Summary
Between 1920 and 1923, British cinema distilled the very ether of Conan Doyle’s London into forty-five crystalline vignettes: gaslit labyrinths where Eille Norwood’s razor-thin silhouette slices through fog like a scalpel, Hubert Willis’s Watson hovers two steps behind, heart forever caught in throat. Each one-reeler is a pocket-watch universe—ticking, ticking—until a cocaine-bright epiphany snaps the mainspring: a deranged beggar who is also a country squire, a dying detective play-acting demise with Hamlet-level bravura, a Cornish clifftop inferno that turns blood to copper. The celluloid itself seems impregnated with 221B’s pipe smoke; every iris-in feels like a cautious eyelid closing over chaos.
Synopsis
45 Sherlock Holmes silent short films made between 1920-23 in Great Britain. See individual entries for "The Man With the Twisted Lip", "The Dying Detective", "The Devil's Foot"; "The Copper Beaches".
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