Scott Lord on Silent Film Hollywood, Lost Silent Film, Swedish Silent Film, Danish Silent Film: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes The Man With The Twisted Lip (Maurice Elvey, 1922)

Scott Lord on the Silent Film of Greta Garbo, Mauritz Stiller, Victor Sjostrom as Victor Seastrom, John Brunius, Gustaf Molander - the Golden Age of Swedish Silent Film........Lost Films in Found Magazines, among them Victor Seastrom directing John Gilbert and Lon Chaney, the printed word offering clues to deteriorated celluloid, extratextual discourse illustrating how novels were adapted to the screen; the photoplay as a literature;how it was reviewed, audience reception perhaps actor to actor.

Wednesday, August 13, 2025

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes The Man With The Twisted Lip (Maurice Elvey, 1922)

silent film

In his volume Deer Stalker! Holmes and Watson on screen, Ron Haydock quotes the author of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the creator of the armchair detective, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, "Conan Doyle himself, having seen Norwood in the role, seemed as equally impressed with him as were Norwood's general movie audiences. 'He had that rare quality which can only be described as glamour, which compels you to watch an actor eagerly.' Conan Doyle said, 'He has the brooding eye which excites expectation and he has also a quite unrivalled power of disguises.'". Admittedly, Ellie Norwood prided himself on his ability to assume a disguise and cherished the role of Sherlock Holmes for that reason.

Haydock writes, "The series was well recieved wherever it played and such a success that over the next two years Stoll produced another 32 films about the best and wisest man Dr. Watson had ever known." The first of the 47 film was appropriately an adaptation of "The Dying Detective".

Sherlock Holmes in Elsinore, Danish Silent Film

Silent Film

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Victor Sjostrom

Victor Seastrom Swedish Silent Film More properly the headlines should read, "Garbo Talks, Seastrom Returns Home." Victor Seastrom, who had worked in the Swedish theater before pioneering in Swedish Film, returned to Sweden with the advent of the sound film, not to direct, but to act. As in Hollywood, the exterior of the Swedish landscape that had established Sjostrom, Stiller and Molander during the golden age of Swedish Silent Film, had taken the innovation of sound back to the proscenium arc of the interior with Molander managing the transition to dialogue centered films.

Victor Sjostrom

Several of the films directed by Victor Sjostrom use artistic experiments in camera technique conducive to conveying symbolic meaning and dramatically charged images, among them being Masks of the Devil, with John Gilbert, and the earlier Kiss of Death, made in Sweden. Victor Sjostrom had begun on stage as an actor in Sweden and appears both on screen as well as from behind the camera. it is an obvious tribute to The Phantom Carriage that Ingmar Bergman includes the actor Victor Sjostrom in a symbolic scene during Wild Strawberries. In his autobiography Images, Ingmar Berman regrets that his workbook to the screenplay to Wild Strawberries had been lost, but he continues to acknowledge the influence of Sjostrom as a director while he moved "spontaneously between different planes-time-space,dream-reality....the hearse that overturns with the coffin bursting open." Silent Film Victor Sjostrom