Englishness and America: Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes

Abstract

The ‘Sherlock Holmes’ series of films, originally produced by Twentieth Century Fox for two period versions in 1939 (both released as headlining movies), and then by Universal, after the series was revived and updated to the contemporary period in 1942, are a curious example of the detective genre. Although the films mainly have a mystery detection format and feature the most famous detective in modern culture, they are also the most variable of the detective series films in their marshalling of generic codes. At times, Holmes is a classical detective engaged in hermeneutic activity, but at others he is a spy-hunter, an active male hero in the manner of the investigative thriller, or a special agent (like Dick Tracy or Bulldog Drummond) in the B-thriller mode, often shifting from one role to another within films as the situation demands. Holmes is as variable in his function as The Saint and encounters a wider variety of criminal types and narrative forms, even if the series also requires him to move through the vaudeville of styles as if he were the unchanging figure announced in the pre-sequence titles of Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror so that he can be used to embody values of permanence and stability in order to tame a shifting and uncertain world. The films often seem to emphasise the relationship between the onscreen personas of Holmes and Watson, as performed by Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, with a focus on the comic incomprehension or blustering buffoonery of the latter, and this also deflects away from the classical form of the detective narrative of ratiocination to create a music- hall or vaudeville version of the detective format in which the mystifications associated with the whodunnit are supplemented and displaced by the comic diversions that Bruce provides.