"Most likely the budget could not stretch to showing too many scenes from Miss Morstan and Mr Sholto's stories, but the 'fireside' chat ..."
Actually, when I recently watched this part again (very recently, probably 2 or 3 weeks ago), I unexpectedly - you might remember my criticism of the Hound - liked it. It _is_ atmospheric, you rightly mention chiaroscuro, it's much more subdued in tone, and it indeed does not jar. There is no grotesque, and humour is mild.
It might also have something to do with a viewer's expectations. The Hound, an undisputable pinnacle of the Canon texts, one has most probably read as a child, when imagination is more vivid and the brain naturally translates words into intermal images. I remember how irritating some of the TV adaptations of Russian classics looked to me when I was a schoolboy. Foreign backgrounds populated by strangers with incongruous voices and weird gestures: no, it cannot be that book which I had read and SAW, sometimes as flashes, sometimes as long scenes in wonderful detail, as the text directed my inner gaze.
So shooting another version of the Hound would be a much bigger challenge than shooting the Sign of Four. Expecting less, and probably remembering less of its melodramatic and lush victorian story, the viewer then suddenly finds out the film is better than his expectations, and takes a liking to it.
It might be you are right thinking that some of the exotic escapades of the Four somewhere on a tropical island were more difficult to film in the times of the USSR. But for me the first scenes and the story as told by Sholto are perfectly allright and true to the book. And Sholto _is_ sufficiently "strange" to recognize an opium addict etc. etc.
"Agra" is probably the "truest" film of the Russian series in the sense that it shows some Russian visualization of the Conan Doyle timeless pair with most fidelity. I will not be able to point any serious distortions or exaggerations, probably.
So when you continue your review and something strikes you as unusual, tell us, you'll be speaking of the parts when Holmes and Watson are not quite as the English would imagine them.
no subject
Actually, when I recently watched this part again (very recently, probably 2 or 3 weeks ago), I unexpectedly - you might remember my criticism of the Hound - liked it.
It _is_ atmospheric, you rightly mention chiaroscuro, it's much more subdued in tone, and it indeed does not jar. There is no grotesque, and humour is mild.
It might also have something to do with a viewer's expectations. The Hound, an undisputable pinnacle of the Canon texts, one has most probably read as a child, when imagination is more vivid and the brain naturally translates words into intermal images. I remember how irritating some of the TV adaptations of Russian classics looked to me when I was a schoolboy. Foreign backgrounds populated by strangers with incongruous voices and weird gestures: no, it cannot be that book which I had read and SAW, sometimes as flashes, sometimes as long scenes in wonderful detail, as the text directed my inner gaze.
So shooting another version of the Hound would be a much bigger challenge than shooting the Sign of Four. Expecting less, and probably remembering less of its melodramatic and lush victorian story, the viewer then suddenly finds out the film is better than his expectations, and takes a liking to it.
It might be you are right thinking that some of the exotic escapades of the Four somewhere on a tropical island were more difficult to film in the times of the USSR. But for me the first scenes and the story as told by Sholto are perfectly allright and true to the book. And Sholto _is_ sufficiently "strange" to recognize an opium addict etc. etc.
"Agra" is probably the "truest" film of the Russian series in the sense that it shows some Russian visualization of the Conan Doyle timeless pair with most fidelity. I will not be able to point any serious distortions or exaggerations, probably.
So when you continue your review and something strikes you as unusual, tell us, you'll be speaking of the parts when Holmes and Watson are not quite as the English would imagine them.