BFI launches campaign to find missing film featuring Sherlock Holmes.

The BFI has launched a campaign to find a copy of the first feature film featuring Sherlock Holmes.

Silent film A Study in Scarlet, directed by George Pearson, was first released in autumn 1914 but was subsequently lost.

The work is an adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s story of the same name, which shows a fictional murder during Brigham Young’s trek across America with his Mormon followers.

The film was shot on location at Worton Hall studios in the Summer of 1914. Cheddar Gorge in Somerset and Southport Sands in Merseyside stood in for the Rocky Mountains and the Utah plains.

Pearson’s second Holmes film, The Valley of Fear (1916), starring H.A. Saintsbury, is also missing.

Bryony Dixon, curator, silent film, BFI National Archive said: “Every archivist dreams of finding lost films. But this is a film of great importance. Sherlock Holmes is internationally renowned as a great detective. It would be wonderfully appropriate if a super-sleuth could help us celebrate the centenary of this film with a chance to see it.”

The search coincides with an exhibition on the detective, and the city that inspired the stories, at the Museum of London, opening October 17.

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