The Granada Holmes Movies
↳ The Master Blackmailer, Part 7
From “Bending the Willow” by David Stuart Davies
In ‘The Resident Patient’, Brett was particularly proud of the scene where
he examines the patient’s room, picking up all the clues without saying a word.
He referred to it as ‘the Rififi scene’ because it was similar to a sequence in
a Jules Dassin film. It is a remarkable scene, especially for modern television,
having no dialogue for two-and-a-halfminutes.And it does epitomise the essence of Sherlock Holmes’s minute investigation of a scene of crime: all those passages that Conan Doyle created describing his detective crawling on the floor, inspecting paintwork with his lens, and scraping dust or cigarette ash into a small envelope for analysis are crystallized in this sequence, and Jeremy Brett knew it.
(The Rififi scene; with a 32 minute long burglary scene with no dialogue at all)
