TV Reviews : Heston Is Hot on the Trail as Holmes

Charlton Heston as Sherlock Holmes, prowling the foggy streets of London in a deerstalker cap and an Inverness cape, takes some getting used to. Heston is cerebral and aloof enough but there’s a stolidity about his performance that makes it difficult to accept him as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s semi-Bohemian sleuth in “The Crucifer of Blood” (screening on TNT cable today at 5 p.m., 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m.).

OK, so Heston isn’t the gaunt, saturnine, polished Basil Rathbone (who etched the role in stone). We all have our own vision of Holmes. But Heston’s mastermind is at least foursquare, or as he tells Dr. Watson, “a brain attached to this appendage of a body.” That’s interesting, in a science-fantasy sense: turning Holmes into a human computer in a romanticized thriller adapted from Paul Giovanni’s 1979 Broadway play. (Heston, no stranger to Holmes, played the same role on stage at the Ahmanson in 1980.)

Baker Street purists will be surprised by a stronger female character (Susannah Harker) than Doyle was noted for. And they will also find, in opposition to the blundering Holmes’ colleague made famous by Nigel Bruce, a resourceful, romantic Dr. Watson (the scruffy but gallant Richard Johnson), who falls for the story’s mystery woman.

The production is meant to be an evil journey, but occasionally the focus veers to near-parody (which was also true of the stage play). All you have to know about the Byzantine plot is that it’s about a box full of jewels with a curse on it, stemming from a blood pact made in mutinous India by three British soldiers that leads to their murders in London 30 years later. The material, adapted and directed by Heston’s son, Fraser Heston, is a bewitched reworking of Doyle’s “The Sign of the Four” and “The Bohemian Scandal.”