One of the best Sherlock Holmes films ever made, Murder By Decress was not
based on a story by Arthur Conan Doyle, but used his characters of Holmes
and Watson, played by two great classical actors, Christopher Plummer and
James Mason. Today I received the DVD of the film which includes many
extras, not available with the VHS version. It is very interesting to
listen to the Director, Bob Clark, talk about the various scenes and how
they were manufactured and set up. Another valuable extra is a very long
text biography of Chris with more information than I have seen in any other
DVD biography- e.g. I learned Chris starred in some early NBC productions
of Johny Belinda and The Prisoner of Zenda (does any fan have videos of
these?). And of course, the quality of the video is much better than the
earlier VHS versions. I was surprised to learn that the late great English
playwright John Hopkins, husband of actress Shirley Knight and their
daughter Kaitlin Hopkins both worked on the film. I also learned that
originally the director had arranged for Laurence Olivier and Peter O'Toole
to play the parts, but they didn't like each other, so even though the
director was a little leery about CP's tippling, he decided to use
him. Chris played the violin himself when the part called for Holmes to
play it. Although many, many actors have played Holmes over a period of 80
years, I believe that CP is among the top three actors to play the part.