Sherlock Holmes - The Sign Of Four / Blue Carbuncle [DVD]

I was surprised that Peter Cushing admited to being part of this. Terrible production, Awful acting' This adaption is astonishingly bad

I love Cushing but these episodes are boring (sorry)

Rubbish

AS much as I like Cushing, the production values are poor by BBC standards. Nevertheless Peter gives a good depiction of the great detective.

Two very good stories well acted and well directed could not go wrong

What do you expect from a Holmes story. Better than Basil.

The Sign of Four is a very strange story that reflects the exoticism of life in London at the end of the 19th century. A father could disappear in no time leaving a daughter behind. A messenger could reappear later in life and cause no surprise. A present could have come every year to the girl and no one would have found it bizarre. A quite normal Englishman would live in a Hindu temple in a street of semi-detached brick houses without anyone saying anything, nor by the way seeing anything either. Some Polynesian dwarf could run around half naked in the cold streets and that would look normal and a man with a wooden leg trampling the avenues of the city would be just everyday humdrum news. Not to speak of all the boats going up and down the Thames as if it were a free passage between nowhere and nowhere else. That's the atmosphere created in this story and the poor daughter who would like to get the treasure of her father, what about her? Not much except that the promise is strong enough for her to do something about it. But will it be too late? Never with Sherlock Holmes but at times his sense of justice is quite different from ours and lying at the bottom of the Thames seems a decent prospect to a gentleman like him.The blue Carbuncle is another story entirely. Here Conan Doyle, Sir if you please Sir thank you, is settling his accounts with the aristocracy and at the same time with some mediocre intellectual, or what he calls an intellectual. The noble lady is a guano pack of macaroni in the middle of a three thousand old China service dish from some Chinese Emperor. She stinks and radiates high heavens her down-treading and forbidding hatred for those who are not at her entire service without asking the slightest question and for her no one is worth not serving her. Every instant of hers and her blue carbuncle, that was recently laid as an egg by a big Christmas poultry, become on the screen poisonous arrows thrown at this blind aristocracy that is not even selfish since for them there is no one else but them. How can they in anyway look down upon people who do not exist. Then you have the top servants of these aristocrats managing the service institution these noble people haunt. Those are selfish because they want to appropriate something that is not theirs but by having some innocent accused in their place. With these Sherlock Holmes is obnoxious with condescendence. And finally there are the little honest ones Sherlock Holmes likes so much and the reward for the carbuncle will go to one of these though this reward is worth what they earn in ten or fifteen years. And they will go on working like every other day because working is their life and money is more a hindrance than a comfort.Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne, University Paris 8 Saint Denis, University Paris 12 Créteil, CEGID