Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

I've been trying for several weeks now to figure out what to say about Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. (I hate titles with colons. Don't you? Makes me feel like I'm back in college, reading academic articles.) Anyway, what can I say about this movie? Well, it was very good. It was very well made, artistic, technically sound. It was suspenseful and exciting and it kept my interest throughout. There were moments of great humor. Robert Downey Jr. was magnificent in the lead, as was Jude Law in the number two slot. In short, it was a very good movie and I'd gladly see it again. In fact, I'm seriously considering purchasing both this movie and its predecessor. I just have one niggling little problem with Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. It's not Sherlock Holmes! Let's be blunt about this. Sherlock Holmes was not - I repeat, NOT - and action figure. He didn't go in for fisticuffs, and he especially didn't engage in modern martial arts style kickboxing. Sherlock Holmes was an intellectual detective. He solved crimes not by racing about, fighting, shooting and that sort of thing. In quite a few of his cases, in fact, he scarcely leaves his smokey rooms. Instead, he holes up and ponders the case, sending his Baker Street Irregulars all over the city looking for clues, firing off telegrams to gain information. For Sherlock Holmes, it was always a game of the mind.

So who was a good Sherlock Holmes? Well, Basil Rathbone did a serviceable job in the fourteen Homes films shot in the 1940s, but Rathbone is such a cold fish that it's hard to be sympathetic with his character the way you can be with Downey's. And Nigel Bruce's Watson was a bumbling idiot who couldn't tell which end of the gun the bullet came out of, not anything like Law's passionate, hard-fighting, pistol-wielding Watson. The best Holmes - at least to my mind that is - was Jeremy Bret, a consummate actor who literally made the character his own. Bret's Holmes was intense, cerebral, yet he possessed a compassion for those who were the victims of crimes. When he would pontificate at length on the quality of a piece of paper or a bit of tobacco, you knew you were seeing a master at work, a man who devoted himself to his craft to the exclusion of everything else. And he scarcely needed to use his fists or a gun, because he could talk most criminals into giving themselves up to him peacefully.

But back to our new Holmes. As I say, Downey gives a superb performance as this new, fast-talking, fast-acting Holmes, and there's nothing wrong with that, I guess. Young people today, having been raised on music videos, action films and video games, want a faster-paced, wittier Sherlock Holmes, and Downey and Ritchie give them just that. And Law's Watson is, I suppose, a character more in keeping with someone who was both a doctor and a soldier. And I will give kudos to the set design. Watching A Game of Shadows, you truly get the feeling you are in Victorian England, with its mix of incredible wealth and extreme poverty, luxury and filth, high society and working classes. There's dirt and mud and horse droppings. Everything seems to be under construction - the buildings, the bridges, the streets, all of the landmarks that we associate with Jolly Olde England. And there is a lot of action and gunfire - including one very big gun - and racing about on horseback and people getting thrown off of trains, and all that sort of thing. As I said - the film kept me riveted. I highly recommend it. But once you've seen A Game of Shadows, go grab a copy of Arthur Conan Doyle's work and find out what the "real" Sherlock Holmes was like. You never know. You may find that you prefer the original.

Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows is rated PG and has a runtime of 129 action-packed minutes.

l'Avventura (1960)

What would you do if your best friend disappeared? Search for her? Call the cops? Panic? All of the above? Sure you would. If you were a normal person, that is. But that doesn't happen in Michelangelo Antonioni's l'Avventura (The Adventure). When Anna (Lea Massari) disappears while she and her friends are exploring a tiny island near Sicily, her friends aren't exactly distraught. In fact, it's more like they're simply put out. How dare she go missing? Anna's friend Claudia (Monica Vitti) and her boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) make a half-hearted search for her. They send for the police. Anna's father shows up. Even he's irritated at being called away from his important business for such a tedious matter. Soon, everyone gives up the search and goes home. And before the day is out, Sandro is putting the moves on Claudia. Anna is never found. In fact, she's quickly forgotten, as Sandro and Claudia go in search of fun and pleasure. "What?" you ask. "Can they be so thoughtless?" Well, yes, they can and they are. Claudia and Sandro check into a hotel together. Claudia is tired and wants to go to bed, preferably with Sandro. He, on the other hand, has already started to lose interest in her, and he heads downstairs to join the party that is already in progress. Come morning, Claudia comes downstairs and finds Sandro in the arms of a prostitute. She runs away. He chases her. In the final scene, Sandro sits crunched on a bench facing a stone wall, Claudia stands over him looking out to sea. You don't gotta be Freud to figure that one out.

And really, that's all there is to this movie. Someone goes missing and nobody really cares. Nothing much is done about the disappearance, and no one's especially concerned about that either. We never see, or hear from, Anna again, and no explanation is ever given for her mysterious vanishing act or her closest friends' bizarre behavior following it. Everybody just goes back to their wealthy, idle, bored lives. And in those last three words you have the entire crux of l'Avventura. Wealthy, idle people who are so utterly bored that they can't even raise an emotion when one of their own goes missing. All they can think of is finding something that they think will relieve their boredom. They don't have relationships, because those are apparently too boring; instead, they just have sex, and they try to make that suffice. They have big, empty holes inside of them where their souls are supposed to be. They spend their time grabbing anything that they think will give them pleasure and stuffing it into that empty space trying to fill it up. They might as well try to mop up the ocean with a sponge. Their boredom consumes everything they touch, like some stomach parasite that sucks all of the nutrition out of the food you eat before your body can use it. This is ennui (ahn-wee), a feeling of utter weariness and discontent that results from satiety, when everything and everyone bores you, when nothing in the world holds any interest at all, when you go through your entire life on autopilot.

Antonioni - like Fellini - picked up on the horrendous ennui and alienation that gripped Italy (and the rest of Europe) in the late fifties and early sixties, something that the US is only now having to deal with. A new upper class had emerged, professionals in their thirties and forties with lots of money and lots of time on their hands. They also had lost their moral bearings and were adrift in an endless sea of relativism and agency. They could do what they wanted and their money would protect them. But they were alienated from everything and everyone, even from themselves. They could have sex when and where and with whom they wanted, and never mind the consequences. Antonioni shows us what some of those consequences are as Claudia and Sandro struggle for something meaningful in a world where life itself has lost its meaning.

Gabrielle Ferzetti gives a strong performance as Sandro, striving for something without even knowing what it is. And Monicca Vitti became a superstar on account of her performance as Claudia, who seems to have a slightly better grasp on what's important in life. Even so, she's the one-eyed queen in Sandro's sightless world. And all of this is filmed against that stark, gritty black and white that is the hallmark of Italian cinema. The pacing is slow, deliberate, as Antonioni carefully unwraps the souls of his characters. Dialogue is sparse. This isn't a talky film; its an observational one. Claudia and Sandro are placed in one situation after another, each one fraught with enough ethical dilemmas to keep a first year philosophy class going all semester. Having lost interest in their friend's disappearance, what will the protagonists do next? Will they move on with their lives? Or will they remain trapped in the same tiresome, dead-end existence. If you aren't sure, I direct your attention back to the final image of the film. It speaks volumes without saying a single word. Therein lies Antonioni's genius.

l'Avventura is NOT RATED. While the film has no objectionable scenes, it does deal with adult situations that may not be suitable for children. On the other hand, it's doubtful that children would even sit through the 143-minute running time. You should, though. It's worth every second of it.

The Trouble with Harry (1955)

The trouble with Harry Worp isn't so much that he's dead; it's that no one's quite sure how he died. Or who killed him. Captain Wiles (Edmund Gwenn) thinks he might have shot Harry. Jennifer Rogers (Shirley McClaine in her film debut) hit him over the head. So did Miss Gravely (Mildred Natwick). Sam Marlowe (John Forsythe), a local artist, stumbles upon the body, just as Captain Wiles is trying to drag him into the woods. Sam is sympathetic. He's even willing to help get rid of the corpus delicti. Shovels are procured. The digging begins. Soon Harry is safely tucked away underground. But not for long. When the good captain accounts for all of his bullets and realizes that he didn't shoot Harry, he insists they dig him back up. And so they do. Then Sam meets Jennifer, and it's love at first sight. Jennifer tells Sam that Harry was her husband. She's been trying to get away from him. He's been quite insistent that they stay together. While he was insisting his way into her house, she whacked him over the head, and he stumbled away. Jennifer thinks the hit on the head must have killed Harry. She thinks they should just put him back in the ground and forget about him. So Jennifer and Sam and Captain Wiles bury Harry again. Then Miss Gravely tells the captain that she thinks that she might have killed Harry. He stumbled toward her while she was hiking, grabbing at her, knocking her down. She pulled off her hiking boot and clubbed him over the head with it. She's worried that she killed Harry. She wants him dug back up so that she can go to the police. Sam decides that they need to find out exactly how Harry died first. So they dig him up, clean him up, and call the doctor. He'll tell them how Harry really died. I won't though.

The Trouble with Harry was one of director Alfred Hitchcock's favorite movies, and it's easy to see why. It's and absolutely delightful film; although, American audiences didn't feel that way in 1955. It received poor reviews here. Europe received it better. The film ran for a year in England and Italy, for a year and a half in France. This is not a fast-paced movie, filled with intrigue and chase scenes and shoot-outs and explosions. It's a deliberate film that takes its time unfolding its story. The Trouble with Harry is more about the characters than it is about the crime, and the characters are wonderful. Sam is a bohemian artist who doesn't give a fig for conventions. Captain Wiles talks of his life sailing the world when in fact he was merely a tug boat captain on the East River. Miss Gravely is a middle-aged spinster who proves that you're never too old to fall head-over-heels in love. And Jennifer is a quirky young mother who wants to live her life in her own way. All four of these are brought together over the corpse of Jennifer's husband. The Technicolor cinematography brings the beautiful New Hampshire countryside to life. Interestingly, after the long exterior shots were filmed, the weather turned bad, so the rest of the filming had to be done on a sound stage. The crew collected as many of the Autumn leaves as they could and shipped them back to Hollywood, where they were painstakingly glued onto artificial trees to capture the feel of a New Hampshire Autumn. If you're in the mood for a quirky, romantic murder mystery, this one should fill the bill. Call it a black comedy or a morbid romance. Either way, The Trouble with Harry is a great movie.

The Trouble with Harry is rated G. Running time is 99 minutes.