Lamentation for a Grand Romance

New to DVD, Godard's long-lost "Made in U.S.A." is a requiem for his relationship with Anna Karina.

There isn’t much of an auteurist or actor case to be made for “Sherlock Holmes” (1922), released by Kino with a phalanx of other John Barrymore silents — it’s daydreamy time travel, pure and simple, intoxicatingly tweedy and tarnished, thick with Gothic attics and German Expressionist shadows. (In the same year as Murnau’s “Nosferatu,” this Goldwyn epic liberally folds location shooting into the darkness — the use of 1922 London is freewheeling and inventive.)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s sleuth is seen here as a Cambridge underclassman, and Barrymore fills him out rather long-leggedly, but it’s the world you sneak into, not the ideals of art or craft. For one thing, the movie positively wallows in that peculiarly 19th century idea, so popular in films with the Germans and with Louis Feuillade, of a criminal underground populated by wizardly masterminds and evil gangs, instead of by the idiot thugs and desperate losers that constitute most lawbreakers then and now. As idealized fantasies go, I find the Langian crook cult paradigm (embodied here as Moriarty, personified by Gustav von Seyffertitz as he were a Nibelung troll) far more interesting than teen wizards waving wands around.

“Made in U.S.A.” (Criterion Collection) and “Sherlock Holmes,” available as part of The John Barrymore Collection (Kino Video), are now available on DVD.

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