A long-lost Sherlock Holmes film dating from 1916 has been discovered in the vaults of the Cinémathèque Française, the Paris-based archive that houses one of the world’s biggest film collections. Entitled Sherlock Holmes, the silent film stars renowned American actor-manager William Gillette, and is an adaptation of the play with which Gillette was famously associated.

Céline Ruivo, director of the film collection at the Cinémathèque Française, said the supposedly lost film was uncovered while staff were working on an ongoing project to catalogue the 80,000 boxes of nitrate films in its collection. “It had been briefly catalogued in the past, but the document was incomplete. One of our team found it mistakenly put with some other Sherlock Holmes films.”



Directed by Arthur Berthelet, the Sherlock Holmes film was shot in Chicago by Essanay studios, now best known for its series of Charlie Chaplin shorts made in 1915. It remains the only record of Gillette’s performance as Holmes, which popularised the deerstalker-and-cape image of the detective. (Gillette, however, was by no means the first to come up with it – though never mentioned by Conan Doyle, the look is generally credited to an 1891 illustration by Sidney Paget for The Boscombe Valley Mystery short story.) The play – and presumably the film – is a compendium of Holmes’s “best bits”, weaving scenes from a variety of stories into a single narrative.

A nitrate negative of the 90-minute film with French-language captions was discovered in the Cinémathèque Française. “The film was to be tinted for the French market, we think, so it was in small rolls to make it easier to colour,” says Ruivo, who has viewed sections of the work. “It’s just marvellous to find a film that is lost. We are all very moved.”

Restoration is being undertaken in Bologna, Italy, by the Cinémathèque Française, in conjunction with the San Francisco silent film festival. Robert Byrne, president of the latter organisation, said: “William Gillette’s Sherlock Holmes has ranked among the holy grails of lost film, and my first glimpse of the footage confirms Gillette’s magnetism.” According to Ruivo, it is the only existing film of the actor.

It will have its premiere in January as part of the Toute la Mémoire du Monde festival at the Cinémathèque Française, followed by the US premiere next May at the San Francisco silent film festival.

