The Sherlock Holmes Collection

A Great Showcase for Peter Cushing
"The Sherlock Holmes Collection" contains the only six surviving episodes of the BBC's 1968 TV series "Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes". The great Peter Cushing stars as Holmes and Nigel Stock plays Dr. Watson. The six episodes feature five stories:

The Hound of the Baskervilles (a two-part episode)
The Sign of the Four
The Blue Carbuncle
A Study in Scarlet
The Boscombe Valley Mystery

The main reason to get this set is Peter Cushing. It's great to see him playing one of his favorite characters at the prime of his career. Cushing had already played Holmes in Hammer Films' THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES in 1959. Cushing's TV Holmes is a bit calmer
than his Hammer Holmes. The mannerisms and behaviour of the literary Holmes are still present, though.
Unfortunately the episodes themselves do not live up to the star of the series. It's obvious the BBC did not spend the money necessary to bring Doyle's stories to life properly. Most...

Perfectly Logical
Well done, atmospheric Holmes adventures with Peter Cushing and Nigel Stock. I'm sorry the rest of this 60's series is lost, since I believe I read that Cushing actually did about 16 episodes for the series. The loss is ours, but it makes having this small collection of the survivors that more precious. If you are a Hammer Film fan then you are pretty sure of what you're getting with Cushing's performance as the master slueth. I enjoyed his big screen turn as Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles, but the performance at times seemed a bit too energetic, almost too frenetic at times, as though Cushing were trying hard to point out how unusual Holmes was. In these later years portrayals, Cushing's Holmes seems to move with a slow intellectual grace that is more befitting the Detective. Nigel Stock is also a recognizable face from Hammer, and other British productions. He plays Watson very well here, using the right combination of patience and awe at Holmes' quirks and genious...

A must for Holmes fans
The series is worth watching for the Holmes of Peter Cushing, as well as Nigel Stock's take on Watson. The guests are unfamiliar aside from Gary Raymond and Frank Middlemass. The main flaws are the slow pace and low budget sets, as well as color, which never seems suited to the Victorian settings.
The biggest surprise here is a complete verison of "A Study in Scarlet", which one book claimed only had a few scenes that still existed. The changes in the story were minor, a minus being in not keeping the first meeting of Holmes and Watson, a big plus being the deletion of the dull flashback from the book.
"The Hound of the Baskervilles" is a bit disappointing, it suffers from the two part telling and, being fairly faithful to the novel, has far too little Holmes. Two other flaws, a cave floor creaks badly and the story ends abruptly.
"The Boscombe Valley Mystery" wasn't one of Doyle's best and is probably the weakest in the collection here, due in part to the poor...

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