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 at any given time derives as much from the actors who've 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 Rober...