Directed by Edwin L. Marin
Starring Reginald Owen, Anna May Wong and June Clyde
Produced by KBS Productions Inc.
People love their police procedurals. The traditional whodunit is amongst the sturdiest movie foundations you can build a movie on. It’s got good guys. It’s got bad guys. It has tension as you are never 100 percent sure who the good guys or bad guys are.
Tales involving Sherlock Holmes (when they are good) traditionally ratchet these movies up a notch. Holmes is a superhero, except instead of flying (Superman) or looking impressive in wifebeaters (Wolverine), Sherlock notices the clues that no one else does. And he has Watson as his overmatched partner who serves as the audience stand-in so Holmes can explain the crime and the culprit in ways that make you want to go back and see what you missed.
A Study in Scarlet is a procedural. And it features a guy named Sherlock Holmes. And it’s pretty terrible.
The set up here is widow comes to the detective explaining that her husband was murdered and he was part of a secret society whose members pooled their resources. The problem for Mrs. Murphy is that when a member dies, the spoils get divvied up by the other society members so she gets nothing.
Now, we embark on the whodunit. Except we don’t. Because Holmes learns that Merrydew is a member of the underground group. And Holmes has been trying to catch him for a while so now we can move on because it must be him.
The film never really stops to lay out clues and show us Holmes’ deductive process. Indeed, Watson is barely around for Holmes to explain much to anyway. A Study in Scarlet’s depiction of Holmes treats him more like Batman solving one of Joker’s riddles from the 60s TV show: “These numbers are big so they must be page numbers from a large book everyone has… just because.
Reginald Owen’s depiction of Holmes is unmemorable. He doesn’t look much like the character as he is traditionally portrayed which would be fine if he did anything to make the role his own and distinguish himself. He does not and so we get a guy playing a detective whose name happens to be Sherlock Holmes instead of anything close to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s creation.
By the time we get to the end of A Study in Scarlet, things just get silly in terms of the leaps in logic Holmes must make. But more importantly, I don’t care about the outcome. The stakes are trifling and the explanation is more like a Law & Order twist than anything the audience could follow from the story. As a detective story, this is bad. As a Sherlock Holmes mystery? It’s terrible.
D
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