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Sherlock Holmes - Das gefleckte Band
episode 1
West Germany 1967
produced by WDR
directed by Paul May
starring Erich Schellow, Paul Edwin Roth, Andreas Blum, Margot Medicus (as Margot Philipp), Astrid Frank, Manja Kafka, Fritz Tillmann, Annemarie Schlaebitz, Kurt Wendolin
screenplay by Giles Cooper, based on the short story The Adventure of the Speckled Band by Arthur Conan Doyle, music by Rolf A. Wilhelm
TV-series Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes (Erich Schellow), Sherlock Holmes in Germany
review by Mike Haberfelner
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It's been a year ago since Julia Stoner (Margot Medicus) died under
mysterious circumstances at the manor where she and her sister Helen
(Astrid Frank) lived with their strict and eccentric stepdad Dr. Roylott
(Fritz Tillmann), only days before her marriage. Now shortly before her
death, Julia complained about hearing weird sounds from Roylott's room,
which was right next to hers. Now Helen is engaged to Percy Armitage
(Andreas Blum), and for some trumped up reasons, Roylott moves her into
her deceased sister's room, where she hears the same weird noises Julia
heard the days before her death - something disquieting enough for her to
turn to Sherlock Holmes (Erich Schellow) and Dr. Watson (Paul Edwin Roth)
for help, much to the dismay of Roylott, who threatens Holmes should he
dare to intervene ... which only convinces Holmes there's something going
on, so he and Watson sneak into Julia's bedroom that night, investigate
and find out there's a small tunnle between her and her stepdad's room,
and soon enough a snake's coming through that tunnle, apparently intended
to bite Helen (who's supposed to sleep in the room) to death, but Holmes
chases the animal back through the tunnle where it bites Roylott to death
instead. Turns out Roylott had killed Julia and also wanted to kill Helen
because of their inheritance, and wanted to commit murder by poisonous
snake (the titular speckled band) as it was something he's sure local
physicians couldn't identify and would thus suggest a common heart attack
(as was the case with Julia). As it is, when in the 1960s
German television wanted to run the BBC's
Sherlock Holmes series starring Douglas Wilmer and later Peter
Cushing, they for some reasons could not obtain the rights to dub the
series but did get the rights to the screenplays and thus chose 6 of the
British series for their own show, starting with The
Speckled Band, also the first of the original series - which to be
quite honest was not the best choice, as Arthur Conan Doyle's source story
isn't one of his better efforts as it gives away way too many clues too
soo, and the script remains too close to Doyle's story and thus feels a
bit padded to get to its roughly an hour length, which isn't helped at all
by the fact that the direction is very functional and stagey, owed to the
fact that the series was recorded (mostly) on tape that couldn't be edited
afterwards, and thus everything's a bit too factual - apart from the scene
when Holmes and Watson actually face the snake, which is a nice piece of
very cinematic suspense. As for Erich Schellow's Sherlock Holmes, he seems
a little too cold, too factual to really strike a chord, but in his
defense, he reportedly wanted to play the character much edgier, but
director Paul May opted for a squeaky clean Holmes for maximum TV appeal
instead.
In all, an interesting document of yesteryear's TV for sure, but hardly a
masterpiece in its own right.
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