Watch The Master Blackmailer For Free

You won't be disappointed!

I wanted to but couldn't!

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

The first movie I see with Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. Very different in all respects from the other screenings. Many actors played Holmes, the most notable being Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing, Robert Downey, Jr., Basil Rathbone, Michael Caine, Roger Moore, Christopher Plummer, Ian Richardson, John Cleese, Peter O'Toole, Nicol Williamson, Stewart Granger, John Barrymore. Each with its unique personality. Jeremy Brett is very special. Very good Edward Hardwicke as Dr.Watson. Also very good Robert Hardy as the villain.

I am just watching it now on ITV+.... What a masterpiece ! Almost inside the book, living in the author's breath. A perfect example of Cinema becoming Art when the director is really in his element & he exhibits his craftsmanship. A "Must Have" in a collection. :) I will never forget Holmes flirting with the Maid .His laughter on the ladder.The amazing moments of still scenes director made look like we are just having a glimpse into the spirit of that era. Incredible!I will get this movie at once! It will be one of the tops I keep watching over & over again. If Arthur Conan Doyle was able to watch this I am sure he would be awed to see the accuracy of images exactly as he imagined them to be. A piece of Art can't be described it should be experienced so I recommend dedicated followers of Cinema watch this movie & make a treasure of it.

The production values, as usual, are excellent. There's even a big ballroom scene with Watson doing the polka. Maybe it's not up to "War and Peace" or "Madame Bovary" but there are a lot of extras, its colorful, and the music is tripping. Jeremy Brett and Edward Hardwicke as as good as always and the supporting players get the job done.But I don't know why it isn't more enjoyable. Sometimes it even made me squirm with discomfort. It was never my favorite story, and I haven't read it for years, and I can't understand why the producers and the writer, Jeremy Paul, drew it out to such length. Unlike "The Hound" and "The Sign of Four", it was not a novella to begin with. It was just another short story, and not one of the best.Except for the climactic confrontation, at 102 minutes this is rather a long, slow slog -- more of a melodrama than a mystery. Holmes pulls off no spectacular feats of deduction. Nothing about cigar ash, footprints, or even somebody's old hat. Except for two or three extended scenes in which Holmes appears (convincingly) as a raggedy plumber, the sleuth's name might as well have been Philo Vance.Holmes does a couple of illegal and unethical things to nail Charles Augustus Milverton, the nasty blackmailer. He engages in burglary, he witnesses a murder and allows the killer to escape without informing on her, and he woos a simple housemaid to get information.Murder, burglary, okay, but that housemaid business is unnerving. She's Agatha, Sophie Williams, plain but honest in her affection for Holmes the ersatz plumber. And Jeremy Brett plays his attraction to her in a perfectly straight manner -- straight, the way Holmes would be straight. She asks him to kiss her and he replies in a tremulous voice, "I don't know how." In another scene he's flat on his back in the garden and she's lying on top of him and tells him of her feelings for him. "Agatha," he says, barely able to get it out, "you have touched my heart." Watson objects to his using the girl and Holmes brushes it aside, "It can't be helped." And in a later scene he shows up at the house not in the persona of the unkempt plumber but as Holmes, the world's only consulting detective, and he sweeps past the maid without a glance.The final scene has Holmes and Watson back at Baker Street. Watson takes up his pen and a subdued Holmes begs him not to write up the story, adding that the case isn't one that he's particularly proud of. Right.

An earlier comment of mine was deleted by a complaint from a blackmailing reader, who threatened me to go more lightly on his pet world.This was never a great Holmes story. It is of the "take action and disguise self" branch of the Conan Doyle tree. I much prefer the scientist who deduces, ideally deducing what's going on the master criminal's mind.Here, the story structure has four women whose lives are touched by the bad guy. They are the center of the thing, these four, not Holmes, and every sequence is set up to illuminate them not the detective. Two are women who have been successfully blackmailed. One (the redhead) not yet. The fourth sets a kind of symmetry as she is employed by the criminal and exploited emotionally not by him, but by Holmes. These four are mirrored by other women and men dressed as women in a portrayal of a sort of survivalist London underground.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.