Holmes and the Snake Skin Suits:
Fighting for Survival on '50s Television

By Russell Merritt, September 12, 2019 (revised)

 

 

Abstract

The release of the Rathbone-Bruce Sherlock Holmes series on television in May 1954 was a landmark in the use of studio film libraries on TV.  The breakthrough marketing of this vintage series on TV led to the era of film classics screened on late-night television.  Matty Fox, who rescued the Rathbone-Bruce series from the studio vaults, went on to market the first Sherlock Holmes series made for American TV, which starred Ronald Howard.

 

 

Introduction

 

It is a tale madmen used to tell in the King Cole Bar, under a gigantic cartoon mural; a story for territory salesmen at the all-night delis in L.A. or at Fritzel's in Chicago.  You could have read about it in Billboard or Sponsor, but not in The Baker Street Journal.  In academic talk, it will lose its essential fragrance, sound a little sterile, turn into a bland little report about suits… unfamiliar middle men, advertizing executives, Hollywood players, and long-forgotten fights over feature films on television.

 

But listen.  Odds are you have never seen a Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes feature in a movie theater.  Almost certainly you never saw one as a double feature with a cartoon and newsreel.[1]  Instead, you discovered those films on television or, if you are under a certain age, on a digital screen where you likely streamed it.

 

This is the way we encounter most classic Hollywood films today, on TV screens and monitors where they have been revived since the mid-1950s, and where their current reputations as cultural icons have been created.  Like The Wizard of Oz, It's A Wonderful Life, or virtually any B-film noir prized today, the Universal Sherlock Holmes movies were rehabilitated in critical and popular esteem only on TV, emerging from the lukewarm reception critics gave them on their original release to find their abiding audiences among viewers brought up on late-night shows and matinee theaters.

 

How Sherlock Holmes migrated from motion pictures to television has seldom been told, and for good reason.  Today, when films move seamlessly from theaters to home screens, the transition seems automatic and unremarkable.

 

But there was nothing inevitable about it in the early 1950s.  Watching Sherlock Holmes movies on TV was made possible only by a series of cut-throat battles and shrewd calculations made over a short but remarkably eventful period of months.  And when the films eventually emerged on television, the response ranged from delight to derision that passed into contempt.[2]

Topics

 

 

 

The pictures were so snowy, small, and unstable that a viewer could hardly see what was happening.  Scenes were brutally cut or condensed to make room for local commercials.  Today, we are still familiar with commercial breaks.  But not the slicing up of the films to fit into hour-long time slots, nor with black and white images that wriggled and waved with interference patterns, or lost all depth when pasted onto ultra low-resolution screens.

 

"How do you snip out 30% of a carefully made product and have it make sense?" the writer in a 1950 trade journal asked.  His solution:  "First, eliminate all dark scenes that won't show up on a TV tube, and then all the long shots in which distant objects get lost."[3] How to enlarge an image on a family TV set that could measure as little as 12" diagonally?  Buy a specially designed magnifying glass that could be fit in front of the screen.

 

And yet, particularly for those who had never seen 1930s and wartime films, they could be mesmerizing.  A lost world had opened up, and it is a tribute to many of those films, including the Rathbone-Holmes series, that their pull could be so strong they survived even these conditions.  And of special importance to Sherlockians, it was through this deeply flawed medium that the last and most famous of the Sherlock Holmes feature film series was kept alive.

Topics

 

 

Tonight's title, as the ad indicates, is Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon – the second film in the original series.  It is being broadcast not in the off hours customarily given to old films, but in prime time on a Sunday night, in the spring of that fateful year 1954.  It is also being broadcast over an independent station, not a network affiliate.  Just as striking, it was sponsored by "Your Nearest Pontiac Dealer," – a consortium of local dealers – not by the national giant that owned the Pontiac brand, General Motors.  And finally there is the Universal logo – significant because it is nowhere to be found, either in this ad, on any televised print, or in any promotional material.

 

What all this points to is a turning point in film exhibition, a curious mix of the old and new, with a studio still shy about acknowledging its involvement in the telecast of its own product, and an old movie still being shown by a local independent station when networks wanted nothing to do with movies in prime time.  And yet there are quiet innovations:  a movie being offered on prime time, underwritten entirely by a single sponsor in a top broadcast market.  We are not just at the start of an important Sherlockian revival.  The ad also doubles as a snapshot of a pivotal point in the rapidly changing relationship between film studios and a looming monster market.

Topics

 

 

By the mid-50s there was, of course, nothing novel in re-running old films on TV.  From virtually the start of commercial television, stations were notorious for filling their schedules with cheaply-made westerns, crime films, serials, discarded British imports, and cartoons from poverty-row studios.  Even major studios – notably Universal, Paramount, and Twentieth Century-Fox – were surreptitiously putting many of their B-pictures, serials, and cartoons on the market.

 

Nor was there anything new about showing quality films on television.  As early as 1944, David O. Selznick's Nothing Sacred (1937) with Carole Lombard and Fredric March and RKO's The Hunchback of Notre Dame had run on New York's WNBT.  And in 1950, A Star is Born (1937) could be seen on WPIX, the same year Ford's Stagecoach (1939), Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940), and Lubitsch's To Be or Not To Be (1942) were syndicated as part of a package of features produced by Walter Wanger and Alexander Korda.[5]

 

But these broadcasts were all under-the-counter, one-time only arrangements – covert operations where, to disguise their involvement, the major studios created sales through dummy companies, third parties and specially created studio subsidiaries whereby they could secretly engineer repurchase agreements.  In virtually every case, the contracts required that studio identifications and logos be removed from all prints before they reached the air.[6]

 

The idea was to take advantage of the windfall profits made possible with one-off TV rentals without offending their theater chains and, in particular, independent exhibitors who saw in the rise of television the principal cause for the decline of theater attendance.  Despite the on-going process of divorcing themselves from their theaters, mandated by the famous 1947 Supreme Court decree, the majors were still eager to maintain the good will of independents and the most powerful exhibitors who were still capable of boycotting studio product.

Topics

 

 

Why Holmes?  Available business records and correspondence are silent on the subject, so any answer must remain speculative.  Given the popularity of TV crime and mystery series, Holmes must have seemed a plausible choice.  As John McElwee and Jack Tillmany have pointed out, 20th Century Fox had already released their Charlie Chan films on television a year earlier, and Paramount was ready to make its Bulldog Drummond series available just as Holmes made his TV screen test.[8]  Further, the Rathbone-Bruce films were likely considered the logical bridge between Universal's long list of fillers that had already been snuck onto TV, and the company's most valuable pre-1947 properties.

 

The studio would not be willing to trade their prized assets – their famous '30s horror films, their Deanna Durbin musicals, and prestige pictures like Shadow of a Doubt, All Quiet on the Western Front and Destry Rides Again – until the tail end of the decade.  But among their B-series, the Sherlock Holmes was the studio's tallest tent pole.  Other poles – notably, Abbot & Costello and the Maria Montes/ John Hall fantasy series – had been taller when they were new, but by the mid-50s they were considered moth-eaten, banished to theatrical kiddie matinees.

Topics

 

 

With that sale, the Rathbone-Bruce series was now ready for major markets across the country.  By fall, the films debuted on the country's most prominent network affiliates – CBS' principal branch in Philadelphia [WCAU], its flagship station in New York [WCBS] and then, in December, over DuMont's Chicago affiliate, WGN-TV.[9]  No network would as yet televise a theatrical feature nationally – certainly not a B-picture.  But their affiliates, even their flagship stations, were willing act on their own after seeing the ratings and revenues that independent rivals earned.

 

 

In short, within a year, Sherlock Holmes had migrated from independents to three separate network stations in Philadelphia, New York, and Chicago.  Within that year, too, Universal had come out of the closet as the ultimate author of the sale, determining that the risk of retaliation from ever-weakening independent theaters and chains, disinclined to fight over B-picture filler, was off-set by the ever-increasing profits from television syndication.  Growing TV audiences meant ever-increasing paydays for a studio renting out old films that otherwise had virtually no commercial afterlife.

 

Topics

 

 

He is worth our attention.  True, Mathew "Matty" Fox did not keep the Rathbone series alive out of love for Sherlock Holmes.  But the series could have found no sharper, better qualified champion.  Known for his steel nerves and razor-sharp intelligence, Fox was the consummate Hollywood player – arguably the most important figure in the history of film libraries.

 

Eventually, Matty Fox would revolutionize the way studios used their vaults, demonstrating how to use libraries to finance current film production.  While a vice president at Universal, he had taken the distribution of old films to a new level, outsourcing the sound library to a theatrical film distributor called Realart Pictures in a deal that made millions for Universal.  Two Sherlock Holmes films were part of that group, Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon and The Scarlet Claw, routinely reissued to sub-run theaters and drive-ins at the tail end of the 1940s.[10]

 

 

Having masterminded deals that were credited with revitalizing Universal, Matty Fox was now setting up companies of his own, and in 1954 engineered the most spectacular studio sale of the decade.  He will show up continually in the Holmes television saga, the hidden hand behind the Rathbone-Bruce broadcasts, as he had been the catalyst for their short-lived theatrical reissue, and as he would become the link to the first Holmes series made for TV, starring Ronald Howard and H. Marion Crawford.[11]

Topics

 

 

Unfortunately, no subsequent literary rights agreement between Universal or Fox's companies and the estate is available, but the few clues that survive indicate that Arthur Conan Doyle's sons simply found themselves lost in the maze that Fox had created.  In any case there is no evidence of any litigation directed against Universal-International or Fox's companies; nor is there any evidence that the estate – notorious for its litigious enthusiasms – saw any additional revenues from the television broadcasts.

 

Regardless, the timing of those broadcasts could not have been better.  Matty Fox's Motion Pictures for Television [MPTV] acquired the TV rights from James Mulvey, just as Matty Fox's Western Television Corp [WTC] had bought them from Universal-International, and then sold them to a Matty Fox spin-off, Associated Artists Productions [AAP], run by one of Fox's former business partners.  And even as he was selling and bartering licenses to stations, the dam was about to break, with top-line Hollywood movies set to flood the airwaves.

Topics

 

 

Matty Fox immediately bought territorial rights for the markets O'Neil didn't control and spun those off to a sub-distributor called C&C Television Corp, which included a window for broadcast over the ABC network.  With that, R.K.O.'s A-line product became available to every TV station in the country, and other major studios rushed to follow suit.  Fearful that if they did not sell off their A-film libraries promptly, rivals would beat them to the punch and saturate the market, each studio raced to sell off its top-line "vaulties" at premium rates.  Within eighteen months of the R.K.O. sale, every major except Paramount had created prestige packages to be marketed on TV.[14]

Topics

 

 

As they saw it, it was a battle for control.  Network executives like David Sarnoff and William S. Paley feared that film libraries made affiliates less dependent on network feeds, tempting affiliates to bypass expensive network programs to show low-cost movies that the local stations had licensed for themselves and could market to local sponsors [lots of them, as it happened] for greater profits.[15]

 

But now networks saw the potential for nationwide broadcasts of vintage films that could attract comparable audiences to the ones watching their famous variety shows and live dramas.  And at less cost.  So, while the Sherlock Holmes series, like other B-film products were permanently banished to late night shows and matinees, The Wizard of Oz, King Kong, Top Hat, Gunga Din and their successors found massive new audiences on network prime time.[16]

 

And what became of Holmes in the backwash?  In a nutshell, he morphed.  From a film personality showcased on TV, he became a TV personality reacting to his Rathbone film prototype.

Topics

 

 

In Howard's Holmes, the high-strung, moody, infallible Rathbone gives way to an absent-minded, impetuous, and non-threatening youngster.  Even more remarkable is the new Watson:  Bruce's boobus Britannicus transformed to Crawford's astutus Britannicus.  Crawford to this day remains the unsung pioneer of the modern Watson as an intelligent, witty, and bemused companion. 

In place of Universal's twentieth century London, the TV series returned Holmes to the Victorian era, making a point in the publicity campaign of the care taken in reconstructing Baker Street and its environs.  In fact, the wonderfully detailed 221B sitting room was copied from the room Michael Weight created for the celebrated Sherlock Holmes exhibit in the 1951 Festival of Britain.[17]

 

For Matty Fox, it was a natural progression.  MPTV had become the market leader in the distribution of movies on television; now it was time to produce and market actual television programs.  Sherlock Holmes followed with him.  And so was born the first [and until Elementary, the only] American TV series to star Conan Doyle's detective.

Topics

 

 

 

The series benefited from seasoned American directors and writers and from remarkable behind-the-scene French talent, produced on an historic sound stage.  Sacha Kamenka, whose father created the legendary Russian-French Albatros Film Studio, was the stage manager who himself went on to stage manage for Hiroshima Mon Amour and Jean Anouilh's Le rideau rouge.  Music was written by Paul Durand, the prolific composer and music arranger for Edith Piaf, among others.  And the associate producer was Nicole Milinaire, one of television's first senior female executives, with a reputation for extraordinary efficiency and resourcefulness.[19]

 

So, Universal B-films gave way to Sheldon Reynolds' B-telefilms.  Today we may be struck by the crude look of the Ronald Howard telefilms, especially when compared with the Rathbone productions.  The Universals, though cheaply produced, ranked among the most handsome program pictures ever made.  Here, fighting even greater budget restrictions plus the limits of 16mm photography and brutal shooting schedules [one 30-minute episode per every four-day week], the films looked quaintly unpolished.

 

Aside from the finely-detailed Baker Street apartment and hallway, the indoor scenery consisted of simple painted flats, indistinct manor rooms that could be re-used with minor adjustments, and an all-purpose cobblestone street set up inside the studio to be used with an all-purpose studio hansom cab.  Dialogue scenes depended on the bland multiple camera technique that had become standard TV practice by the mid-1950s.  Graphically this meant an endless series of choker close-ups, designed for efficiency, but not dramatic nuance.

Topics

 

 

 

Regardless.  The series had difficulty finding enough sponsors to sustain a second season.  Critics, notably Edgar W. Smith in the pages of the BSJ, lost their enthusiasm, and after a season-and-a-half, it ended.[21]  By then – Fall, 1955 – Matty Fox was at it again.  He mortgaged the Sheldon Reynolds series and sold off syndication rights to a consortium called UM&M, while he unloaded his Universals [along with the rest of his library] to the aforementioned AAP.  Like Mr. Toad bouncing in his motor car, he leapt out of film distribution and TV production so he could now focus on his latest pet project:  Pay TV.  He would prove some thirty years ahead of his time.[22]

 

With Fox's departure, Holmes' adventures on syndicated television did not exactly come to an end.  The Sheldon Reynolds series may have disappeared, but the Universals were endlessly recycled as they were licensed and sub-licensed to one distributor after another.  Eventually they even came onto the 16mm educational market, the Universal logos restored.  But not until PBS imported the Granada series, thirty years after the Rathbone TV debut, would Jeremy Brett provide Americans a new Holmes created for television.

 

The escapades that brought about the advent of Holmes' series on television may seem quaint and unnecessarily tortured, but in their day both the Universal reissues and the new Sheldon Reynolds series were shrewd, strategic ways of using the new medium to keep Holmes' memory green.  In our own time, media distributors coordinate with services like Amazon, Netflix, and with media conglomerates like Turner Broadcasting and Time-Warner to promote old movies and new TV shows.  But the end result is exactly the same:  wheeler-dealer antics and quickly-made products co-mingle in a way to bring popular diversion for everyone.  What Holmes said of the press in "The Six Napoleons," Matty Fox could say with equal force about television: "a most valuable institution if you only know how to use it."

 

Special thanks to David Pierce and John McElwee for their generous sharing of primary materials and invaluable critical insights.  Thanks, also, to Jon Lellenberg for a sharp-eyed reading of the text and to Lou Luminick for sharing information about films on TV broadcast during the Second World War.

 

 

The first version of this paper appeared in Fan Phenomena: Sherlock Holmes (London: Intellect Ltd., 2014), 28-42. This website published a revised version In August 2016, and it was updated in September 2019.

Topics

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Topics

---

 

Russell Merritt teaches in the Film and Media Department at the University of California, Berkeley, and has published on D.W. Griffith, melodrama, animation, American and European film history, and Sherlock Holmes.  He was associate producer on the restoration of the 1916 William Gillette Sherlock Holmes film.  <russmer41@gmail.com>

 

Listen to his reminiscences about the Baker Street Irregulars and other Sherlockian matters.

 

 

Russell Merritt retains the copyright of this paper, and is solely responsible for the views, content, and images included with it.

Topics

---

 

An in-depth analysis and review of the Rathbone Holmes movies by Amanda Field

 

A Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes Film Festival at the Stanford Theatre

 

The Year's Best Sherlock Holmes Movies on DVD & Blu-Ray

 

The Best Sherlock Holmes Stories