DVD Review: A lost, century-old Holmes film hits home video

It’s generally believed that, of the thousands of films made in the silent era, more than half are lost ... probably forever. But every once in a while, a lost film is found. In 2014, a complete French-language print of William Gillette’s “Sherlock Holmes” turned up. This print has been restored, shown at a few venues, and is now on DVD and Blu-ray from the small but energetic Flicker Alley.

Gillette was the first actor to define the Holmes image. He himself wrote a Holmes stage play, with Arthur Conan Doyle’s blessing. The drama took elements from several stories and combined them with Gillette’s own ideas. The play was a smash, and the actor performed the role more than a thousand times. In 1916, it was finally made into a feature — which, after its initial run, vanished for 98 years.

The film — directed by Arthur Berthelet — is not bad, but is certainly no fit rival for that year’s best known movie, D.W. Griffith’s “Intolerance.” It should be of interest more to Sherlockians than to general film buffs.

The restoration is extraordinary. The print was scratchy and sometimes worse; the Blu-ray is essentially pristine. In addition, Flicker Alley has put together a nice collection of related material.

These extras include three other “Sherlock” silents; to be fair, they have little to do with Holmes outside of their titles. “A Canine Sherlock” (1912) is the best, a 15-minute short about a very clever dog sleuth. There is also a fragment of the 1900 “Sherlock Baffled,” the first “Holmes film”; and “Piu forte che Sherlock Holmes” (1913), which is framed as a dream and contains lots of “ghost images” in the style of George Melies.

Preservationist Robert Byrne is shown giving an often funny 25-minute lecture about the film from the 2015 San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Best of all is a 1928 Fox Movietone News short of Conan Doyle talking to us about both Holmes and spiritualism, his preoccupation in his senior years. It’s the only sound footage of the author, who speaks with good humor and a bit of a Scottish accent.

Sherlock Holmes (Flicker Alley, Blu-ray/DVD three-disc combo pack, $39.99)