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The Other Baker Street Detective
 Blake’s popularity on the printed page inevitably meant his translation to other mass media. There were several Sexton Blake stage plays, the earliest one produced in 1907. But the principal stage incarnation for Blake was in the four-act play SEXTON BLAKE written by regular Blake author Donald Stuart and produced in London in 1930. The title role was taken by Arthur Wontner (pictured left), best known for playing Sherlock Holmes on stage and in film. He repeated the role in a gramophone record - MURDER ON THE PORTSMOUTH ROAD – also scripted by Donald Stuart. The first Blake film appeared in 1909 and during the silent era there were thirteen more half-hour Blake features. During the 1930s, three quota films were produced starring George Curzon as Blake and Tony Sympson as Tinker:
"The only one of these films which seems to have survived is the third, SEXTON BLAKE AND THE HOODED TERROR. This was produced in 1938. It had a marvellously hammy villain in the personage of Tod Slaughter who was The Snake, leader of the Black Quorum. George Curzon was an adequate Blake, he was quite authorititive but he lacked the vitality that the character in the stories had; fine in the domestic scenes where he was sitting around in Baker Street but he wasn’t really a man of action. Tony Sympson, unfortunately, was a disappointing Tinker. The film makers couldn’t get away from the fact that they believed a partner should be a silly ass who’s easily duped by the villians. There’s plenty of atmosphere in this film, though; a marvellous gaming room sequence with dummies instead of people; a lovely death room with snakes writhing through the walls, and Greta Gynt is a marvellous Mlle. Julie." But perhaps the finest screen Blake to date was played by David Farrar (pictured below) who in two war time productions, MEET SEXTON BLAKE and THE ECHO MURDERS, was pitted against a new enemy: the Nazis. David Farrar enjoyed himself as Blake as he recalled in his autobiography:  ‘A proposition was put to me to create Sexton Blake on the screen. Well, here again was something which was not likely to shatter the sophisticated circles of London’s West End. But I reflected that Ronald Colman had, in his earliest days, made the Bulldog Drummond series and Basil Rathbone was churning out Sherlock Holmes series regularly, so I thought it might be fun to create the oldest of all the famous sleuths of fiction. And fun it was! I knocked out countless villains, got into dreadful scrapes, smashed chandeliers, was thrown down flooded mine shafts… but always got my man!’
"David Farrar had actually had a small part in SEXTON BLAKE AND THE HOODED TERROR; he’d played Granite Grant. He was a very good Sexton Blake; great authority, a good screen presence, tough with the villains but had that common touch." |