The Life and Death of Sherlock Holmes by Mattias Boström

Author:Mattias Boström [Boström, Mattias]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784977726
Publisher: Head of Zeus

Part 5

1958–1970

68

IN THE SMALL Surrey village of Frensham, in the fall of 1958, someone who looked very much like Sherlock Holmes was relaxing at the Mariners, drinking a glass of pineapple juice at the bar. His Inverness cape and deerstalker were laid aside.

“Mr. Cushing,” the landlord said to the man. “I have something for you.” He had fetched it upstairs; it had been in his possession for years.

“Would you please accept this as a present?” The landlord handed over a Conan Doyle first edition with Sidney Paget’s illustrations.

The forty-five-year-old actor Peter Cushing was ecstatic and thanked the landlord.

“I’ve based all my costumes on the original Strand Magazine pictures,” Cushing told the man next to him, a drama critic who had come down to Surrey to interview him about the film they were in the middle of shooting. “Fortunately my father left me a whole set.”

The wild heathland near Frensham Ponds was standing in for Dartmoor. The story, being turned into a movie for the seventh time, was The Hound of the Baskervilles.

“Everything is accurate,” Cushing continued, “right down to the famous old ‘mouse-coloured’ dressing-gown which I charred with cigarettes to get the burns Holmes made during his experiments.”

It was to be the first Sherlock Holmes movie in color, produced by Hammer Films, a company that had made lavishly colored and classy exploitation films its specialty. Hammer had, during the last few years, made its reputation in horror, and the classic tale about the hellhound on Dartmoor fitted its profile perfectly. It was not Holmes the filmmakers were after, it was the chills that would be sent down the spines of filmgoers. Hammer’s chairman had also asserted that the actor playing Holmes needed to sex it up a bit.

Cushing had finished his pineapple juice. “The producers had some absurd idea that I should not wear a deerstalker. I told them you might as well play Nelson without a patch over his eye!”

*

Eight years earlier, one night at the main train station in Munich, Henry E. Lester looked out through the window of his compartment. Where was the baron? If he didn’t deliver the cash to Lester it would jeopardize the whole film production.

A whistle was sounded by the stationmaster. Still no baron had appeared, and the train pulled out of the station. Lester, who was the German coproducer of this Italian mafia western noir film, Amore e sangue, had to complete the Italian financing in a hurry to keep the American coproducer from taking his stars and walking out. Everything was as chaotic as it habitually was in those European productions in which Lester happened to be involved.

Henry E. Lester had been born in Berlin but had an American passport after having served in the US army. He came from a German family of bankers. Leipziger was their name, and they were often involved in financing film projects, which had led Lester to enter the entertainment industry in 1937.

The train slipped into a smaller station on the outskirts of Munich but soon made ready to depart.

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