SERIES - Sherlock Holmes

TITLE - The Hebraic Breastplate

DATE - 11-11-34

NETWORK - NBC Blue Network

NOTES
First show of the season after some time off the air
First with Luis Hector as Holmes
Not the familiar theme music yet, something more adventurous-sounding I can't identify
Watson is back from a "travel year" spent with his dispatch-box, has brought Holmes stories never before told on the sir

RATING - 5

COMMENTS
It's fascinating to hear such a relatively early episode in the radio adventures of Sherlock Holmes; few from this era survive. It's also Louis Hector's debut in the role, and he seems to play ruthless, superior. and almost boorish-sounding Holmes (at one point Watson reprimands him for taking all the kippers). He seems more preocuppied with being his dea of Sherlock Holmes than acting his individual lines, and his performance doesn't especially impress me overall.

The episode opens with Sherlock Holmes having smelled up Baker Street by designing "the Sherlock Holmes test" for blood and used Watson's hat for a wastepaper basket; he then invites himself on Watson's trip to see museum curator Ward Mortimer, and we move into a very rough adaptation of Conan Doyle's clever non-Holmes short story "The Jew's Breastplate," with added murders. Adapting another Doyle story to create a new Holmes adventure is by no means a bad idea, but in this aprticualr instance the effort to insert Holmes and Watson and to spice up the narrative with a couple of deaths

The changes to the story are not of the cleverest nature, unfortunately, with the suggestion that thousands-of-years-old poison on the artifact could still kill being very implausible, and Holmes' suggestion that nobody should be told about it and the needle removed secretly once it is discovered to be there and still deadly seeming very ill-advised. Holmes also seems to demonstrate a belief in ancient curses, which doesn't sit right with his traditional characterization.

There's a plenty of "let me describe what I'm looking at to you" writing which often indicates laziness, and the way Holmes made a key part of his deductions is only revealed by Watson in his closing dialogue with the announcer, Joseph Bell (which, coincidentally, shares a name with the man on whom Conan Doyle based Sherlock Holmes). This is still a fun listen and there are some clever points inserted into the story (the new Egyptian sarcophagus put into the Jewish collection, for instance),but it isn't overall the most stunning Holmes dramatization on record.

"Oh, don't blame yourself to severely professor. The cause of Wilson's death goes further back than any of us can remember -- back to the Curse of Soloman. After all he had laid the same hands upon the breastplate of the high priest, and the rock of the god of Judea is not to be taken lightly. "
--Holmes