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Detectives - The Speckled Band
episode 1.8
Sherlock Holmes - The Speckled Band
UK 1964
produced by David Goddard for BBC
directed by Robin Midgley
starring Douglas Wilmer, Nigel Stock, Felix Felton, Liane Aukin, Marion Diamond, Donald Douglas, Mary Holder, Nan Marriott-Watson
screenplay by Giles Cooper, based on a story by Arthur Conan Doyle, music by Max Harris
TV-series Detectives, Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock Holmes - 1960's BBC, Sherlock Holmes (Douglas Wilmer)
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Two years ago, Helen's (Liane Aukin) sister Julia (Marion Diamond) has
died of undetermined causes, just days before her wedding, but Helen is
certain her stepfather Roylott (Felix Felton) had something to do with it.
Now Helen herself is going to marry, and Roylott insists that she sleeps
in the room where her sister has died for her last few days at home. Helen
is sure her stepdad is trying to murder her, but has no idea how, and the
only clue that her sister has left her are the words "the speckled
band". With all of this, Helen turns to Sherlock Holmes (Douglas
Wilmer), who, when examining the room Julia has died in detects a
ventilation shaft leading to Roylott's room - and thus asks Helen to let
him and his associate Watson (Nigel Stock) secretly stay in her room for
the night. At night, a snake - a swamp adder, the deadliest snake in
India, which indeed looks like a speckled band - tries to make its way
into the room via the airshaft, but Holmes sends it back to where it came
from, Roylott's room, where it bites Roylott to death, who has sent the
snake over in the first place to kill Helen, whose fortune he was hoping
to inherit. Ultimately, Holmes, having solved the case, hushes the whole
thing up - because ultimately he has (if out of self-defense) killed
Roylott ... Not the best Sherlock Holmes movie
ever made perhaps, but a quite ok adaptation nevertheless, moving along
quite swiftly and to-the-point. Originally made as an episode of the
series Detectives, this was eventually spun off into a
series of its own with Douglas Wilmer and later Peter Cushing as Sherlock
Holmes.
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