News

Sean Wilson Jan 16, 2017

From the BBC's Sherlock, through Disney, Hans Zimmer and Young Sherlock Holmes: we salute the music of Mr Holmes...

Few characters have enjoyed as much reinvention as Arthur Conan Doyle's sleuth Sherlock Holmes, an enduring icon who is as much bound up with the history of cinema (and indeed stage, TV and radio) as he is with literature. Indeed, adaptations of Holmes stories stretch right the way back to the earliest days of film at the start of the 20th century. Fittingly enough given Holmes' penchant for a violin serenade, the musical scores to his adventures are as richly varied as the outcomes to his mysteries are unexpected. Here are Holmes' musical highlights, from Buster Keaton through to Benedict Cumberbatch.

Sherlock Jr. (1924)

Not, strictly speaking, a Sherlock movie but as the title implies, the legacy of the character casts a long shadow over Buster Keaton's silent classic.

'Sherlock Holmes' movie found at Cinémathèque Française (image: William Gillette in 'Sherlock Holmes') Sherlock Holmes, a long-thought-lost 1916 feature starring stage performer and playwright William Gillette in the title role, has been discovered in the vaults of the Cinémathèque Française. Directed by the all-but-forgotten Arthur Berthelet for the Chicago-based Essanay production company, the approximately 90-minute movie is supposed to be not only the sole record of William Gillette's celebrated performance as Arthur Conan Doyle's detective, but also the only surviving Gillette film.* In the late 19th century, William Gillette himself wrote the play Sherlock Holmes, which turned out to be a mash-up of various stories and novels featuring the detective, chiefly the short stories "A Scandal in Bohemia" and "The Final Problem." ("May I marry Holmes?" Gillette, while vying for the role, telegraphed Conan Doyle. The latter replied, "You may marry or murder or do What you like with him.