Sherlock Holmes in the Great Murder Mystery

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Movie
Original title Sherlock Holmes in the Great Murder Mystery
Country of production United States
Publishing year 1908
Rod
Director unknown
script unknown
production Crescent Film Co. , Brooklyn , New York
camera unknown
occupation
  • unknown

Sherlock Holmes in the Great Murder Mystery is an American B / W silent film by an unknown director from 1908. The now- lost film is considered the first film adaptation of a subject by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe .

Detective and plot

Holmes and Watson instead of Dupin and first-person narrators

Although the main parts of the plot of the film are clearly borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe's 1841 crime story The Double Murder in Rue Morgue , the protagonist of the film is not, as in Poe's case, the noble French private detective C. Auguste Dupin with his sidekick , the nameless first-person narrator , but rather the Sherlock Holmes by the British detective writer Arthur Conan Doyle , which was only created almost 50 years later , who in turn was led by Dr. Watson is accompanied. The "template" for Sherlock Holmes was Poe's Dupin. In Holmes' first case, A Study in Scarlet , from 1888, Holmes and Dr. Watson even about Edgar Allan Poe and his character Dupin.

action

Advance notice of the film in the film magazine The Moving Picture World of November 21, 1908.

A gorilla (in Poe's short story it's an orangutan ) is in a cage on a ship lying in port. The monkey breaks out and is pursued by its owner, the ship's captain. However, this initially fails to recapture the animal. The monkey escapes into a house where, after a short fight, it kills a young woman. Only now does the captain manage to catch the animal again and take it back to the ship. After the crime is discovered, the police arrest the victim's fiancé as the suspect .

Dr. Watson alerts Holmes to the crime reported in the newspaper. Holmes and Watson take out the crime scene in appearances . After returning to their shared apartment, Holmes, lost in thought, grabs his violin and begins to play. Immediately he falls into a trance in which he sees various crime scenes, but only one of which - namely that of an erupted gorilla that Holmes had already learned about - is the actual sequence of events.

After Holmes finally succeeds in tracking down the animal and its owner , he convinces the captain to rush with him to the court where the fiancé has just been sentenced to death by hanging . Holmes arrives just in time to rescue the innocent convict thanks to the abundance of evidence he can produce.

analysis

Sherlock Holmes in the Great Murder Mystery was the third film in the young US film industry to feature Sherlock Holmes as the protagonist and was made while Arthur Conan Doyle was still alive. In 1900 Sherlock Holmes Baffled , a 1-minute animated film, was shot, and in 1905 The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes . The approximately 800 ft. Long third film was released in US cinemas on November 27, 1908, so it can be assumed that the film producers planned to present it to the public shortly before Poe's 100th birthday, January 19, 1909 .

Even this early adaptation of a work by Edgar Allan Poe for a film shows the typical features that the makers of future "Poe films" used as a guide:

  • Takeover of the plot from the original, whereby the development in the film is based on the original;
  • Combination of Poe work contents with those of other authors;
  • Embedding Poesch's motifs in a broader narrative context .

literature

  • Don G. Smith: The Poe Cinema. A Critical Filmography of Theatrical Releases Based on the Works of Edgar Allan Poe. McFarland & Company, Jefferson, NC and London 1999, ISBN 978-0-786404537 , p. 7
  • Eva-Maria Warth: The Haunted Palace. Edgar Allan Poe and the American horror film (1909–1969). (= Volume 3 of CROSSROADS. Studies in American Culture. ) Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Trier 1990 ( plus dissertation, University of Tübingen 1988), ISBN 3-922031-03-X .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Don G. Smith: The Poe Cinema. P. 7
  2. ↑ a b c Phil Hardy (Ed.): The BFI Companion to Crime. University of California Press, Berkeley / Los Angeles 1997, ISBN 0-520-21538-9 , p. 168.
  3. ^ Don G. Smith: The Poe Cinema. P. 287.
  4. ^ Fredrick S. Frank, Anthony Magsitrale: The Poe Encyclopedia. Greenwood Press, Westport 1997, ISBN 0-313-27768-0 , p. 103.
  5. ↑ A Study in Scarlet / Part 1 / Chapter 2 The Science of Deduction on wikisource.org.
  6. ↑ Summary in The Moving Picture World Vol. 3, no. 22, November 28, 1908 S. 434-435.
  7. ↑ The Moving Picture World Vol. 3, no.21, November 21, 1908, p. 412 .
  8. ^ Eva-Maria Warth: The Haunted Palace. Pp. 50-51.