If you were to ask a random stranger on the street how Sherlock Holmes earned his livelihood, you are more likely than not to hear the correct reply, ‘private detective’. If you asked that same person to describe Holmes, they would probably say something like, ‘Tall and gaunt; wears a tweed frock coat, a deerstalker hat, smokes a pipe, and carries a walking stick.’

Arthur Conan Doyle's detective Sherlock Holmes is the late Victorian offspring of Edgar Allan Poe's creation C. August Dupin, the first detective in the modern literary sense to appear in fiction. Holmes has proven to be a much more popular fictional character than Dupin and holds the honour of being the most prolific and popular screen character in film history, with over 70 actors portraying him in an estimated 200 films. The first film to feature Holmes was a one reel short produced in 1900 by the American Mutual and Bioscope Company titled Sherlock Holmes Baffled. The most recent is Bill Condon's 2015 feature film Mr. Holmes with Ian McKellan starring in the title role.

The strangest characterisation of Holmes on film is probably George C. Scott's performance in They Might Be Giants (1971). Scott plays Justin Playfair, an eccentric New York millionaire who suffers a nervous breakdown after his wife's death and retreats into a paranoid delusion that he is Sherlock Holmes. While under observation in a psychiatric hospital, he is treated by a psychoanalyst who just happens to have the name Dr. Mildred Watson. She soon becomes fascinated by his fantasy of being Holmes, especially since, like Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, he possesses an uncanny facility for adductive reasoning. Dr. Watson follows Playfair, who is garbed in Holmes's iconic deerstalker hat and tweed cape, as he rushes around Manhattan on foot in his quest to find the elusive criminal mastermind Moriarty.