The questions of who was the best screen Sherlock Holmes rarely strays past two names – Jeremy Brett and Basil Rathbone. They both played the part for the best part of a decade, they both achieved world wide fame and both became more than "just another Holmes". As the BBC found a couple of years ago, it isn’t enough to call an actor Sherlock Holmes. The part is more than that. I watched a Basil Rathbone film over the weekend (the joys of DVD rental) and it came with an absurdly cheap documentary about the role’s history in film and television. Hosted by Christopher Lee and made in 1985 it was a very low cost attempt to cash in on that year’s "Young Sherlock Holmes" movie. The picture wobbled throughout, Brett and Tom Baker were represented by still photos as they couldn’t get footage (Baker from a cropped Doctor Who pic) and Lee was shut up in a Holmsian room and had the air of a man who considers it a morning’s work and nothing more.

The documentary, once you got past everything, was rather good. It had clips from numerous Holmeses and photos of those whose films or stage performances no longer exist. Did you know that Leonard Nimoy once played Holmes? One thing it showed is that the current TV attitude of "can’t think of anything new so lets remake Holmes" is nothing new. We may be looking down the barrel of two new versions (the BBC team reunited and a Fry & Laurie partnership that has been mooted for over a decade) but I doubt there has been a decade in the last century which hasn’t had more than one man pick up the magnifying glass and await a telegram from Scotland Yard.

But I’m not here to blather further about Mr Sherlock Holmes. I do that elsewhere. I’m here to talk about Basil Rathbone. M’love and I have discussed his various merits and, while I can see her point, he isn’t Holmes for me. First I want to talk about his performance because it is the best thing in these old films. He ignores the darker side of Holmes but that is understandable. These films were made during the War years and people didn’t want to see manic depression and drug abuse. Rathbone looks like most peoples idea of Holmes – he has a good shaped head. I recall a line in the Brett "Hound of the Baskervilles" (to my shame I cannot recall whether it is in the original book or not) where Dr Mortimer asks if he can take a plaster cast of Holmes’ skull "until the original becomes available." Rathbone has the right look to pass for Holmes. The high forehead, the prominent nose and dark hair are all trademarks going back to Paget’s original illustrations. I fear Stephen Fry, for all his massive talents, simply is not Holmes shaped.

Where the films fail for me is pretty much everything else. We will start with the worst offence – Watson. Now Nigel Bruce was only obeying orders. I have nothing bad to say about him. His performance is admirable. He’s just not Doctor John Watson. He is a bumbling old fool and Watson was not bumbling, nor old, nor a fool. It is simple logic – Holmes was intolerant of mental incapacity. He took pleasure in Watson’s inferiority when it came to deduction but he respected his friend’s abilities in other areas. Holmes would simply never have tolerated a bumbling old gimmer. Watson was not Holmes’s comic foil. In "The Woman in Green" (the film I watched) we see a ‘hilarious’ scene where the sceptical Watson is hypnotised by a hypnotist he has just denounced as a charlatan. Richly comic I’m sure. When a film runs to a mere 65 minutes and we have padding like this it is not a good sign.

Another Holmes trademark is the atmosphere of Victorian London. It is a myth of course that all Holmes stories are set in this iconic nineteenth century locale. Conan Doyle’s stories were more or less contemporary to the time he wrote them and he wrote well into the 1920s. But we associate Holmes with the foggy streets and grubby urchins of Victoria’s capital. The Rathbone films do away with all this and we get immaculate people on immaculate streets breathing immaculate air. We have films set in the 1940s and featuring all the comforts that people of that time had which the previous generation did not – telephones, motor cars and so on. There is something fundamentally wrong in Holmes receiving a message over the phone. Messages are delivered by telegram or messenger boy, dammit.

The great strength of Holmes over other detectives is his scientific methods. Conan Doyle was a doctor, the inspiration for Holmes was a doctor, Watson was a doctor and he first met Holmes in a laboratory as he toiled over an experiment in blood detection. Rathbone’s Holmes has no such scientific bent. Indeed, he doesn’t really do any detecting at all. No analysis, no clues, no logic, no working day and night to solve a problem. He hears about a murder, decides that Moriarty is obviously behind it and the professor is arrested. There isn’t much more to it than that. The reliance on Moriarty is lazy, clichéd and another slap in the face to the original tales.

American studios are notorious throughout their existence for taking an old idea and distorting it until they make something which bears no resemblance to the original. They have their own story to tell and twist the facts to tell their story rather than using the original story. Be it a book, a character or a world war. One wonders why they bothered using Sherlock Holmes. Why not just create their own detective? One who lived in the 1940s, had a bumbling sidekick and fought Nazis. Because these films aren’t bad per se. They are light entertainment (though it is a little disturbing to think of light entertainment featuring the murder and mutilation of several young women) and their popularity is a testament to the fact that they were what the people wanted to see. But they are not Sherlock Holmes as anyone who has enjoyed the books would understand the term.