Elementary, dear what’s on

As you may have 
noticed, we are currently in the midst of a Sherlock Holmes revival. There have been two big-budget movies directed by Guy Ritchie with Robert Downey Jr making an unlikely Holmes. And then, there is Sherlock, a British TV series that has won rave reviews wherever it has been screened.

Both versions of the Holmes legend are updatings. The Guy Ritchie movies dispense with the deerstalker hat and the caricature of Holmes as a thin, eagle-faced man. As played by Downey, Holmes is a bit of an action hero.

Sherlock is even more dramatic in its conception. The series takes the characters of Holmes and Watson and transposes them to present-day London. Because the scripts are so good and because Benedict Cummerbatch makes an excellent Holmes, Sherlock is the more successful of the two recent re-workings of the Holmes legend.

I have been trying to recall if any fictional character has had as long a cinematic life as Holmes. The old Basil Rathbone movies are classics and Holmes has been revived again and again with a variety of actors playing the role (Jeremy Brett was probably the best).

In this day and age, when we are used to the likes of James Bond, it is refreshing to find that Holmes still has an audience. Because Conan Doyle’s invention is one of the great detectives of fiction, it is not difficult to work out the appeal of the Holmes legend. But, with each passing year, it is interesting to see how many old heroes make their way to the screen.

Batman and Superman are now mainstays of film and television. But a host of comic book characters have joined them: Thor, Green Lantern, Iron Man, and even Captain America. Spiderman is not just the star of his own franchise but a Broadway musical that offers a fresh take on the Spiderman story (with music by U2) is also a smash.

In an era where even Tintin gets his own movie, it is hard to explain why two characters seem to have faded from public memory.

The first is Tarzan. The Edgar Rice Burroughs books were never very good (in one adventure, Burroughs had Tarzan fighting a tiger in Africa) but Hollywood turned the character into a household name. The first Tarzan movie was a silent picture starring Elmo Lincoln but in the public imagination, the character is most closely associated with Johnny Wisemuller, who played Tarzan in the 40s and 50s, with Maureen O’Sullivan (the mother of Mia Farrow) as his wife, Jane.

By 1972, 13 different actors had played Tarzan and a few more were still to don the loincloth, including Christopher Lambert who starred in the big-budget 1980s blockbuster Greystoke. (Dara Singh also played Tarzan in Hindi movies that were not sanctioned by the estate of Edgar Rice Borroughs.)

I would have imagined that in an era where every great hero of popular fiction (even Zorro) gets his own movie or TV series, Tarzan would be enjoying some kind of revival. But strangely enough, the character has almost been forgotten. There was an animated movie over a decade ago and there has been nothing since then.

So it is with the Phantom. The character is the original costumed comic book hero, pre-dating Batman and enjoying an unparalleled popularity all over the world. But except for a low-budget movie starring Billy Zane nearly two decades ago, the Phantom has never become the star of his own film franchise.

I am not sure why this should be so. My theory is that political correctness prevents Hollywood from making movies about white people who call the shots in the jungle and push the natives around. In the Tarzan stories, the hero is clearly white (he is an English lord) while all those around him are either black people or monkeys. The Phantom is not set in Africa — his creator Lee Falk placed the stories in a mythical continent called Bengala, which mingled elements of Africa and India — but once again, the thrust of the stories is that a white man imposes order on African pygmies, Indian rajas and pirates who go by the name of the Singh brotherhood.

Ironically enough, I don’t think anybody in Africa or India regards the stories as offensive or politically incorrect. We grew up in India following the adventures of the Phantom in the Illustrated Weekly of India and in Indrajal comics. None of us minded that he was an American who lorded it over Africans and Indians. I imagine that the same is true of Tarzan.

Alas, in this era of political correctness, my fear is that we will be denied a good Phantom movie or further Tarzan adventures and will have to suffer rubbish like Steven Spielberg’s mauling of the Tintin stories or Kenneth Branagh’s risible Thor.

Still, at least there’s Sherlock Holmes. And I guess, we should be grateful that nobody has found him politically incorrect and that the character flourishes in movies and on television.

(Vir Sanghvi is a celebrated Indian journalist, television personality, author and lifestyle writer. To follow Vir’s other writings, visit 
www.virsanghvi.com.)