Customer Reviews

Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes

5 star:		(32)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

"Murder Rooms" consists of five episodes, starring Ian Richardson as Dr. Joseph Bell, the historical personage on whom Arthur Conan Doyle allegedly based Sherlock Holmes; with Dr. Watson based on Doyle himself. The 116-minute first episode ("Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle, The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes") was a BBC series pilot released in January 2000. In "Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle...," Robin Laing starred as the young Doyle in medical school. This pilot has been available in NTSC for two years (see Amazon's listing) and IS NOT INCLUDED IN THIS PACKAGE. In the remaining four 90-minute episodes comprising this set (on BBC in September-October 2001), episode chronology begins three years later, Charles Edwards assuming Laing's role as the young, idealistic but adult Doyle with his own medical practice. Information on source books, author David Pirie, screen credits, histories, plot synopses and cast are available at murder-rooms.com

FOR BEST APPRECIATION, ONE MUST TREAT THIS SERIES AS AN INTEGRATED FIVE-PART, EIGHT-HOUR MINISERIES, beginning with the pilot "Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle..." setting the backdrop against which the other four, described IN ORDER below, play out. Missing "Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle...," this reviewer STRONGLY RECOMMENDS you purchase this set now and set it aside until that pilot can be seen. In "The Patient's Eyes," a black-shrouded cyclist repeatedly stalks a lady patient cycling to Dr. Doyle eye appointments through eerie wooded terrain, leading to a mysterious abandoned house, love-interest conflicts, betrayal, and murder. (There are striking scene similarities to "The Solitary Cyclist.") In "The Photographer's Chair," a series of murder victim corpses bearing strange marks lead to mesmerism, spiritualism, séances, apparitions, erotic mutilation, daguerreotype photography, and genuinely chilling moments. In "The Kingdom of Bones," the publicized spectacle of unwrapping an apparent Egyptian mummy for scientific study yields highly unexpected results leading to suicide, dinosaur bones, gypsies, kidnapping, attempted murder, multiple murders, and political terrorism. And in "The White Knight Stratagem," Doyle and Bell come to a near falling-out involving a Dickensian business climate leading to suicide and murder; with a curious chess enigma hovering over everything. This last episode concludes the miniseries and should be viewed last.

These adaptations get this reviewer's highest commendation, being at least the equal (or better?) of the David Suchet / Jeremy Brett adaptations in their prime. The general tone is exceedingly dark, uncompromising, and far more menacing than the light-hearted Poirot-Holmes adaptations. (The atmospherics remind this reviewer of that excellent film "From Hell.") Excepting as discussed below, nothing in these episodes is short of first-class: plots, incredible principal and supporting cast, direction, cinematography depicting 1880s Victorian Edinburgh, hauntingly mysterious musical score, period mood, and the appallingly brutal times with modern medicine in infancy. Sound is fine; extraneous background noise is nil; diction is clear with no accent barriers.

So superior is MPI's production that current PAL DVD owners may want to buy the NTSC release anyway! The widescreen 16x9 anamorphic picture is excellent, with night scenes sharp yet still mysterious. This reviewer doesn't know how the original episodes were recorded, but suspects that the widescreen image seen here was likely achieved by slicing off top and/or bottom portions of an original 4x3 TV image: some close-up shots have head-tops suspiciously out of range, a typical symptom. But such trimming is a small price for what one sees on an HDTV system as contrasted to the original PAL release. Unlike that release, MPI also provides both running time display and chapter breaks; and the periodic PAL scene blackout interruptions (presumably omitting advertisements) are gone, greatly enhancing the narrative flow. There are two DVDs contained in one keep-case with an inner leaf. Each DVD has two episodes on the same side with full menu accessibility.

American viewers may not realize that this offering is but the first in a series (the only one available in NTSC format so far, the rest being in PAL) called the "Murder Rooms" series. Subsequent titles include "The Photographer's Chair", "The White Knight Stratagem", "The Kingdom of Bones", "The Patient's Eyes", and perhaps more (?), starring the inimitable Ian Richardson. For those who like David Suchet's Poirot series, and Jeremy Brett's Holmes series, this series is absolutely stunning and mandatory!! Any good DVD mystery library is severely deficient without these episodes! This reviewer has finally thrown in the towel and purchased complete PAL-compatible equipment since there are so many such riches in the British PAL/DVD world that are simply unattainable in the USA. This matter could be the subject of a truly wild rant by this reviewer, the NTSC available-title crap-factor index being so high while so much other great material on both sides of the pond goes begging!

This episode deals with the young Arthur Conan Doyle (Robin Laing) as a medical student, who must perforce, with considerable trepidation, take a mandatory course from a certain Dr. Joseph Bell (Ian Richardson). It seems Dr. Bell has a notorious reputation amongst the medical students as a quite idiosyncratic, difficult and perhaps too challenging tutor and instructor. In this opening sequence, several of Dr. Bell's students are mystified by what they perceive as his strange nocturnal disappearances. One of them, the young Doyle and protagonist of this episode, surreptitiously follows Bell one night on such an errand. The result is that Bell catches the young Doyle in the act and subsequently "drafts" him as his "clerk" into these night-time escapades. It seems the good doctor, as a master of logic, deduction and diagnosis, is trying to unravel various crimes for the Crown which he feels are getting short shrift by those charged to investigate such matters. This story follows the unraveling of several inter-related murders by an apparent serial murderer.

The real-life Dr. Joseph Bell is alleged as the historical personage on whom Sir Arthur Conan Doyle modeled his Sherlock Holmes character, with the young Doyle himself being the archetypal Watson. Ian Richardson is truly superb as the good doctor, a pioneer forensic pathologist who took up crime investigation and related matters in his free time when he wasn't busy teaching during the day. This episode, set in 1878 Edinburgh, is extremely rich in Victorian period lore, full of subplots like the homeless, the struggling women's rights movement, the sub-citizen status given to prostitutes' rights, and police incompetence. This reviewer is not familiar with Sir Arthur's biography (but see below), so cannot judge the factual merits of the material presented here. But such accuracy would be totally irrelevant to the enjoyment of this rousing good story.

B.F.S. Video's color picture and Dolby digital sound are excellent for this BBC production. There is a great set of easily accessed and read special feature stills, including a multi-screen Doyle biography, a list of his selected works, multi-screen cast profiles, and multi-screen production notes. The 116-minute production is highly recommended along with the rest of the series if you can get them!

Aurthur Conan Doyle, the author who "created" Sherlocke Holmes was a Scotsman who studied at the Medical College in Edinburgh in the late 19th Century, and became a physician in real life (was he Watson?). Ian Richardson plays a top professor at the college. Some speculate that the Richardson character was the basis for Sherlock Holmes.

The professor (Richardson) is called to help the police when foul play is suspected in a murder investigation. Several good tales are told in this series involving the death of a woman student at the medical college, the betrayal of a married woman, and seances with a medium.

I found the tales as fascinating if not more fascinating than the "original" Holmes tales because they provide some insight into the forensics of the period. This forensic detail is much more than you'd find in a Holmes story...but just what would have been available in 19th Century Scotland when people were beginning to think about the application of science to crime solving.

Several interesting actors populate the stories including Richardson who starred in the trilogy "to play the king...the final cut" about the Prime Minister of the UK.

I bought this DVD primarily because of Ian Richardson, who was so excellent in the "House of Cards" trilogy. Although this subsequent effort doesn't provide Richardson with as delightfully colorful a role, it's quite interesting in its own right.

The film -- which is directed by Paul Seed, who helmed the first two "House of Card" installments -- takes the facts of Arthur Conan Doyle's early life and adds a bit of conjecture to forge a convincing mystery. It's very well done, and the viewer is expertly manipulated into jumping to wrong conclusions in order to stay surprised at the end.

What gives the film added depth is the sense of period it gives, as well as the historical perspective on forensic investigation. And Doyle fans will enjoy seeing the parallels between Dr. Bell and Sherlock Holmes.

Anyone with an interest in any of the above will find this DVD worth getting.

When we last saw the great forensic professor of medicine, Dr. Joseph Bell (Ian Richardson), from the University of Edinburgh, it was 1873. He and his callow young medical student, Arthur Conan Doyle, had just solved a horrendous series of murders, but at great cost. The young woman Doyle had loved was the last victim and the murderer had escaped. It's now a few years later. Doyle has his degree and is trying to establish his own practice. Bell has chosen to become friends with Doyle, drawn by Doyle's eagerness to learn, his intelligence and his concern for the sick and weak. Bell also is touched by the knowledge of Doyle's great loss. He is sensitive enough not to comment on Doyle's physical change. Instead of a callow youth, Doyle, while still tentative in manner, now looks something like a Hollywood hunk. Where earlier Doyle had been played by Robin Laing, a fine actor but no matinee idol, now he is played by the handsome actor Charles Edwards. Bell and Doyle have become friends, something on the order of mentor and student, and Bell continues to help Doyle when mysteries arise. In Murder Rooms, four do.

This series of four 90-minute episodes has some of the greatest production values I've ever come across in British period dramas and mysteries. It must have cost a bundle to mount them and may account for Murder Rooms not being renewed for further episodes. We don't simply have dark, wet cobblestone streets, foggy nights and horse-drawn carriages. There are great dining rooms and entrance halls, a lavish banquet, Victorian velvet settees and well-groomed riding horses, lecture halls sided by carved, polished dark oak with seats filled by prosperous elderly gentlemen in evening clothes. There are cold autopsy rooms occupied by grey-green corpses with all sorts of scalpels and saws, jars and liquids, trays, tables, weights and drains. The costumes are detailed and look bespoke; even the beggars' rags look authentic.

But what of the stories? Are they good mysteries? I'm not as enthusiastic as I am about the sets and costumes. The proposition of the series is that Conan Doyle's great fictional detective, Sherlock Holmes, was patterned after Joseph bell. Bell is a clever, shrewd doctor who observes and thinks. He notices things. He'll use his eyes, his nose, his finger tips, not just his scalpel, to pry out secrets from a corpse. Much of this was evident in Dr. Bell and Mr. Holmes: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes. This was the first program, available on a separate DVD. Dr. Bell led the way there, demonstrating and teaching the science of deduction to Doyle as he developed answers to murder. In the four episodes of Murder Rooms, two significant changes have crept in. First, the focus has shifted a good deal to Conan Doyle. He is the one who finds himself dealing with mysteries, and Bell is the one who shows up to demonstrate a solution. Because Doyle is now a handsome young man with a strong profile, the programs center as much or more on him and his situation as they do on the much older Ian Richardson. Second, the mysteries seem to me not to be so much clever puzzles as to be somewhat exotic events. We wind up dealing with mummies, Irish terrorists with an iconic sword, seances and dead loves, a fascination for capturing souls as a person dies, and a deus ex machina that depends on madness, tunnels and caves. I suppose the writers didn't have the time or the inclination to develop the sort of complex plot lines which would have taxed Sherlock Holmes...I mean, Dr. Bell...and so settled for next best; that, and the need to put forward Doyle as a more traditional, handsome leading character. Still, the production values and Ian Richardson save the series. Murder Rooms is fascinating to look at and Richardson provides enough dry energy to keep us interested.

There are four stories for us: The Kingdom of Bones, The Patient's Eyes, The Photographer's Chair and The White Knight Stratagem. For the most part, the acting features that solid, assured British manner which is such a pleasure to see. Some old friends we noticed include Ian McNeice, John Sessions, Crispin Bonham Carter, Warwick Davis, Annette Crosbie and Henry Goodman. The DVD transfer is very good.

If you were a medical student at the University of Edinburgh in 1876, be prepared for cold, gray, grimy days, complacent and pompous professors, class consciousness and the occasional dissection. If you were lucky, as the young Conan Doyle was, you might wind up as a clerk assisting the brilliant Dr. Joseph Bell, a forensic surgeon and one of the professors. In Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle (subtitled, The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes), Bell, played by Ian Richardson, believes that one must "observe the small facts upon which large inferences depend." He can take a man's pocket watch, even though newly cleaned, and determine that the owner was poor but had come from a well-off family, that he had periods of income but they never lasted, that he was an alcoholic and that he was descending into madness. Bell can study a poorly clad man standing on stage in front of a classroom of students and determine, among other things, that the man was recently discharged from the army, earned a living as a horse driver and who drove two horses, one bay and the other white. This all comes in handy for two reasons. First, Bell uses his powers of observation and deduction to find criminals of the worst sort who otherwise would have been missed by the police. Second, and this is true, the real-life Bell served as the inspiration for Conan Doyle's great creation when Doyle gave up medicine for writing...Sherlock Holmes, of course.

Young Doyle, played by Robin Laing, initially doubts Dr. Bell's methods. Gradually, observing Bell in action and being challenged by Bell to use his own powers of deduction, Doyle becomes a believer. "You see," Bell says to Doyle one afternoon at the Edinburgh morgue, "I believe that crimes can be diagnosed in the same fashion as disease if we use the same techniques. So...what can you glean from the late Mrs. Canning here?"

While Doyle is learning from Bell, Bell and Doyle are caught up in several crimes which might be related. They involve a nobleman who often visits a house of ill repute and whose wife becomes ill; a mute street beggar who plays the violin for coins, and who dies in convulsions; a room bespattered and filled with blood, and then slaughtered sheep are discovered with their eyes gouged out; a woman who dies in a locked room with a husband who is perhaps too helpful; a pair of severed human ears placed in a box and delivered to one of the few women who are studying, with great opposition from most of the teachers and many of the male students, to be doctors; a woman of the streets who was given herbal pills and now is vomiting her life out. In fact, some of these cases truly are related, and the suspects include a moralistic, furious fellow student and an unknown psychopath who believes in simple, straight-forward evil. Bell, with help from Doyle, eventually pulls the pieces together. The conclusion, however, is not entirely satisfactory. There is loss and the promise of retribution. Even more, there is a sense that a part two was waiting to be filmed and, for whatever reason, wasn't made. Eventually there were four additional mysteries featuring Ian Richardson as Dr. Bell and a different actor as Conan Doyle.

Through it all, Doyle and Elspeth Scott, one of the women students, hesitantly discover a mutual affection that could easily grow into love. Their recognition of a possible romance comes while she dissects a corpse's right knee. One of the attractions of the production is that it doesn't shy away from depicting the reality of autopsies and forensic experiments. We first encounter Dr. Bell while he is whipping the buttocks of a corpse, prior to firing a bullet into the dead man's chest. Throughout we see the reality of how the poor live in Edinburgh, the damp, cobbled streets, the constant chill, the smeared faces of the children and the grubbiness of the prostitutes. Even the medical students don't look too well washed at times. The production values are high and there is a solid depth of acting.

Ian Richardson makes the production work. Laing does a fine job as the sincere and somewhat callow Doyle. Richardson, however, gives us a complex character who can at times be impatient, even irascible, but who has a sense of humor and irony and who has a strong feeling of humanity for those who are unfortunate, sick and poor. We can see how Bell slowly grows to feel affection for Doyle and how, in a moment of tragedy, Bell can provide comfort and strength to his student.

The DVD transfer is first rate. There are one or two inconsequential extras, such as cast lists. One of the pleasures of this production, if you are a reader of the Sacred Texts, is to identify references to some of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. I found two, but I've been told there are several others. The affair of the watch references The Sign of Four. The severed ears are a key element in The Cardboard Box.

I am a keen reader of the Holmes stories and a admirer of Ian Richardson, whose acting I thoroughly enjoyed watching the "House of Cards" triology. The stories on this DVD are much darker then the Holmes stories and one shouldn't watch them when feeling depressed. However, there are some really funny scenes, for example, when Doyle's pompous former anatomy professor is reading the riot act to a journalist in "The Kingdom of Bones." The atmosphere, the writing and the superb acting make this one of the favourite DVDs in my collection.

On its own, or combined with the follow-up series Murder Rooms, 'Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle' is well worth the price. While I was already familiar with the follow up series, I was sadly unaware of the telefilm that started it all. I'm very pleased with the purchase.

Fine sound and video quality, though lacking in other features. You get what you pay for, it seems. I recommend it as I recommended the Murder Rooms DVD. If you like Holmes and Victoriana, it's a sure bet. If not, look elsewhere.

DVD - Video is clear and crisp. Colors are bright (for a Victorian subject) and don't bleed. The audio is clean.

The MOVIE- My biggest complaint is that they haven't released the rest. If you like mysteries in general, or Sherlock Holmes specifically, then you'll find Dr. Bell & Mr. Doyle a great little film. I found the whole premise of the origins of the idea of the Holmes character to be great plot. The acting is wonderful.

I'd pick this up before someone gets the bright idea to put it out of print.

What a brilliant method to give us another Sherlock Holmes series. While Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was at medical school and first starting his medical practice he met a real-life surgeon named Dr. Bell that was a living Sherlock Holmes. What an inspiration he would be for books would he not? So the first two hour movie, "Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle", introduces us to this excellent Murder Rooms series of four movies. During the first movie, "Dr. Bell and Mr. Doyle", we find Doyle in medical school working with the forensics expert Dr. Bell that assists the police from time to time with their investigations. All five movies are a must see for fans of the Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series a few years ago. The stories are slightly different takes on some of the books Doyle wrote. All four movies in this set are 90 minutes each and very interesting. This set picks-up with Doyle after he gets out of medical school and starts his practice. In the first movie Dr. Bell comes to visit Doyle after hearing about a hooded cyclist following a lady. The acting, directing, costumes, sets, scenery, and music are all first rate in all four movies. The DVD quality is very good. Sound and clarity was excellent. I highly recommend this series for the whole family.