Sherlock1916Sherlock Holmes (Flicker Alley, Blu-ray+DVD) – The 1916 Sherlock Holmes was not the first film based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective but it is by all accounts the first Holmes feature and in many ways it remains the most important Holmes film ever made. It’s an adaptation of the popular stage play written and produced by William Gillette, who drew his script from a collection of Holmes tales with the blessing of Doyle. Gillette toured England and the U.S. in the title role for years before hanging it up but revived the play one final time 1915. It was a smash on Broadway and Gillette took it on tour, ending up in Chicago where the Essanay Film Company struck a deal to bring the stage play to the big screen and bring Gillette’s signature performance before the cameras in a cast featuring both his roadshow actors and members of the Essanay stock company.

We’re not talking resurrected masterpiece here, mind you, but it is a fine piece of filmmaking and an entertaining feature from an era when features were still finding their form. More importantly, it is the sole film performance of William Gillette, a stage legend in his own right and the first definitive Sherlock Holmes, as conferred upon him by both audiences and the author Doyle himself. His interpretation not only informed the performances that followed but the screen mythology itself. Gillette elevated Moriarty from minor Doyle character to defining nemesis (and in some ways anticipated Lang’s Dr. Mabuse), gave Holmes his signature curved pipe, and added the term “elementary” to his repertoire. In other ways his version is unlike the Holmes of the page or later screen versions. He’s a cultivated patrician in elegant evening clothes and dressing robes before donning the signature deerstalker cap and familiar tools of the trade, he falls in love, and he even marries (with Doyle’s blessing).

Above all, Gillette’s Holmes is dignified, observant, committed, and courageous as he outsmarts kidnappers and stalks Moriarty to his underground liar, and Gillette’s screen presence is defining and commanding. He dominates the film, which is directed by Arthur Berthelet with rudimentary but effective staging and pacing. There’s something of a factory quality to the production but the performances enliven the film. Not just Gillette but the entire supporting cast, from his touring company players taking the roles of his support team to Essanay’s actors as Moriarty and his henchmen. Compared to John Barrymore’s 1922 Sherlock Holmes, also based on Gillette’s play, Gillette’s portrait of the detective is, well, more Holmesian in both temperament and action. Barrymore plays it big and broad. Gillette lets his stern gaze and stony face suggest the genius at work.

The film was long assumed lost until original materials of the 1920 French release, which was divided into four serialized chapters but otherwise apparently uncut, were discovered in the collection of the Cinemateque Française. The restoration premiered in early 2015, nearly 100 years after its debut.

The film makes its home video debut on a beautifully-mastered Blu-ray and DVD combo edition mastered from the restored elements at a corrected 20 frames per second and accompanied by an original score composed and performed by Neil Brand, Gunther Buchwald, and Frank Bockius.

The three disc edition is filled with supplements. Restoration producer Robert Byrne presents “From Lost to Found: Restoring William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes,” a recording of his presentation at the 2015 San Francisco Silent Film Festival. There are three archival Holmes-related shorts: Sherlock Holmes Baffled (1900), the earliest known film appearance of Sherlock Holmes; A Canine Sherlock (1912), a comic short with Spot the Dog playing detective; and Piu forte che Sherlock Holmes (1913), a trick film from Italy. All three shorts feature scores by Cliff Retallick. There are also new HD masters of two archival newsreel shorts from the Fox Movietone Collection—an interview with Arthur Conan Doyle and outtakes from a 1930 broadcast with William Gillette showing off his amateur railroad—and galleries of stills from the 1899 stage production and lobby cards and fliers from the film release.

All these extras are on both the Blu-ray and DVD editions in the set but two supplements are available solely DVD: a PDF typescript of the 1899 Sherlock Holmes play by William Gillette and a PDF of the original contract between William Gillette and the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company

An accompanying 20-page booklet features essays by William Gillette expert S.E. Dahlinger, film historian and Baker Street Irregular Russell Merritt (who was an advisor on the restoration), restoration producer Robert Byrne, and composer Neil Brand. You can read a longer version of Merritt’s essay, covering the history of the film and its restoration, at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival website.

DiaryLostGirlDiary of a Lost Girl (Kino Classics, Blu-ray, DVD) – Louise Brooks, an icon of the silent era today, was merely a bright, vivacious supporting player in Hollywood when German master G.W. Pabst brought her to Germany to star in his classic Pandora’s Box, one of the great films of the German silent era. In Diary of a Lost Girl, their second and last collaboration, she plays Thymian, a naïve, wide-eyed innocent impregnated by her father’s assistant and sent to a repressive reform school by a family that spurns her for her fall from innocence. No better than a prison, it is so spirit-crushing that she escapes and drifts into prostitution.

Brooks is an original: her performance is refreshingly free from actorly technique, and her sweetness and sincerity radiates from her very presence. She can even make prostitution seem like a noble profession the way she innocently creates joy with games and good cheer at the high class bordello. While this lacks the dramatic power of the brilliant Pandora’s Box, it remains a beautiful and masterfully made social drama. More poetic realism than grim expressionism, Pabst’s sour portrayal of class prejudice and hypocrisy is enlivened by the luminescence of la Brooks.

The film was censored upon its original release and for years available only in an edited version. The Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Stiftung produced a restoration a few years ago with the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna in Italy, creating a new negative that incorporated newly discovered footage from archives around Europe. Among the 15 minutes of restored footage is (among other scenes) a seven-minute “dance lesson” by Brooks in the brothel, who strips down to loose tights and joyously stretches out as her lascivious “student” drools, thinking it all a game. Other restorations include more footage in the reform school, the negotiation for her father’s pharmacy, and a scene where a man from Thymian’s past propositions her on the beach.

The Blu-ray debut is mastered from archival 35mm elements restored by the Cineteca del Comune di Bologna in Italy in association with the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau Stiftung in Wiesbaden, Germany. New to this edition is commentary by Thomas Gladysz, film historian and director of the Louise Brooks Society, and a promotional trailer from 2015. Carried over from the earlier DVD release is the 1930 short sound comedy Windy Riley Goes to Hollywood, starring Brooks with Jack Shutta and directed by Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle under the pseudonym William Goodrich.

SpartacusrestoredSpartacus: Restored Edition (Universal, Blu-ray) – Hired gun Stanley Kubrick and producer/star Kirk Douglas clashed mightily over this blood-and-thunder drama and came up with one of Hollywood’s most intelligent historical epics. Douglas is fine as the steely eyed, clench-jawed slave who rebels against his tormentors and leads his people on a bid for freedom (think of a Moses without God on his team), but Charles Laughton and Peter Ustinov steal the film in their scenes. Kubrick later disowned the film but gave his blessing to the 1991 reconstruction that restored slivers of censored violence, lost dramatic scenes, and the notorious “snails and oysters” exchange between Laurence Olivier’s lascivious senator and blue-eyed boy slave Tony Curtis.

The film has seen numerous disc editions but the 50th Anniversary Edition that Universal released a few years back was a serious disappointment, mastered from an old HD master and worked over with digital noise reduction technology that removed detail. This new Restored Edition has been freshly restored in HD from original film elements and it is a vibrant

New to this release is a “I Am Spartacus: A Conversation with Kirk Douglas,” a new nine-minute interview with Douglas (he had a stroke years ago and his speech is a little slurred but his mind is sharp), and a nine-minute featurette on the new restoration, which is based on the 1991 reconstruction but remastered with sophisticated digital technology unavailable in 1991. Carried over from the previous edition is a couple of deleted scenes, 1960 interviews with Jean Simmons and Peter Ustinov, behind-the-scenes “gladiatorial school” footage, five vintage newsreels and five image galleries

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