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Rare Holmes Movies for Free

Posted December 29th, 2005 at 02:04pm

My big Christmas gift to myself came as a result of wandering through the Mystery section of PublicDomainTorrents.com.

While my collection of Sherlock Holmes DVDs are well rounded-out with Brett, Rathbone and others, some of the earliest films have always eluded me, and in particular those of Wontner and Owen as the Master Detective. I did find Wontner’s The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes for $1 in the discount bin at a Wal*Mart, but all three copies they had there were defective, crashing Windows and refusing to be read by either Mac OS X or Linux. So it was a pleasant surprise to trip across four Wontner and Owen films in this torrent archive (the films fell into the public domain years ago), free for download.

The quality is not the greatest, of course –these are films made in the 30’s and these copies are not taken from the masters– but they’re still a great find for me nevertheless. If you’re interested, point your BitTorrent client (I use Azureus) to PDT and catch Reginald Owen in A Study in Scarlet (1933, and bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the novel), and Wontner in The Sign of Four (1932), The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935), and Murder at the Baskervilles (1937, a.k.a., Silver Blaze). There are also a few of the Rathbone/Bruce films in the Mystery section as well, although those are somewhat easier to find elsewhere.