After reading some reviews in Video Watchdog, I've decided to revisit the Granada Sherlock Holmes series on DVD. I remember some of them from PBS in the eighties but the only one I had seen more recently was their "Hound of the Baskervilles" which I thought was rather dull compared to the Hammer adaptation (still meaning to revisit the Rathbone-Bruce version - is this on DVD in R1?).
"A Scandal in Bohemia" features Gayle Hunnicutt as "the woman" Irene Adler who is in possession of a photograph of herself and the prince of Bohemia that he would very much like to get back before his wedding. Although this is the first episode, everything seems to be in place. Brett's Holmes is a fully realized character. Hunnicutt's Irene Adler is also a three dimensional character even though she is mostly seen in flashback during the first half of the episode but demonstrates her intelligence and complexity in what's left of the episode in her interactions with Holmes. David Burke's characterization of Watson seems a little less focused but it becomes apparent in the next few episodes that its intentional as he awkwardly mediates the interaction between an abrupt Holmes and his clients and trying to anticipate Holmes' reactions to his own remarks. Mrs. Hudson has more to do in some episodes than in others.
"The Dancing Men" is another fine adaptation (although I'd brushed up on "Scandal", I didn't read this story again before seeing this one). I don't have much to say about this one because it just worked for me (although British actors doing American accents always seem less convincing to me on British shows than in American ones).
"The Naval Treaty" isn't as interesting and is let down by being a bit too faithful to the original story (I assume) in rendering the confrontation between Holmes and the villain in flashback at the end rather than taking a more linear approach (also the fight is depicted as firelit shadows on the wall in an unconvincingly "arty" fashion).
"The Solitary Cyclist" finds a young woman coming to Holmes because she's being stalked on her bike rides between her post as a music teacher at a manor house and the train station (she goes to see her mother on the weekends). Her employer is a man returned from South Africa who delivered the news that her only other living relative - an uncle - died in poverty. He offers her double the going rate for her to instruct his daughter. Another younger associate from South Africa has more overtly sinister motives. Although it was obvious that the woman's inheritance was being concealed from her, I must admit that I didn't guess the identity of the cyclist until late in the episode. Holmes gets to demonstrate some boxing moves and the action is more convincingly choreographed and filmed than in the previous episodes.
I borrowed an MPI disc with four episodes of the first series. Is this an early MPI DVD? Like their TURN OF THE SCREW, I noticed the subtitling was extremely poor. Not only were their misspellings but other errors (the word fiancé is rendered as fianc;;). Did something go wrong in the authoring or did MPI use some bad OCR text recognition on what I'm guessing are subtitles from an R2 release without bothering to proof the subs?
The disc I borrowed was apparently a separate release from the box set but according to imdb, these are the first four episodes. I was planning on renting the rest from Netflix. Is this four episode disc the same as the first disc in the set? In other words, can I start with renting disc 2 and not miss an episode or two?