Murder Rooms - The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes
by Paul Marcus, Simon Langton, Tim Fywell
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DVD details
Actor: Ben Macleod, Charles Edwards, Crispin Bonham-Carter, Ian Richardson, Mossie SmithDirector: Paul Marcus, Simon Langton, Tim Fywell
Brand: MPI
Producer: Alison Jackson
Writer: Daniel Boyle
Writer: David Pirie
Writer: Paul Billing
Writer: Stephen Gallagher
DVD: Region Code 0
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo
Format: Color, DVD, NTSC
Picture Format: 1.78:1
Running Time: 360 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-06-27
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: Mpi Home Video
Product features:
- The Patient s Eyes A beautiful young woman is haunted by a masked cyclist who pursues her through the woods. To Doyle s surprise, the pursuer is real. And so are the hideous murders connected to a gruesome incident in the Boer War. The Photographer s Chair Doyle and Bell investigate a serial killer s victims, all of whom bare unusual markings. Doyle looks to a spiritualist for answers and is ca
DVD Reviews of Murder Rooms - The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes
DVD Review: "It is to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes."
Summary: 4 Stars
As is Amazon's incredibly unhelpfiul wont, they have bundled all the reviews together for two separate releases with different content. Please bear in mind that Dr Bell and Mr Doyle only contains the 116-minute first episode: the subsequent four episodes are released in a separate set as Murder Rooms.
David Pirie's inspired mystery examines the seeds of Arthur Conan Doyle's greatest fictional creation by examining his relationship with the brilliant surgeon and pathologist Dr Joseph Bell when Doyle was a young medical student, imagining the two investigating a series of murders that prefigure the Jack the Ripper killings and reveal both the dark underside of Victorian society and Doyle's own troubled family background. A champion of applying the deductive reasoning he used for diagnoses to criminal cases at a time when detection was still anything but a science, Bell did often lend his expertise to the Edinburgh police, and while there's no evidence that he and Doyle ever formed a Holmes and Watson relationship, the drama is never less than entirely convincing. Both central characters are well drawn, and the instances where scenes foreshadow fictional incidents from the Holmes stories are often beautifully handled, with the moment where - just as Holmes did with Watson's pocket-watch in The Sign of Four - Bell inadvertently shames Doyle by revealing far more of his personal problems by simply examining a watch than the student would like a particular standout. It's typical of the way that the show manages to incorporate not just the personal (the details of Doyle's mentally ill father are based in fact) and the fictional but also offers a wider portrait of a society whose rigid social order hides dark secrets. It's psychologically astute, aware of the temptations to self-harm or violence - the evil imp urging us to move ever closer to the cliff's edge or to harm the helpless, as one fellow medical student puts it - and the way a repressed, absolute set of values can sometimes act to encourage the very breakdown of order and propriety they try to prevent.
It's a vividly realised society too, from the drawing rooms of the outwardly respectable but inwardly diseased aristocracy to the brothels and back streets at a time when women - only recently granted the right to higher education - are regarded more as property or ornaments. Certainly the tale lives up to the promised darkness in the title. Aside from murder and a doomed romance, there's mental illness, VD and a lot of blood once the story graduates from a typical locked room mystery that introduces the practical applications of Bell's genius to a series of murders that no-one is interested in solving because the victims are so poor that at first no-one even notices they've been murdered.
Not everything is entirely successful. The framing device, with Doyle visiting his editor at The Strand magazine after he has attempted to send Holmes to his death over the Reichenbach Falls, really has no impact on or even much relevance to the central story and feels a little redundant. But there's so much to enjoy here, from Richardson's superlative performance to Pirie's excellent screenplay, to forgive it its few shortcomings. What is much harder to forgive are the surprisingly heavy cuts on the UK DVD: over 14 minutes has been shorn, removing many of the psychological niceties as well as one suspect's philosophical motivations, which seems inexplicable in a drama that only ran 116 minutes to begin with. Luckily, the US NTSC DVD release is uncut - albeit retitled Dr Bell and Mr Doyle for US audiences - and is well worth getting.
The followup, released on a sepate 2-0disc DVD as Murder Rooms, had a sadly brief run: four episodes, two of them excellent, two less so. Never given much of a push by the BBC despite strong ratings for the original `pilot' story, it was never picked up for a second series, and the UK DVD release was something of a botched job with all four episodes only available in cropped fullframe transfers with curious layer changes seemingly every 15 minutes or so (though it fared better than the first special, which was heavily cut for its UK DVD release and is only available uncut in the USA under the title Dr Bell and Mr Doyle).
Luckily, the US Region 1 NTSC DVD release of the series is a distinct improvement - decent transfers of all four 90-minute episodes in widescreen on two discs. No extras - though neither does the UK 4-disc set - but the series is definitely well worth seeing, and the US edition is definitely the best way to see it.
Description of Murder Rooms - The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes
Murder Rooms: The Dark Beginnings of Sherlock Holmes tells the story of the relationship between the young Arthur Conan Doyle (Charles Edwards, Batman Begins) and his real-life mentor and a noted forensics scientist, Dr. Joseph Bell (Ian Richardson, From Hell), as they unite to solve the most baffling murder cases in Edinburgh in the late 1800s. The 2-disc set includes four episodes: The Patient?s Eyes ? A beautiful young woman is haunted by a masked cyclist who pursues her through the woods. To Doyle?s surprise, the pursuer is real. And so are the hideous murders connected to a gruesome incident in the Boer War. The Photographer?s Chair ? Doyle and Bell investigate a serial killer?s victims, all of whom bare unusual markings. Doyle looks to a spiritualist for answers and is cautioned about his investigation from beyond the grave. Little does he know about the murderer?s plans for his victims in the afterlife. The Kingdom of Bones ? When an ancient Egyptian mummy is unwrapped in public, a recently murdered Englishman is found, involving Doyle and Bell in a bombing conspiracy. The White Knight Strategem ? Two men with knowledge of a woman?s suicide are murdered, setting off a heated disagreement between Bell and an old police rival. At the risk of alienating Bell, Doyle sides with the policeman, but both men prove only partly correct.Bestsellers in DVD
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