Paul Evans It falls on Sherlock Holmes to take out Charles Augusts Milverton, The Master Blackmailer who sits like a spider in the middle of a web, a particularly nasty and deceitful individual who uses spies to obtain the dirt on his wealthy victims.The book is a good one, but the out and out brilliance of Robert Hardy makes Milverton one of the best remembered villains from the Jeremy Brett era of Sherlock Holmes. He plays him with truth, and a degree of downright villainy seldom seen. He is cold and chilling. Brett and Hardwicke combine beautifully, there is a sense of tension and urgency in their performances. Holmes's romancing with Aggie are well worth a look, as are his disguises. Worth noting that The Dowager, played by Gwen Ffrangcon Davies was over 100 years old when this was made.Beautifully produced, the surroundings are glorious, and the costumes are first rate, it looks exquisite. Full of suspense, mystery and villainy. This is a slick production, one of the very best, an ending you cannot help but enjoy, love it. 9/10

sissoed I am a longtime fan of the hour-long Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes dramatizations, but the three longer ones I have seen -- this one, The Sign of Four, and The Hound of the Baskervilles -- have left me disappointed. I was going to give this one a pretty negative review, until I went on-line and read the original story, Charles Augustus Milverton. The faults are almost all in the original, which Doyle wrote in 1904 and which feels pretty rushed and mechanical. Holmes does hardly any deducing or reasoning in this, but then he doesn't in the original, either. The dramatists have done an excellent job in creating a new foreground story and interweaving the central blackmail plot from the original story into several other blackmail plots. They have also developed the Watson character much more, and have fleshed-out Holmes' romance-in-disguise with the housemaid (the ever-excellent Sophie Thompson). Robert Hardy gives a masterful performance as the villain. As to the core scenes of the original story -- they are all here, practically verbatim. A pet peeve of mine is when dramatists take a classic character from literature and in an attempt to modernize and flesh-out the character, have the character do and say things that contradict the values of the original character. I thought that a bit of that had happened in this version, but again -- the Holmes here is the Holmes in the original story. It seemed to me that Holmes here was a bit too quick to go along with the lady's desire to hide the embarrassing letters from her about-to-be husband. After all, she wrote the letters, so doesn't the groom have a fair claim, at least, not to be deceived about his future wife? If the letters are really not so embarrassing, but the groom would terminate the wedding anyway, doesn't that tell us that perhaps he isn't so very suitable? That maybe this marriage should not happen? Is she really marrying the man for money and title, and not for love? The Holmes in the earlier stories would at least have given some thought to these questions, and the Doyle who wrote the earlier stories would have re-shaped his plot to answer all these concerns. But not in this story. While the dramatists did a good job in expanding the story, it would have been even better had they expanded it by developing the moral and romantic issues in the impending marriage that the original story overlooked.

tedg An earlier comment of mine was deleted by a complaint from a blackmailing reader, who threatened me to go more lightly on his pet world.This was never a great Holmes story. It is of the "take action and disguise self" branch of the Conan Doyle tree. I much prefer the scientist who deduces, ideally deducing what's going on the master criminal's mind.Here, the story structure has four women whose lives are touched by the bad guy. They are the center of the thing, these four, not Holmes, and every sequence is set up to illuminate them not the detective. Two are women who have been successfully blackmailed. One (the redhead) not yet. The fourth sets a kind of symmetry as she is employed by the criminal and exploited emotionally not by him, but by Holmes. These four are mirrored by other women and men dressed as women in a portrayal of a sort of survivalist London underground.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

smokehill retrievers I tend to look askance at departures from Doyle's sacred writings, but the additions in this film were well-chosen and done well. Those of us who have most of the Holmes canon mostly memorized tend to forget that for many viewers this may be their first exposure to Holmes, Watson and the foggy streets of Victorian London. A bit more atmosphere and additional plot may be a good introduction for newcomers to the Foggy Fables.The large body of work left by Brett and his associates is, I believe, the best and most faithful Holmes films so far.