“Sherlock Holmes” is clearly the movie everyone’s talking about. Some Doyle purists have objected to the obviously high-octane approach used in the current film, arguing that Holmes is a cerebral character who solves problems with his mind. He isn’t the “hard-boiled dick” type that emerged with the popularity of pulp magazines like “Black Mask,” giving rise to characters like Sam Spade and probably epitomized by Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. Yet Doyle’s Holmes was no slouch in hand-to-combat, and Doyle mentions Holmes as having backgrounds in boxing and Japanese martial arts (“The Sign of the Four,” “The Adventure of the Empty House”).
Amazingly, the rumors that Brad Pitt is in “Sherlock Holmes,” opening Christmas day, are still circulating. It seems like rumors have been swirling for ages that Pitt is glimpsed in the shadows of the Guy Ritchie re-imagining of Arthur Conan Doyle’s classic, Victorian detective stories, supposedly laying the groundwork for him to co-star in the sequel as the villainous Professor Moriarty.
On September 24th, a spokesperson for Warner Brothers specifically told me that Brad Pitt does not appear in “Sherlock Holmes,” and was not attached to a sequel at that time. The role of Professor Moriarty, if the character does indeed appear in a sequel, has yet to be cast. Producer Daniel Lim recently told Collider the same thing.
Moriarty was created by Doyle but isn’t all that major a character in the original stories. He was dreamed up by Doyle as a foil who could kill off Holmes when the author got tired of the character and wanted to concentrate on what he considered to be his more important literary endeavors. Doyle and Moriarty failed, as it turned out. Doyle hadn’t even written half his Holmes output when he wrote “The Final Problem,” which was meant at the time to be Holmes’ swan song.
Hollywood made Moriarty a prominent recurring villain in the long series of movies starring Basil Rathbone as the best known Holmes, and Nigel Bruce, who chiseled the concept of an elderly, bumbling Watson in stone. George Zucco, Lionel Atwill and Henry Daniell all played Moriarty in that series.
Interestingly, Boris Karloff, one of the greatest movie villains of all time and who was under contract to Universal during part of the period they were producing the Holmes movies, never played the part. He did appear with Rathbone in the movie “The Tower of London.”
Whether or not Pitt will play Moriarty is an open question. He doesn’t seem natural casting. He isn’t English and although now a legitimately middle-aged man, he looks younger. Hugo Weaving would seem a better choice. Or maybe someone think of digitally resurrecting Karloff and give him the shot at the role he never played but should have.
The villain in the current film is Mark Strong, who was in “RocknRolla” for director Guy Ritchie last year, and has been in no fewer than four films in 2009 alone: “Endgame,” “The Young Victoria,” “The Odds” and “Sherlock Holmes.” He has four films in post-production, including Ridley Scott’s uber-budget “Robin Hood,” is filming “The Guard” and is attached to Pixar’s live-action “John Carter of Mars,” which is scheduled to begin filming next year.




















