An Actor and a Rare One: Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes

Review 1: Tony Earnshaw’s An Actor and a Rare One: Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes is a long-awaited study of an actor who is always associated with the great detective by the public but too often overlooked by Sherlockians. When Cushing died, BBC TV could have paid a proper tribute to him by broadcasting the magnificent 1968 two-part Hound of the Baskervilles, which is by far the best television treatment of the book and may even be better than the 1939 Rathbone Hound. Instead, they trotted out, yet again, the entertaining but deeply flawed Hammer movie. After an incomplete repeat of Cushing’s TV series in 1970, the BBC wiped two thirds of the films and have since refused to broadcast the rest or to issue them on video. Rare showings at the National Film Theatre, however, have proved that the series did contain a number of gems, despite the notoriously bad conditions under which it was made, and the Beeb’s refusal to allow the series to be seen generally (along with the earlier and overall better Douglas Wilmer series) is frankly disgraceful. Peter Cushing’s final performance as Holmes, in the apocryphal adventure The Masks of Death, was a triumph, and it’s sad that the proposed follow-up, The Abbot’s Cry, wasn’t made (after ill-health forced him to retire from the project Cushing told me that Ian Richardson would be taking over the rôle). Tony Earnshaw’s book, admirable as it is, left me wanting more. He interviewed a lot of people, but no one, apparently, who could comment on those films from the 1968 series that don’t survive. It’s time that Cushing’s performances were properly assessed, and An Actor and a Rare One is a very welcome book.

Reviewed by: Roger Johnson, [District Messenger 215, 2001]

Review 2: A longer review of the book plus more information about Peter Cushing by Charles Prepolec on Bakerstreetdozen.com