Sherlock in the Seventies: A Wild Decade of Sherlock Holmes Films

Every era has had the Sherlock Holmes it wanted or needed—except the 1970s. In that wild decade, all bets were off . . .

The popular image of Sherlock Holmes in any given period derives as much from the actors who portrayed the detective as it does from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories and Sidney Paget’s famous illustrations. In earlier and subsequent decades this image was defined by a single stage or screen actor (from William Gillette and Basil Rathbone to Jeremy Brett and Robert Downey Jr.), but the nine Sherlock Holmes films made in the ’70s re-imagine the detective in starkly divergent ways, from the boldly inventive to the flat-out irreverent. Holmes is variously portrayed as gay (Robert Stephens), crazy (George C. Scott), pompous (Stewart Granger), petulant (Gene Wilder), vulnerable (Nicol Williamson), camp (Roger Moore) wrong-headed (John Cleese), silly (Peter Cook), and socially conscious (Christopher Plummer). Yet all these films contribute in their own way to casting new light on the legend.

In Sherlock in the Seventies, Derham Groves offers an entertaining and absorbing account of these films, packed with shrewd analysis and insights, background details, numerous illustrations, and behind-the-scenes anecdotes.

Derham Groves has written many books on popular culture and architecture. His recent works include Walt Disney’s Forgotten Australia and Arthur Purnell’s ‘Forgotten’ Architecture: Canton and Cars. He studied architecture at Deakin University and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in Australia, and art history at the University of Minnesota in the USA. He taught architecture at RMIT from 1985 until 1997 and at the University of Melbourne from 1999 until 2019. He is currently a Senior Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne.