tone and then there's kind of an ice blue version. What's the
difference there?

Russell Merritt: Those are authentic color things. This is a seven reel film, but
in fact, what we had from the Cinémathèque Française were
something like 92 small rolls of films. This is the day when film
development was very much a hand-crafted operation, and so
each of those rolls had a little note indicating what color the
roll was to be in, and each of those rolls was separately dyed in
a transport system that would then be reassembled thanks to
a numbering system so that everybody could get the finished
film in order.

Russell Merritt: The only two colors in our film were the ones that you
mentioned. Sometimes silent films could be as many as a half
dozen different colors, and the blue always was a code to
 indicate night scenes and so the sepia was the normal color
and the blue, as I say, was taking in the night. But we not only
had references to what color which scenes went with, but we
could even match the intensity of the colors, because they
would be varied as well, and so you're looking at what an
original audience would see in that regard.

Scott Monty: That's something.

Russell Merritt: Yeah.

Scott Monty: So having gone through the release, the world premiere and
multiple showings of Gillette's film - and now of course, it's
available on DVD from the fine folks at Flicker Alley. And by the
way, we'll have links to all of these films and eras and things
we're talking about here with Russell on the show notes.

Scott Monty: But help us understand or maybe interpret from your

perspective, what would the world of Sherlock Holmes and
film have been like had that film never been lost in the first
place?

Russell Merritt: I think we would continue with a distorted view of Gillette's

contribution. It is very tempting to see Gillette as the father of
cinematic and stage Sherlock Holmes. What the film reveals is
a personality quite different from the ones we're most familiar
with, starting with Rathbone and up through Cumberbatch.

Russell Merritt: What you get with the famous contemporary Holmes
interpreters is a highly strung intellect who can be very brittle.
What the surprise in the Gillette interpretation, not a surprise
to hear historians, but to Sherlockians sometimes, is how
relaxed and how aristocratic this Holmes is, comfortable with
spats, with the flamboyant dressing gown and the cane and
cravat. He is a marvel of relaxation.

Russell Merritt: Gillette the actor had become famous for those qualities and
on top of that, he in the silent film version, and probably on
the stage version, is remarkable for the delicacy of his touch. I
 sometimes think that he reads a set the way he is trying to
reveal his mastery of the details of a set, by reading the set as
though it were in Braille, that it's a very delicate touch as he
goes across a piano or against a fireplace, and then reveal
what the bad guys would never imagine he could detect from
all this.

Russell Merritt: Those are two big surprises, and of course, he could have been
a supreme matinee idol on film, had he decided to make other
films, but this is the only feature film he ever made, and so it
becomes this unique insight into this icon that is cut off in
some ways from his successors as he provides the floor plan.

Russell Merritt: The floor plan is much better indicated by what he does with
Moriarty. In this film, we have Ernest Maupain, another
classically trained actor, playing opposite him, but Maupain is
in a long line of Moriarties that Gillette worked with and
what's interesting to me is that Conan Doyle of course had
done away with Moriarty the way he had with Holmes, and it
was Gillette who revived Moriarty and reinterprets the
Moriarty character. No longer this weirdo who operates by
himself and by remote control in an academic setting, but
rather a hands-on organization criminal who in fact, of course,
the original Moriarty has his organization, but this is a hands-
on guy who now operates not in a library of his own in an
academic setting but rather in a underground cellar and with
all the trappings and is constantly interacting with his gang.

Russell Merritt: That's all Gillette, and in fact this is the Moriarty that takes off
in cinema and gets converted by some of the best directors in
the industry into their own characters. Fritz Lang for instance,
in Germany, creates Mabuse, Dr. Mabuse, a direct steal from
the Moriarty character. Sergei Eisenstein, his film Stachka,
Strike, creates a kind of parody of Moriarty, and Louis Feuillade
in France creates Fantômas, who has many characteristics of
this Gillette Moriarty. Those are the real continuity that
continue up through this day. And that's as much Gillette as his
creation of Sherlock Holmes.
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Burt Wolder: These are great milestones, you know, and to talk with you
about them and listen to you describing these various factors
that make all this literature and these works so interesting and
enduring and enjoyable seeing them again and again, it's really
wonderful.

Burt Wolder: Can you tell us anything, I remember at the end of Chautauqua
and now obviously more recently, there's been some more
work around this German Der Hund von Baskerville. Can you
tell us, what can you tell us about that? That sounds like the
next interesting event on the horizon.

Russell Merritt: Yes, we just had the premiere of Der Hund in San Francisco,
and that is another wonderful background story, at least for
me. This is kind of unbelievable. It's a German silent film, made
in 1929, with Czech intertitles, found in a Polish archive, and
the discovery of this film is just as international as that preview
of the film itself.
Russell Merritt: It had been given to the Polish National Archive back in 2009,
but they were very reluctant to spread the word because there
were their own national entanglements. The film was in very
delicate condition and they were in the midst of a political
whirlwind that you may or may not have heard of the Law and
Justice Party that had taken over Polish politics, and that had
had an implication for what the archive could do and what
could be preserved.

Russell Merritt: This is an ultra-right and is an ultra-right nationalist political

party and so the way it worked was that for film, it meant
Polish films were going to be given the top priority. This is a
German film. And secondly, the archive for various reasons has
been [inaudible 01:01:08] with this ultra-right political party.

Russell Merritt: So, what to do with this? It was, I heard about it from two
Russians who had discovered an article about the donation,
and they got in touch with a Sherlockian in Florida, Sherlockian
in Florida gets in touch with a Sherlockian in Baltimore,
Sherlockian in Baltimore asks me whether I've ever heard of
this. I had not heard of this, but that was going to change.

Russell Merritt: Call up the director of the Filmoteka Narodowa, to give it its
Polish name, and we agreed to meet at a [inaudible 01:01:55]
conference in Bologna. And she heard of the success we'd had
with the Sherlock Holmes restoration, the Gillette film, and
now if we were going to collaborate, suddenly the restrictions
about an all-Polish priority for film restoration was being lifted.
So suddenly, the film could be restored, thanks again to Rob
Byrne and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, that opened
up a collaboration with the Polish archive.

Russell Merritt: There were still tremendous hurdles to be overcome, but that
was when the Pordenone Silent Film Festival came in, because
both Anna and Ella, the two representatives from the Polish
archive, were going to be there, as would Rob and I, and
suddenly from the summer of 2016 to the fall of 2016, the
difference between these two conferences, the world had
 changed. Suddenly, the prospect of a completely new
management for the Polish Film Archive meant that these two
women might never survive the purge and suddenly this
became a front burner imperative. They had to get this film
restored before they were being pushed out of the archive.

Russell Merritt: It turns out that neither of them were pushed out of the
archive, but we didn't know that, and so suddenly, this became
a very active kind of restoration, and so from 2016 up to the
end of 2017, it was done, and so by the time that we had our
premiere, it had been fully restored.

Russell Merritt: I should argue that as opposed to the French Gillette version,
the German film was a breeze to translate into English,
because this was a very accomplished film, a very
accomplished filmmaker, and those who are writing the
German titles knew exactly what they were doing, so it
required far less of gerrymandering with the titles in order to
get something artistically presentable. The big difficulty was
that we were missing a reel of the film, and that was
compensated for by the fact that this film was so popular in
Germany at the time and on the continent, that the French
company, [inaudible 01:04:50], had created what we would
call an 8mm or 16mm, in France it was 9.5mm, reduction of
the film, and that contained a lot of the odds and ends that
were missing from the 35mm print. The print quality wasn't
nearly as good, but just to have that additional footage made
the restoration much more coherent.

Russell Merritt: So that's for the backstory to that, and it didn't have the
charisma of a Gillette presentation, but it is such a wonderful
Saturday matinee kind of entertainment, a wonderful
adaptation of the Hound of the Baskervilles, and the last silent
Sherlock Holmes film ever made.

Russell Merritt: And I should say the first Sherlock Holmes to create a
partnership between Holmes and Watson. Amazingly enough,
silent films up until 1929 had never treated Watson as a major
 character. He's always pushed far in the background. What
could you do with him? This was the film that created the
template that leads to Nigel Bruce and Basil Rathbone to H.
Marion-Crawford and Ronald Howard and so on, to
Cumberbatch and his guy, so there you go.

Burt Wolder: That's fabulous.

Scott Monty: Now, can folks see that version anywhere?

Russell Merritt: That's a good one. Yes. What's happening is we only have ...
we know for sure it will be shown at Pordenone, we know for
sure it will be shown in London, and we don't know anything
else, that we think we estimate it will be shown in Warsaw in
2019 but it doesn't have the series of play dates that the
Gillette film had, because it's not nearly as well-known or in
demand, but was thinking that the DVD, if the Gillette model
holds, be probably available by Thanksgiving of 2018 and so all
the work's been done, it's just a question of the timing for a
DVD release.

Russell Merritt: Flicker Alley will be distributing it as it did the Gillette film and
so what I like to say is that when we announced that the
Gillette film was being restored and being shown, the response
was, "How can I get there to San Francisco?" Now with this
film, the response seems to be, "When will the film come to
us?" So that's less ... I can't give a specific answer to that until
we know more about with the film festivals. It'll be shown with
film festivals, but we don't have that information quite yet.

Scott Monty: Okay.

Burt Wolder: Excellent.

Scott Monty: Good to know. Well, Russell, this has been absolutely
fascinating. I have a feeling we could sit here with you for
another probably three or four hours and still not even begin
to scratch the surface. Thank you for taking the time to be with
 us and for sharing your encyclopedic knowledge of Sherlock
Holmes and the silent movies.

Russell Merritt: I've got to say, Burt, that it's just been an absolute pleasure to
talk with you. Thank you for such smart questions.

Burt Wolder: Thank you for smarter answers.

Russell Merritt: Well.

Scott Monty: Well, what a delightful conversation. Russell is certainly

passionate about this topic and probably more well-informed
than anyone on the planet, so we're very lucky to have him in
our midst.

Burt Wolder: We sure are, and isn't it interesting that you can have such a
great conversation about silent movies. I suppose, you know, a
couple of years ago, if somebody told you we were going to do
a radio interview about silent movies, they would be baffled,
but it's like everything else connected to Sherlock Holmes, one
door leads to another door, things open, and the people
involved are so fascinating. I mean, I would've thought that
Russell had those experiences too, particularly when he was so
young, experimenting with stop-motion animation, I just find
all of that very interesting. And now, of course, I want to see
this new German film.

Scott Monty: Yeah, absolutely. I'm really looking forward to that. Hopefully
Thanksgiving will hold as the date. And you know, speaking of
making an entire episode about silent films, this kind of blows
my original plan, which was to release episode 147 here as
simply an hour of dead air.

Burt Wolder: With projector noise. It needs projector noise.

Scott Monty: A projector going in the background, right, and the piano
player there to just score it for us. You can read the subtitles.

Burt Wolder: Yeah, there you are.

Scott Monty: Well, you know, picking up a little bit on Sherlockian news, it is
the summer so things are a little quiet right now, but one thing
that I saw recently is that there is a faith school, the Yesodey
Hatorah Senior Girls School, it's a state-funded Orthodox
Jewish secondary school in North London. They have been put
on probation, and primarily for censoring Sherlock Holmes
stories. They don't want the kids-

Burt Wolder: Censoring.

Scott Monty: ... reading Sherlock Holmes. But, to be clear, they also don't
want them seeing Picasso's art nor reading about Elizabethan
England.

Burt Wolder: My goodness, of all the things to censor, going back to

Sherlock Holmes.

Scott Monty: Evidently, the staff had gone through all library textbooks to
blank out bare skin on ankles, wrists, and necks.

Burt Wolder: Oh my goodness.

Scott Monty: Even the Victorians would sneak a peak at ankles every now
and then.

Burt Wolder: Oh yeah, crazy.

Scott Monty: That's all that we have in the way of Holmesian news this time.

Scott Monty: Which means it must be time for everyone's favorite game
show, Canonical Couplets.

Burt Wolder: Hooray.

Scott Monty: Oh yeah, we love Canonical Couplets here. Of course, you

remember the last one that we had, it was a little trickier than
usual for Episode 146. The canonical couplet was, "When
noble dukes such doubtful aims pursue, they cause a
 mercenary point of view." The correct answer to that, the
story referenced was ...

Burt Wolder: Oh, everyone knows, that's the Priory Gables.

Scott Monty: No, the Three Schools.

Burt Wolder: Oh.

Scott Monty: The Priory School, that is absolutely right. And we had a fewer
number of entries this time than previously, but we do want to
give them the benefit of winning a prize, so we'll put their
names jumbled up in a random number generator barrel, and
we will spin it around.

Scott Monty: And it comes to rest on number eight, number eight, and that
lucky winner is David Rosenbaum. David, congratulations from
everyone here at I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere. We will be
getting in touch with you about arranging to get a prize your
way.

Burt Wolder: Oh, that's nice, we've heard from David recently, didn't we? He
had an interesting comment. I can't remember if it was with
this podcast or with Trifles.

Scott Monty: I think it was on Trifles, wonder about that.

Burt Wolder: Oh.

Burt Wolder: And we should point out that we love comments, because in
so many of the comments are sort of moving ahead, this
Sherlockian scholarship and pointing out things that there are
very interesting possibilities and alternatives, so please keep
commenting.

Scott Monty: Yeah, things that we are too daft to recognize or point out
ourselves.
Scott Monty: Well, let's get with the program here and finish up the
Canonical Couplets program with this week's entry or this
episode's entry. Let's go with this one.

Scott Monty: "To see a genius in his tracks arrested / Just whisper Norbury,
as he requested."

Scott Monty: If you think you know the answer to this canonical couplet, if
you can identify the Sherlock Holmes story that it refers to, jot
us a note at comment@ihearofsherlock.com, put Canonical
Couplet in the subject of the email, and with any luck, you'll be
selected randomly to win a prize from the IHOSE archives.

Scott Monty: Thanks for playing.

Scott Monty: Well, Burt, any summer plans before we get to our next
episode?

Burt Wolder: No. I'm just doing business travel, going to places that are even
hotter than New Jersey.

Scott Monty: Well, we'll be shooting off fireworks here in the front yard,
making sure we don't blow anyone's thumb off, because we
don't want to end up like Victor Hatherley. If you have to
Google that, go right ahead, but we think you all know pretty
much what we mean by that. And so the guy currently with
two thumbs up says, I remain Scott Monty.

Burt Wolder: And the guy with his fuse getting shorter and shorter says, uh-
oh, I'm Burt Wolder.

Holmes & Watson: The game's afoot.

Sherlock Holmes: I'm afraid that in the pleasure of this conversation, I'm
neglecting business of importance which awaits me elsewhere.

Narrator: Thank you for listening. Please be sure to join us again for the
next episode of I Hear of Sherlock Everywhere, the first
podcast dedicated to Sherlock Holmes.
Sherlock Holmes: Goodbye, and good luck, and believe me to be, my dear fellow,
very sincerely yours, Sherlock Holmes.