the detective is back

Holmes is now unkillablethough purists will argue that Robert Downey Jr.s rendition of him in the Ritchie film is a fate worse than death. Even Conan Doyles own demise in 1930 failed to finish off the great detective. Instead it propelled Holmes into a successful and elaborate afterlife. He has appeared in countless movies,stage plays and TV series. He has even been played by Daffy Duck.

Would Conan Doyle have disapproved of the Ritchie movie? Of course. And not just because Downeys character,antic and mugging,and happier to solve a crime with a punch-up than with his brain,so frequently bears little resemblance to the one Conan Doyle wrote about.

On the other hand,Holmess scenes here of bare-knuckled fisticuffs would have surprised Conan Doyle less. As a young man,he was an accomplished boxer,and in a couple of the stories Holmes shares those skills,though he probably never imagined that Holmes might have a cyborgian,Terminator-like ability to analyse the laws of physics and bone resistance before deciding how to smash his opponent into jelly.

Holmes is so memorable because he is less a fully developed character than a collection of fascinating traits. Raymond Chandler once complained that Holmes was little more than a few lines of unforgettable dialogue and an attitude: the drug habit,the boredom,the show-offy logical deductions.

Yet Holmess vagueness and incompleteness are what make him so irresistible as a pop figure,on whom we can project our own interpretation. A lot of what we knowthe deerstalker hat,the cloaks,the catchphrase Elementary,my dear Watsoncomes from imaginings of him,the movies especially. There have been more than 200 film or TV versions of Holmes. Hes been played by actors like John Barrymore,George C. Scott,Charlton Heston,Roger Moore and,improbably Leonard Nimoy.

But the one whose Holmes lingers in the mind is Basil Rathbone,who was a movie Holmes from 1939 to 1946,and who imprinted on us such seemingly essential Holmesian traits as the high,brainy forehead; the slick,swept-back hair; the languid,aristocratic bearing; the supercilious putdowns.

In 1985 we got Young Sherlock Holmes,directed by Barry Levinson,in which the teenage Holmes turned out to have been a sort of proto-Harry Potter. That movie was produced by Steven Spielberg,whose Indiana Jones-like fingerprints are all over the Ritchie film.

Over time,Holmes has evolved because movies have evolved. The plot of the new movie echoes The Da Vinci Code. The wisecracking relationship between Holmes and Watson here played engagingly by Jude Law may now remind viewers of Butch Cassidy and Sundance. Downey,forgoing a deerstalker for a bowler or a slouch hat,inevitably evokes his earlier movie impersonation of Chaplin,who,as it happens,appeared in one of the early Holmes silents.

Ritchies London is a phony London. The real thing was never this rainy,murky or steam-punky. But his is also the best-looking London Holmes has ever inhabited,and a reminder that part of the appeal of the books and stories was their atmosphere. The oddest thing about the movie is that Holmes is lovable and endearing in a way that he has seldom,if ever,been before.

Downeys character is as needy as he is superior. He still delights in showing off his cleverness,simply because he cant help himself. He lives for an audience. Here,Holmes problems appears to be less mental than physical.

He requires a case not so much to exercise his formidable intellect as to get himself out of the house so he can dart around,throw some punches,wear disguises,wind up nude and shackled to the bedposts. His frustration,you cant help feeling,might stem from the fact that in the Victorian age,the proper vocation for him hasnt yet been invented. Hes someone who needs to be in the movies.