Basil Rathbone’s first of three different Moriartys, George Zucco in 1939’s The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, remains one of my personal favorites, and not just because the film was the first Holmes one I’d seen.
The epigraph sets the stage for a movie where the Holmes-Moriarty duel is front and center. The viewer is treated to an excerpt of Holmes’s journal, while a haunting tune, that would later prove a key to a murder mystery, plays in the background: “In all my life I have encountered only one man whom I can truthfully call the very Genius of Evil—Professor Moriarty. For eleven years he has eluded me. All the rest who have opposed him are dead. He is the most dangerous criminal England has ever known.”
(In yet another inexplicable, unnecessary departure from Canon—albeit less egregious than tampering with the dog in the nighttime classic line in the Christopher Plummer Silver Blaze—the signed entry is dated 1894, three years after the Reichenbach duel of the Canon.)
This opening spells out explicitly the immensity of the challenge before Holmes, who has tried to bring the professor to book for over a decade2, a reasonable extrapolation from the Final Problem’s duration of the battle—“For years I have endeavored to break through the veil which shrouded it.” And the first scene gets right to it—we see a bearded and bespectacled Moriarty in the dock for murder, acquitted moments before Holmes rushes in too late to present his proof that the crucial alibi—giving a lecture before numerous members of the Royal Society, is a fabrication. (Sherlockian film historians have revealed that the explanation for how such an alibi could have been faked was included in the original script, but this is a case where speculating about how Moriarty pulled it off is better than reading what the writers actually came up with.)
We should stop here to note that the Canonical Moriarty would seem to never need an alibi—he’s a planner, not an executioner, or as T.S. Eliot put it in “Macavity, the Mystery Cat,” “And whatever time the deed took place—MACAVITY WASN’T THERE!” He wouldn’t get his hands bloody—one of the unresolved issues for me from the Canon is why the Professor, who is not a physically imposing man, and who knew of Holmes’s self-defense prowess, resorted to hand to hand combat, when some remnants of his organization who had escaped the net could have been utilized.
But what Edwin Blum and William Drake’s screenplay—billed as based on Gillette’s play, but apart from naming one of the Professor’s henchman Bassick, resemblances are relatively few—demonstrates is that even such a departure can work when the spirit of the confrontation is preserved. And the scene where a freed Moriarty offers Holmes a cab-ride back to Baker Street is one of the high points of all Sherlockian cinema. Listen to Rathbone’s Holmes: “You’ve a magnificent brain, Moriarty. I admire it. I admire it so much I’d like to present it pickled in alcohol to the London Medical Society.” Some of the dialogue is lifted straight from “The Final Problem”’s Baker Street encounter. The writers cleverly make Moriarty echo Holmes’s sentiments from “The Final Problem”—during their cab ride together, Moriarty says that “once [he’s] beaten and ruined [Holmes], I’ll retire,” reinforcing the notion that the two men are two sides of the same coin3. Moriarty also displays his hubristic scheming brilliance by telling his adversary that he will “pull off the most incredible crime of the century,” right under Holmes’s nose, a boast that he comes very close to realizing.
That sophisticated, layered plot does have Moriarty as a hands-on criminal, but what choice did Drake and Blum have? To dilute the power of the struggle by introducing an interesting wearer of criminal boots on the ground would lessen the impact of the conflict. Zucco is widely considered one of the best-ever Moriartys, capable of conveying menace with just a subtle facial expression or slight change in intonation, an appraisal that makes up for the ignominy of the actor’s being billed after the boy playing Billy the Page.
The shift of the Rathbone/Bruce series to a contemporary setting put an extra burden on the writers of movies with Moriarty as the villain. Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1943) has Moriarty working with the Nazis, and personally participating in the attempted abduction of an Allied scientist. Lionel Atwill, who was a nicely-creepy Dr. Mortimer in the 1939 Hound, has much less to work with than Zucco, and isn’t given an interesting crime to plan. If his character was renamed Lysander Starr, not much would be different. Substitute Atwill for Zucco in The Adventures, and his portrayal would be more highly regarded.
Henry Daniell (Rathbone’s personal favorite Moriarty, by the way) fares somewhat better in The Woman In Green (1945). A desperate Scotland Yard turns to Holmes to solve the Finger murders, apparently-random atrocities that reawaken fears from the Ripper’s autumn of terror. In a variation of the pretext the Canonical professor used to get Watson out of the way in Meiringen, Daniell’s Moriarty has the doctor lured away with a bogus claim of a medical emergency.
Once he’s done so, he and Holmes have a genteel verbal sparring match, with memorable dialogue lifted straight from “The Final Problem”—
“All that I have to say has already crossed your mind.”
“Then possibly my answer has crossed yours.”
This Moriarty uses more human pawns to achieve his ends than Atwill’s, but that fidelity to the organizational model of the Canon means that there are fewer scenes of Holmes and Moriarty together than would be ideal. He does expose his liberty and his life by not remaining at a safe remove at the climax even without the (apparent) necessity the Canonical Professor had because his organization is in tatters. As with Atwill, Daniell is hampered by the script.
A discussion of the next big-screen Moriarty—Hans Sonker’s Professor in 1962’s Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace—must wait a future column on Worst Sherlock Holmes Films Ever, one which, as editor Marvin Kaye has convinced me, the world is not yet prepared for.4 And while Laurence Olivier, from 1976’s The Seven Percent Solution, is the most noteworthy actor to play Moriarty on screen, Nicholas Meyer’s revisionist take on the character makes discussion of the character’s criminality moot.
So, we’ll jump ahead to 1988, the next time the Professor was in a movie—the unsuccessful farce, Without A Clue. The usually-excellent Paul Freeman, still best-known for his René Belloq in Raiders of the Lost Ark, is in the same boat as Olivier to some extent. His character is merely a plot device in a movie where murder is played for laughs. In contrast to Zucco’s Moriarty, who’s present from the get-go, Freeman’s Moriarty doesn’t appear until a quarter of the movie has passed. His character gets his hands bloody, and delegates only the most menial chores to his unprepossessing henchmen. This places him in the vulnerable center of the action when the authorities close in on a counterfeiting operation. And it’s hard to imagine the author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid ending up in the same fix as does Freeman’s character at the end.
The short-lived, promising, if flawed, Ian Richardson series of television films fell victim to the popularity of Jeremy Brett, but at the outset, Ian McKellen was mentioned as a possible Moriarty. The original concept for an incorporation of the Napoleon of Crime into the series led to one of the most offbeat, ostensibly, straight portrayals—that of Anthony Andrews in 1990’s TV film, Hand of a Murderer (also released as The Napoleon of Crime), written by Charles Edward Pogue, screenwriter for Richardson’s Hound of the Baskervilles and The Sign of Four. The movie opens in 1900, with Edward “The Equalizer” Woodward’s Holmes outdoing Rathbone’s. He’s not only gotten Moriarty convicted of murder, but has helped the Professor end up on the gallows (while apparently leaving the Professor’s organization unscathed.) But Holmes isn’t seen before Moriarty, which is what I believe to be a first. Of course, for the story to continue, the execution doesn’t come off, as the result of several contrivances, including Holmes’s absence, and Scotland Yard’s understaffing. Lestrade shuts the barn door after the Professor has fled, setting 300 officers on his trail, though they would have been better-deployed at