Sherlock Holmes (1939 film series) "Rathbone "was" Sherlock Holmes". The choice of Nigel Bruce as Watson was more contentious, with Davies pointing out that "Bruce's characterisation bore little relation" to the written Watson, even though the portrayal eventually produced "an endearingly avuncular figure". The historian David Parkinson agrees, and wrote that Bruce's "avuncular presence provided the perfect counterbalance to Rathbone's briskly omniscient sleuth". Barnes notes that, despite the criticisms against him, Bruce rehabilitated Watson, who had been a marginal figure in the cinematic Holmes canon to that point: "after Bruce, it would be a near-unthinkable heresy to show Holmes without him". With the combination of
Dr. Watson Alan Cox played a teenage Watson in the 1985 film "Young Sherlock Holmes", narrated by Michael Hordern as an older Watson. Ian Hart portrayed a young, capable, and fit Watson twice for BBC Television, once opposite Richard Roxburgh as Holmes (in a 2002 adaptation of "The Hound of the Baskervilles") and for a second time opposite Rupert Everett as the Great Detective in the new story "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking" (2004). In the Soviet Sherlock Holmes film series, directed by Igor Maslennikov, Dr Watson was played by Vitaly Solomin. He is portrayed as a brave