508. Clive Brook, Cinema’s First System-Smoking Sherlock Holmes
JOIN THE PETE GEEKS IN CHICAGO! Friday, May 1st, 10-12: Glen Whelan and Giacomo Penzo from Peterson will give a presentation on the evolution of bowl-turning at the factory. Friday, May 1st, 2-3pm: Pete Geeks will meet! Several collectors have pledged to bring some of their great Petes, including Lance Dahl, Ken Sigel, Mike Austin, and James Walsh. One of the remarkable things about our tiny in-group of Pete Freeks is how we’re willing to share what we’ve discovered to enrich our community’s knowledge and appreciation of—as I once said—“the world’s oldest continuously operatiing briar-pipe manufacturer.” It’s worth celebrating that this blog can help connect you and I in a fractured world bent on turning everyone into either a brand or a disposable commodity.* This morning’s discovery we owe to Clint Stacey CPG of the UK. He sent me images from a movie book he was leafing through several months ago which, as a Sherlockian and a System man, I found extraordinary. They depicted what turns out to be the first cinematic System-smoking Sherlock Holmes, who was not Basil Rathbone, but another English actor, Clive Brook (1887-1974). Brook made over 100 films between 1920 and 1963, and in 1934 was voted one of the most popular actors by British film-going audiences. He made the jump from silent to sound films easily, and if he had neither the physique nor the voice of Rathbone, he was still a force to be reckoned with. His most memorable roles for film fans today are Joseph Von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927) and Shanghai Express (1932), the latter playing opposite Marlene Dietrich. Brook played Sherlock Holmes three times. First, in Paramount’s Return of Sherlock Holmes (1929), the earliest sound film to feature the Great Detective. Second, in the anthology film Paramount on Parade (1930). Finally, in Sherlock Holmes (1932), Fox Film’s loose adaptation of the William Gillette play. Film critic Russell Meritt writes it “is a droll pre-Code feature that ranks among the most stylish Sherlocks made in the black-and-white era. This was a major studio production, directed by one of Fox’s leading directors, William K. Howard, and filmed by the legendary cinematographer, George Barnes. . . .This is not a production for Sherlockian purists, but for non-purists it’s a pleasure to watch a great studio director in top form having fun with Holmes and Hollywood genres: Moriarty is on the loose, importing American gangsters and their continental allies to wreak havoc on London pubs [!] with Tommy guns, hand grenades, and speeding cars.”** None of these, unfortunately, is available for home viewing in good prints, although the two SH features have been preserved by Library of Congress (Return) and the Museum of Modern Art (SH). Three things stand out as of signal importance for us: first, that Brook smoked the Shape 9 DeLuxe (and yes, he really smokes it!); second, that he wore an Irish tweed fedora later adopted by Rathbone; and third, that European and American movie-goers knew to ask for “Sherlock Holmes’s…