Cheap Sherlock Holmes - The Master Blackmailer (DVD) (Peter Hammond) Price

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Customer Reviews of Sherlock Holmes - The Master Blackmailer

Holmes the human -- almost.
THE MASTER BLACKMAILER is arguably the best of the five feature-length Sherlock Holmes films made by Grenada TV. It lacks the convolutions of THE LAST VAMPYRE, the occasional sluggishness of the THE SIGN OF FOUR, the weird mystical elements of the THE ELIGIBLE BACHELOR, and the overly experimental cinemetography that undermined the otherwise excellent HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES. The story shoves Holmes out of his comfort zone of cold deductive reasoning and poses with brutal frankness the old Nietzscheian question: 'How many lines can the hero cross before he becomes a villain himself?' <
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>BLACKMAILER pits Jeremy Brett's Holmes Edward Hardwicke's Watson against <
>Charles Augustus Milverton, their most formiddable opponent since Professor Moriarity. As the name suggests, Milverton, played with sniggering, loathsome villainy by Robert Hardy, makes his living obtaining compromising information about London's elite and threatening to ruin them unless paid fortunes in hush money. His long history of blackmail has left a wreckage-trail of scandal and suicide all over Victorian England, but his precautions are so thorough, and his intelligence so keen, that his victims have no choiue but to pay up or endure the consequences. <
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>When Lady Eva Brackenwell becomes Milverton's next target, however, she employs Holmes to recover old love letters which, if made public, will foil her upcoming marriage to a young lord. And herein lies the story's main departure from formula: instead of a conventional mystery for the consulting detective, we have a problem better suited to a noirish private investigator. How can Holmes prevent a master blackmailer from spilling his illicit goods with the wedding only a few days away? <
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>The late and extremely great Jeremy Brett always played Holmes as being either a bit less or a bit more than human depending on his mood and the case at hand -- he was often ill-tempered, arrogant, bad-mannered, and insensitive to the point of cruelty, and even in his best moments he seemed to be approximating human feelings rather than actually experiencing them; yet he was also courageous, brilliant, dogged, loyal, and imbued with a fierce sense of justice and a terrifying resolve to see the mystery solved and the evildoer punished. It is this last category that the writers chose to explore in BLACKMAILER, in which an increasingly desperate and frustrated Holmes finds himself posing as a plumber and seducing (in chaste Victorian fashion) Milverton's naive housekeeper, Agatha, so as to gain access to Milverton's home. To what extent Holmes feels anything for Agatha, if at all, is unclear, but Brett's subtle acting shows that while Holmes may not be capable of experiencing affection, he is certainly capable of feeling shame -- shame encouraged by a disgusted Watson, whose gentlemanly sense of honor is revolted at this ultraMachiavellian move. <
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>Hardy's Milverton, far from being a foil for Holmes' genius, proves to be a full match for our hero, who grows to hate his antagonist and finally throws aside the subtleties of espionage for brute force and thievery. The story's resolution, one of the most violent in the history of the series, is simultaneously satisfying and humbling -- in the end, Holmes and Watson serve as little more than accessories after the fact to the world's most unlikely vigilante. The only real down note in the whole production was the decision by the director to edit Inspector Lestrade's role in the story to a glorified cameo -- a potentially classic scene where he is talking to Holmes and Watson about a crime without realizing he is talking to its perpetrators unfortunately did not make the final cut. <
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>THE MASTER BLACKMAILER stands as one of the more disturbing and poignent of all the Grenada TV Holmes outings. Normally it is Holmes who gives the lecture and those around him who are the pupils. Here, it is the detective who learns one of the hardest of life's lessons -- that the means used to defeat evil are often as bad as the evil itself. <
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not as good as "sign or Hound of the baskerville" however
If you're a Brett fan you have only so many choices. The master blackmailer, filmed late in his career, still holds up. It's a nice story with Holmes flirting, in disguise, with the scullary maid. And outwitting the master Blackmailer. <
>It's better then The Eligible Bachelor and The Last Vampyre but the best two hour productions are The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Sign of Four.