Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking is a British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 television movie

Television movie

A television film is a feature film that is a television program produced for and originally distributed by a television network, in contrast to...

 originally broadcast on BBC One

BBC One

BBC One is the flagship television channel of the British Broadcasting Corporation in the United Kingdom. It was launched on 2 November 1936 as the BBC Television Service, and was the world's first regular television service with a high level of image resolution...

 in the UK on December 26, 2004. Produced by Tiger Aspect Productions

Tiger Aspect Productions

Tiger Aspect Productions is a British television production company, particularly noted for its situation comedies. Co-founded by producer Peter Bennett-Jones, its productions have included popular hits such as The Vicar of Dibley and Mr. Bean...

, it was written by Alan Cubitt and was a sequel to the same company's adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles

The Hound of the Baskervilles (2002 film)

The Hound of the Baskervilles is a 2002 television adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novel of the same name.-Production:Produced by Tiger Aspect Productions for the BBC, it was shown on BBC One on Boxing Day, 2002. It was directed by David Attwood, and adapted by Allan Cubitt. The film stars...

, made for the BBC

BBC

The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...

 two years previously. Although Silk Stocking retained the same Dr. Watson, Ian Hart

Ian Hart

Ian Hart is an English stage, television and film actor.-Early life:Hart, the grandson of Irish immigrants, was born in Liverpool, Merseyside, England. He is one of three siblings and was brought up in a Roman Catholic family...

, this time the character of Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes is a fictional detective created by Scottish author and physician Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The fantastic London-based "consulting detective", Holmes is famous for his astute logical reasoning, his ability to take almost any disguise, and his use of forensic science skills to solve...

 was played by Rupert Everett

Rupert Everett

Rupert James Hector Everett is an English actor. He first came to public attention in 1981, when he was cast in Julian Mitchell's play and subsequent film Another Country as an openly gay student at an English public school, set in the 1930s...

.

Unlike Baskervilles, this production was an original story written by Cubitt, although the script used some lines of dialogue for Holmes taken from Arthur Conan Doyle

Arthur Conan Doyle

Sir Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle DL was a Scottish physician and writer, most noted for his stories about the detective Sherlock Holmes, generally considered a milestone in the field of crime fiction, and for the adventures of Professor Challenger...

's original stories. Set in the early 1900s, Cubitt provided Watson with a new wife and indicates that it had been some time since he and Holmes last worked together.

Reviews of the drama were generally mixed. "I did feel that this peculiar tale was intended to tickle American tootsies," Nancy Banks-Smith

Nancy Banks-Smith

Nancy Banks-Smith is a British television critic; she began writing for The Guardian in 1969. In 1970 she was recommended for the Order of the British Empire, which she declined.*1951- 1955: Northern Daily Telegraph, reporter...

 wrote in The Guardian

The Guardian

The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

. "The king was announced as "King Edward the Seventh", Dr Watson married a Yankee psychiatrist, the duchess was having an affair with the footman, well, two as it turned out, and the London fog never lifted."

Some co-production funding for the drama was provided by United States

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 PBS

Public Broadcasting Service

The Public Broadcasting Service is an American non-profit public broadcasting television network with 354 member TV stations in the United States which hold collective ownership. Its headquarters is in Arlington, Virginia....

 broadcaster WGBH

WGBH-TV

WGBH-TV, channel 2, is a non-commercial educational public television station located in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. WGBH-TV is a member station of the Public Broadcasting Service , and produces more than two-thirds of PBS's national prime time television programming...

, and it was later shown on PBS's Masterpiece Theatre

Masterpiece Theatre

Masterpiece is a drama anthology television series produced by WGBH Boston. It premiered on Public Broadcasting Service on January 10, 1971, making it America's longest-running weekly prime time drama series. The series has presented numerous acclaimed British productions...

in 2005. The original title for the production was Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Season, the name being changed only a few weeks before transmission.

Directed by Simon Cellan-Jones

Simon Cellan-Jones

Simon Cellan-Jones is a Welsh television director and film director, who began his career as a production assistant in the mid-1980s, working on series such as Edge of Darkness. By the late 1980s he had worked his way up to become a director, and he gained credits on some of the most acclaimed...

, the production was released on DVD

DVD

A DVD is an optical disc storage media format, invented and developed by Philips, Sony, Toshiba, and Panasonic in 1995. DVDs offer higher storage capacity than Compact Discs while having the same dimensions....

 in 2005, with an audio commentary by Cellan-Jones and producer Elinor Day. The musical score is by Adrian Johnston.

The book given to Holmes by Mrs Vandeleur is Psychopathia Sexualis.

Synopsis

In November 1903, young women are being killed in London, each with a silk stocking shoved down her throat. Watson seeks help from the retired and bored Holmes, who determines that the victims are well-born ladies, not prostitutes. Evidence found include a thumbprint, a pair of ladies' dancing shoes, broken glass, a strong smell of chloroform, and a silk stocking removed from a victim's gullet. It seems the killer has a foot fetish.

Holmes questions a survivor - a young girl who was apparently set free by her captor because she has a club foot - and arranges for her to "accidentally" see the footman that he suspects is the killer, despite his ironclad alibis. The girl identifies him as her kidnapper, but the thumbprint clears the suspect. Holmes then baits a trap for the killer: he uses the sister of a victim and has her perform in a classical tableau at an event attended by the King and Queen. Her Grecian-Roman costume is revealing, and her sandals expose her feet. After the performance, she walks away to be alone; the suspect drugs her and is quickly caught by Holmes and placed in custody. The sister returns home and is tucked into bed by her father.

However, the suspect's thumbprint doesn't match the evidence. Holmes suspects the killer has an identical twin, and that the real killer is still on the loose. Holmes telephones the father of the "bait" sister to warn him, but the real killer kidnapped her from her bed just minutes earlier. The audience sees the killer carrying her over his shoulder as blood drips from her face, where he cut her with broken glass.

The police force the other twin to lead them to his brother, but he escapes the police. Holmes finds the killer and his victim just in time; the young woman has a silk stocking tied around her neck, and Watson has to cut it and perform something that looks like CPR. Holmes gets the killer twin to confess that he wanted his victims' attention, because they looked at him while in captivity. Both twins are then taken into custody.

At the end, Watson marries an American psychiatrist and leaves on honeymoon, and Holmes is left sitting alone at the table.

Reception

Critical reaction to Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking has been mostly positive, with the film currently holding a rating of 75 out of 100 on Metacritic

Metacritic

Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...

." Robert Bianco of USA Today

USA Today

USA Today is a national American daily newspaper published by the Gannett Company. It was founded by Al Neuharth. The newspaper vies with The Wall Street Journal for the position of having the widest circulation of any newspaper in the United States, something it previously held since 2003...

remarked, "Everett sticks close enough to the outline created by Arthur Conan Doyle to be recognizably Sherlockian, and yet he deviates enough to create an amusing character all his own." Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal wrote, "Everett carries the role of the master detective off with dispatch -- a portrayal rich in tortured silences and seasoned with touches of campy authority."

Melanie McFarland of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Seattle Post-Intelligencer

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is an online newspaper and former print newspaper covering Seattle, Washington, United States, and the surrounding metropolitan area...

said, "The Case of the Silk Stocking contains more than the usual share of pedestrian turns of phrase, and Neil Dudgeon's Inspector Lestrade

Inspector Lestrade

Inspector G. Lestrade is a fictional character, a Scotland Yard detective appearing in several of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle used the name of a friend from his days at the University of Edinburgh, a Saint Lucian medical student by the name of Joseph Alexandre Lestrade....

 is less than an afterthought here. Everett makes up for it with a haunting portrayal." Brian Lowry of Variety

Variety (magazine)

Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...

wrote, "The Case of the Silk Stocking is a rather wan addition to the Holmes filmography, yet respectable enough in showcasing the character's cerebral charms. If push comes to shove, though, when all the revisionism's done, I prefer my Holmes in black-and-white."

External links

• Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking at bbc.co.uk
  Bbc.co.uk
  BBC Online is the brand name and home for the BBC's UK online service. It is a large network of websites including such high profile sites as BBC News and Sport, the on-demand video and radio services co-branded BBC iPlayer, the pre-school site Cbeebies, and learning services such as Bitesize...
  
  
• Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking at the Masterpiece Theatre web site