When Cinderella and Sherlock Holmes Wore Out Their Welcome

THE FOLLOWING PREVIEWS HAVE BEEN APPROVED FOR ALL AUDIENCES.

March brought us a new version of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “Cinderella,” starring Lily James (familiar to fans of “Downton Abbey” as Lady Rose Aldridge), with Cate Blanchett as The Wicked Stepmother and Helena Bonham Carter as The Fairy Godmother.

 

Lily James stars in the new "Cinderella."

Coming soon to the Moviehouse: In June, Sir Ian McKellen (best known as Gandalf in “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” trilogies and as Magneto in the “X-Men” movies) can be seen portraying a retired Sherlock Holmes in “Mr. Holmes,” based on the novel A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin.

 

Sir Ian McKellen plays 93-year-old Sherlock Holmes in "Mr. Holmes."

The prospect of these two films raises a singular question: Who asked for them? Was there really a hunger among moviegoers for yet one more serving of these too often reheated meals-on-reels? Let’s consider the stories behind the two pictures.

In 2010, after the box-office success of director Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland,” which was the second-highest grossing film of the year, garnering more than $1 billion worldwide, Walt Disney Pictures started work on a new version of “Cinderella.” In the meantime, the popularity of “Alice in Wonderland” - though not a fairy tale in essence (Lewis Carroll’s 1865 book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is a masterpiece of literary nonsense) - set off a string of movies based on fairy tales – “Red Riding Hood,” “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters,” “Jack the Giant Slayer,” “Maleficent” (a twist on “Sleeping Beauty”), and “Snow White and the Huntsman,” not to mention the Snow White-inspired “Mirror Mirror”  – none coming close to the box-office gold of “Alice.”

Only three months ago, the screen version of the Stephen Sondheim-James Lapine musical “Into the Woods” cast Anna Kendrick as a disenchanted Cinderella. So why “Cinderella” again? And why so soon? Maybe the answer lies in the past.

Giambattista Basile, a poet and courtier in Naples, published the earliest version of Cinderella in 1634, although the origin of the tale could be traced back to a 7 BC story about a Greek slave girl who marries an Egyptian king. French academic Charles Perrault’s 1697 version added the fairy godmother and a pair of glass slippers. As retold in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm, the slippers were gold, and the fairy godmother was replaced by magic birds that pluck out the eyes of the evil stepsisters.

 

Gustave Doré's illustrations for "Cinderella"
appeared in the 1862 edition of The Stories of Perrault.

Since the mid-1700s, the tale of Cinderella has been dramatized in a number of operas, ballets, and plays. The year 1899 saw the first screen version of “Cinderella,” a six-minute short made by Georges Méliés, a French magician-turned-filmmaker noted for his pioneering special effects. In 1912, Méliés produced a longer and more elaborate remake. Two years later, Paramount Pictures presented the first Hollywood adaptation of “Cinderella,” starring a waifish 22-year-old Mary Pickford, affectionately known as “America’s Sweetheart” in the silent film era.

Mary Pickford's then husband, Owen Moore, portrayed
Prince Charming in "Cinderella" (1914)

In 1950, the animated box-office hit “Cinderella” (below) rescued Walt Disney Productions from the verge of bankruptcy and financially aided Walt in his development of Disneyland. Incidentally, future talk show host Mike Douglas supplied the singing voice for Prince Charming.

“The Glass Slipper” (1955) starred Leslie Caron, an acclaimed French actress (“An American in Paris,” “Gigi”) who started her career as a ballerina, as Cinderella. Amanda Blake, who would go on to television fame as Miss Kitty on “Gunsmoke,” portrayed one of the nasty stepsisters.

 

Before the ball, Ella (Leslie Caron) meets the eccentric fairy godmother
Mrs. Toquet (Estelle Winwood) in "The Glass Slipper."

Rodgers and Hammerstein, the reigning kings of musical theater in the 1940s and ‘50s responsible for Broadway hits “Oklahoma!,” “Carousel,” “South Pacific,” “The King and I,” and “The Sound of Music, adapted “Cinderella” as their only musical written specifically for television. Starring Julie Andrews, “Cinderella” was broadcast live in color in 1957, but, sadly, all that survives of the production is a black-and-white kinetoscope.

 

Julie Andrews had recently been nominated for a
Tony Award for her performance as Eliza Doolittle
in "My Fair Lady" before she starred in "Cinderella."

Lesley Ann Warren, a TV actress who, like Leslie Caron, was trained as a ballerina, starred in a 1965 telecast of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Cinderella,” which was remade again in 1997 as a vehicle for pop R&B singers Brandy, as Cinderella, and Whitney Houston, as The Fairy Godmother (pictured below).

In 1998, a feisty Drew Barrymore (below) was, in the words of critic Leonard Maltin, “a delight as a Cinderella for feminists” in “Ever After,” “a charming rethinking of the classic fairy tale.” “A Cinderella Story” (2004) updated the story as a teen romcom with Hilary Duff; Selena Gomez and Lucy Halle starred in subsequent direct-to-video sequels. More recently, Jessy Schram played the Cinderella character on the ABC series “Once Upon a Time.”

The original director of the new “Cinderella,” Mark Romanek, is an acclaimed director of music videos, including “Shake It Off” with Taylor Swift and the Grammy Award-winning “Hurt” with Johnny Cash. In 2002, he wrote and directed the creepy Robin Williams thriller “One Hour Photo.” Romanek didn’t exactly fit the Disney mold with a darker version of the tale than the studio desired and was replaced by Kenneth Branagh, the multi-talented actor-director known for breathing new life into Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” “Much Ado About Nothing,” “Hamlet,” and “As You Like It.”

Branagh, who also directed pulp cinema’s “Thor” and “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” dutifully told an interviewer, “It is impossible to think of Cinderella without thinking of Disney and the timeless images we’ve all grown up watching. And those classic moments are irresistible to a filmmaker.”

Mention of timeless images and classic moments bring us to the world’s greatest detective. Seemingly, every generation gets the Sherlock Holmes it deserves. The fictional London-based detective, renowned for uncanny logical reasoning, mastery of forensic science, and fondness for elaborate disguises, first appeared in print in the 1887 novel A Study in Scarlet, created by surgeon and ophthalmologist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which introduced amateur sleuth C. Auguste Dupin, has long been regarded as the first modern detective story, and Dupin became the inspiration for Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, as well as Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot.

 

An original illustration by Sidney Paget depicts Dr. Watson and
Sherlock Holmes in Arthur Conan Doyle's 1892 story "Silver Blaze."

Doyle featured Holmes in four novels and 56 short stories until 1927. More than 250 movies have been made about Sherlock Holmes, and that’s not counting numerous TV programs. More than 100 actors have portrayed Holmes over a span of more than 100 years. In fact, according to Guinness World Records, Sherlock Holmes stands alone as the literary character most frequently depicted on screen.

The earliest “film” portrayal of Doyle’s detective was in 1900’s “Sherlock Holmes Baffled,” a 60-second Mutoscope (similar to Thomas Edison’s hand-cranked Kinetoscope) featuring a masked burglar who repeatedly vanishes before Holmes’ eyes.  From 1908 to 1918, a handful of silent pictures about Sherlock Holmes were produced in Germany and Hungary. In 1922, legendary actor John Barrymore (Drew Barrymore’s grandfather) starred in “Sherlock Holmes,” a silent film long thought lost until its rediscovery and restoration in the 1970s.

 

William Powell (left) costarred with John Barrymore in "Sherlock Holmes" (1922).

For the World War II generation, Shakespearean stage actor Basil Rathbone became the peerless face and unmatched voice of Sherlock Holmes in 14 films and a popular radio serial, from 1939 to 1946, beginning with “The Hound of the Baskervilles.” Initially planted in the Victorian era, Rathbone’s “Sherlock Holmes” mysteries abruptly adopted a contemporary setting to accommodate anti-Nazi plots during World War II. Grumbling about being typecast, Rathbone eventually refused to renew his studio contract and returned to the theater, insisting that he wished to be remembered for his stage career.

 

Trapped in stereotypes, Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce portrayed Sherlock Holmes
and Dr. Watson in 14 films and over 200 radio programs. 

Among the noteworthy actors with Sherlock Holmes on their résumés are Peter Cushing (known to “Star Wars” fans as Grand Moff Tarkin in the “A New Hope”) and Christopher Lee (best known as Saruman in “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” trilogies and as Count Dooku in the “Star Wars” prequel trilogy.)

Patrick Macnee portrays Dr. Watson to Christopher Lee's Sherlock Holmes.

When Christopher Lee played the detective in a pair of made-for-television movies in the early 1990s, Patrick Macnee costarred as Holmes’ loyal assistant, Dr. Watson. Macnee (best known for his role as John Steed, the debonair spy in a derby hat in the ‘60s series “The Avengers”) had earlier portrayed Watson in the 1976 TV film “Sherlock Holmes in New York,” starring Roger Moore. Macnee himself portrayed Sherlock Holmes in the 1993 television film “The Hound of London.” Getting back to Christopher Lee, in 1970, he played Sherlock’s older brother, Mycroft Holmes, in “The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes,” an affectionately melancholy take on the Baker Street detective (portrayed by Robert Stephens), directed by Billy Wilder.

John Huston (as Professor Moriarty) and Charlotte Rampling (as Irene Adler)
costar with Roger Moore and Patrick Macnee in "Sherlock Holmes in New York."

George C. Scott played a daffy millionaire who is convinced he’s Sherlock Holmes in “They Might Be Giants,” a whimsical 1971 fantasy costarring Joanne Woodward as a psychiatrist coincidentally named Dr. Watson. Nicol Williamson (best known as Little John to Sean Connery’s Robin Hood in “Robin and Marian” and as Merlin in “Excalibur”) was cast as Sherlock Holmes in the entertaining 1976 picture “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” featuring Robert Duvall as Dr. Watson, Laurence Olivier as Holmes’ archenemy, Professor Moriarty, and Alan Arkin as Sigmund Freud.

In 1971, Monty Python’s John Cleese portrayed the detective’s grandson, Arthur Sherlock Holmes (above), in a rarely seen spoof titled “The Strange Case of the End of Civilization as We Know It.” The British comedy team of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore played Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson in a humorless parody of “The Hound of the Baskervilles” (1978), directed by Paul Morrissey, a filmmaker better known for his association with Andy Warhol’s The Factory than for his knack for directing comedy.

Peter Cook and Dudley Moore portray Sherlock Holmes and
Dr. Watson in 1978's "The Hound of the Baskervilles."

Christopher Plummer, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar at age 82 for his performance in 2010’s “Beginners,” made for a noble, stalwart Holmes in pursuit of Jack the Ripper, supported by James Mason’s nuanced interpretation of Dr. Watson, in 1979’s “Murder by Decree.” (The intriguing notion of pitting Sherlock Holmes against Jack the Ripper had been depicted earlier in the low-budget 1965 thriller “A Study in Terror,” featuring John Neville, a venerable presence in British theater who enjoyed a resurgence of popularity as the star of Terry Gilliam’s “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen” in 1988.)

 

Scotland Yard Inspector Lestrade, a perennial thorn in Sherlock Holmes' side,
was portrayed in both "A Study in Terror" (left, with John Neville as Holmes)
and in "Murder by Decree" (right, with Christopher Plummer) by British
character actor Frank Finlay.

Picture Michael Caine as an inept actor hired to impersonate the fictional Sherlock Holmes created by a real-life Dr. Watson (Ben Kingsley); that’s the premise of the engaging 1988 farce “Without a Clue.” On a more somber note, 68-year-old Charlton Heston played Sherlock Holmes in the made-for-television film “The Crucible of Blood,” directed by his son, Fraser Heston.

Ben Kingsley and Michael Caine costar in "Without a Clue" (1988).

From 1984 to 1994, Jeremy Brett was regarded as the definitive Sherlock Holmes in four British TV series. Brett’s acting career spanned Shakespeare and musical theater on stage to television and film (he memorably portrayed Eliza Doolittle’s suitor Freddy Eynsford-Hill in the 1964 movie “My Fair Lady,” starring Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison), but he would say, “Holmes is the hardest part I have ever played – harder than Hamlet or Macbeth.”

 

David Burke (right, with Jeremy Brett), portrayed Dr. Watson on the first season
of "Sherlock Holmes" before leaving to join the Royal Shakespeare Company. 

Brett once remarked, “Some actors fear if they play Sherlock Holmes for a very long run the character will steal their soul, leave no corner for the original inhabitant.” He confessed, “Holmes has become the dark of the moon for me. He is moody and solitary and underneath I am really sociable and gregarious. It has all got too dangerous.” During the last ten years of his life, the actor received repeated treatments for bipolar disorder, and his appearance and health deteriorated in the later episodes of the series. He died of heart failure in September of 1995, age 61.

For moviegoers in 2009 and 2011, Robert Downey Jr. (pictured above, with Jude Law as Dr. Watson) brought a theretofore-unseen robust athleticism to the character – a quirky action hero for the Victorian Age - in “Sherlock Holmes” and its sequel, “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows,” both directed by Guy Ritchie (the director of the upcoming big-screen reboot of “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”).

Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Dr. Watson (Martin Freeman)
stand outside the famous Baker Street address in the series "Sherlock."

Since 2010, Benedict Cumberbatch, recently nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award for his role as Alan Turing in “The Imitation Game,” has starred in the intermittent BBC series “Sherlock.” Stateside, since 2012, British actor Jonny Lee Miller has played Sherlock Holmes in the CBS series “Elementary” (pictured below), a modern take on Arthur Conan Doyle’s character as a recovering addict and former Scotland Yard consultant who helps the New York City Police Department solve crimes. Lucy Liu plays Dr. Watson as Holmes’ sober coach and apprentice.

And now, just when we’re all pretty much Sherlocked out, filmmakers expect audiences to be entertained by a portrayal of the detective as an infirm beekeeper in “Mr. Holmes.” Mitch Cullin’s novel A Slight Trick of the Mind depicts an elderly, invalid Sherlock Holmes, eager to talk to his housekeeper’s son about his life before he forgets it entirely. The film finds the 93-year-old Holmes (Sir Ian McKellen) living in a remote Sussex farmhouse, where he reflects on his life while writing his journal and contending with the enfeeblement of his once flawless mind. Flashbacks recall past events when he was at the height of his fame.

 

Sir Ian McKellen shares a scene with young Milo Parker in "Mr. Holmes."

“Mr. Holmes” was co-scripted and directed by Bill Condon, who earlier co-scripted and directed the movie musicals “Chicago” and “Dreamgirls.” He also directed the two parts of “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn.” In 1998, Condon wrote and directed “Gods and Monsters,” which featured an Oscar-nominated performance by Ian McKellen as “Frankenstein” director James Whale; Condon’s screenplay won an Academy Award.

“Mr. Holmes” features a cameo by Nicholas Rowe, a Scottish actor who, in 1985, starred in “Young Sherlock Holmes,” executive produced by Steven Spielberg and directed by Barry Levinson, the Oscar-winning director of 1988’s Best Picture winner “Rain Man.”

“Cinderella.’ “Mr. Holmes.” Now comes the fun part in the Moviehouse when we make a connection between fairy tales and the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle.

Doyle’s first wife died in 1906. After a son died from pneumonia as a result of wounds suffered during World War I, the writer sank into a deep depression and sought solace in Spiritualism, a belief that spirits of the dead can communicate with the living. Believing that these spirits have more knowledge than the living, Spiritualists regarded them as reliable sources of moral, ethical, and theological advice. The movement reached its peak growth from the 1840s to the 1920s, and by 1897, Spiritualism had more than eight million followers in the U.S. and Europe, the majority drawn from the middle and upper classes.

Arthur Conan Doyle was also a member of The Ghost Club, a paranormal investigation and research organization founded in London in 1862 whose members included Charles Dickens. As a matter of fact, years before the deaths of his wife and son, Doyle applied to join the Society for Psychical Research, a committee of academics devoted to the study of Spiritualism “without prejudice or prepossession.” Eventually, Doyle abandoned his lucrative literary career in favor of his obsession with Spiritualism, which consumed him in old age.

In 1917, two cousins, 16-year-old Elsie Wright and 9-year-old Frances Griffiths, who lived in the village of Cottingley in West Yorkshire, England, took a series of five photographs purportedly showing real fairies. The pictures attracted the attention of an enthusiastic Arthur Conan Doyle, who interpreted them as irrefutable proof of psychic phenomena and as the existence of invisible beings. He used the photographs to illustrate an article for the Christmas 1920 edition of The Strand Magazine, which also published Doyle’s “Sherlock Holmes” stories.

 

Elsie Wright took this photograph of Frances Griffiths.

Public reaction to the photographs was mixed. Several people believed the pictures had been faked, pointing to the flat appearance of the fairies, their contemporary hairstyles and apparel, and their static poses compared to the blurred background of natural phenomena such as a cascading waterfall.

 

Frances photographed Elsie posing with a winged gnome.

Curiosity in the so-called Cottingley Fairies declined after 1921, but Doyle’s 1922 book The Coming of the Fairies showed that he was still convinced of the authenticity of the five photographs. He reproduced the pictures in the book alongside theories about the nature and existence of fairies and spirits.

In the early 1980s, cousins Elsie and Frances admitted that they faked the photographs, using cardboard cutouts of fairies copied from a popular children’s book. Frances, however, insisted the fifth and final photograph, “Fairies and Their Sun-Bath” (pictured below), was genuine.

The Cottingley Fairies incident inspired a charmingly winning film in 1997, “FairyTale: A True Story,” featuring Peter O’Toole as Arthur Conan Doyle and Harvey Keitel as Doyle’s friend at the time, famous illusionist Harry Houdini. The moviemakers waste little time in presenting the fairies as very real, which is important in this lovely examination of childhood innocence amid an onslaught of prying journalists, trampling tourists, and grownups who “don’t know how to believe.” According to the website Spirituality & Practice, “This astonishing family film salutes the mystery of life.”

Harry Houdini (Harvey Keitel): "Never try to fool children.
They expect nothing and therefore see everything."
(Top) Frances Griffiths (Elizabeth Earl) and (bottom) Elsie Wright
(Florence Hoath) greet two of their friends in "FairyTale: A True Story."

Gorgeous in its attention to period details, the picture (executive produced by Mel Gibson, who appears in an uncredited cameo at movie’s end) was directed by Charles Sturridge, who made the sumptuous 1996 miniseries “Gulliver’s Travels” for Jim Henson Productions and Hallmark Entertainment, starring Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen. Sturridge’s actress wife, Phoebe Nicholls, delivers a heart-aching performance in “FairyTale” as Elsie’s mother, a theosophist who desperately wants to believe in the fairies. Also along for the enchanting journey is the marvelous British character actor Bill Nighy as a somewhat addle-brained lecturer.

Harry Houdini (left) and his portrayer in "FairyTale: A True Story," Harvey Keitel:
Los Angeles Times critic Kevin Thomas noted, "Keitel is flat-out perfect for
Houdini, intellectually and physically."

Harvey Keitel mesmerizes as Houdini, alternately wryly cynical and touchingly kind, especially when he advises the two girls to keep their secrets, as all “masters of illusion” do. On “Wild About Harry,” a website devoted to Houdini, John Cox wrote, “ ‘FairyTale’ is a sweet, well-made family film with two terrific performances by the young leads and a memorable Houdini in Harvey Keitel.”

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Peter O'Toole) meets the Cottingley cousins.

In truth, Houdini was never involved in the Cottingley investigations, but his presence in the film, as portrayed by Keitel, provides a well-played counterpoint to Peter O’Toole’s engaging characterization of Doyle.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini met in 1920.  The friendship between Houdini, a self-made, streetwise son of a Hungarian immigrant, and Doyle, the educated product of a proper Scottish upbringing who was 15 years Houdini’s senior, was itself a mystery.

Before the acrimony, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was happy
to pose with his friend, Harry Houdini.

After his father died in 1892, 18-year-old Houdini attempted a “professional psychic reunion” with the departed. In 1920, seven years after the death of his beloved mother, he went on a six-month tour in Europe, where he attended more than a hundred séances. He deeply wanted to believe in Spiritualism, but he never managed to suspend his disbelief.

Houdini eventually saw it as his duty to debunk psychics and Spiritualists, not unlike modern skeptics The Amazing Randi and Penn & Teller. “Spiritualism is nothing more or less than mental intoxication,” Houdini noted. “Intoxication of any sort when it becomes a habit is injurious to the body, but intoxication of the mind is always fatal to the mind.”

While Houdini continued to expose Spiritualist mediums as frauds, Doyle became convinced that Houdini himself possessed supernatural powers. Doyle believed Houdini performed his stunts via his paranormal abilities, utilizing those same abilities to block those of the mediums he was debunking. Houdini was unable to convince his friend that his feats were simply illusions.

Houdini recorded his debunking accomplishments in the book A Magician Among the Spirits. He even called for a law that would “prevent these human leeches from sucking every bit of reason and common sense from their victims.”

1860s spirit photographer William Mumler took
this picture of the widowed Mary Todd Lincoln
being comforted by her assassinated husband.

Doyle refused to accept any of Houdini’s exposés, and the two had a bitter falling out. As antagonists, Doyle viewed Houdini as a dangerous enemy. In 1922, Harry Price, a British psychical researcher and Spiritualism debunker, accused William Hope, a “spirit photographer” who supposedly captured images of deceased spouses and family members in portraits of the living, of fraud. Doyle came to Hope’s defense and threatened to have Price kicked out of the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, claiming if Price continued to write “sewage” about Spiritualists, he would meet the same fate as Houdini.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle posed for his own spirit photograph.

Postscript:

The Cottingley Fairies Incident inspired another British film from 1997, “Photographing Fairies,” directed by Nick Willing, who made a number of fantasy miniseries for Hallmark, including “Alice in Wonderland,” “Jason and the Argonauts,” and “Tin Man.” Toby Stephens (best known as Bond villain Gustav Graves in 2002’s “Die Another Day” and as Captain Flint in the Starz series “Black Sails”) starred as an early 20^th century cameraman who specializes in trick photography, in a cast that included Ben Kingsley. Arthur Conan Doyle was portrayed by Edward Hardwicke, who played Doyle’s creation, Dr. Watson, opposite Jeremy Brett's Holmes, from 1986, to 1994, on the British series “Sherlock Holmes.”

Edward Hardwicke (right), the son of the venerable stage and screen actor Cedric
Hardwicke (best known as the old Pharaoh in Cecil B. DeMille's "The Ten
Commandments"), succeeded David Burke as Dr. Watson in the "Sherlock Holmes"
TV series on the personal suggestion of Burke.