The third round of Reel to Reel’s Icons project is rapidly approaching, and this time around I’m turning my attention to the original world’s greatest detective, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary creation Sherlock Holmes. Between the recent movies and sudden influx of television shows (to say nothing of appearances in comic books, novels, video games… I could go on and on…) it’s seems like Sherlock Holmes is experiencing a new renaissance. I think it’s possible that Holmes has been played on-screen by more actors than any other character in the whole Icons project, so picking just five interpretations was actually kind of difficult. But I narrowed it down to the following…

• Basil Rathbone: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939)
• Christopher Lee: Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962)
• Robert Stephens: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)
• Matt Frewer: The Case of the Whitechapel Vampire (2002)
• Robert Downey Jr.: Sherlock Holmes (2009)

And for those of you upset that I haven’t included a certain recent British TV production… well, this is technically a movie site, you know. On the other hand, I did include a bonus for Dorothy Gale week…

Let’s talk about just who this sleuth is we’re gonna get down with next week.

The Character:

Sherlock Holmes is a consulting detective, a man of amazing deductive and intuitive gifts. Holmes uses his dizzying intellect to solve the strangest crimes that come to his doorstep, but his genius often serves to set him apart from the rest of humanity. Operating on a level most people cannot conceive, Holmes’s tales are most often related to us by his companion, Dr. John Watson, a war veteran whose skills and talents often prove useful to Holmes as he carries out his tasks, and gives the rest of us a hope of grasping the mind of the legendary sleuth.

I think that’s enough to start with, don’t you? Come by on Monday when we look at a man who did not originate the role of Holmes on screen, but has become so inexorably linked with the character it can be easy to think that he did: Basil Rathbone in The Hound of the Baskervilles.