HILE my collection of Sherlock Holmes DVDs are well rounded-out with Brett, Rathbone and others, some of the earliest films have always eluded me, and in particular those of Wontner and Owen as the Master Detective. I did find Wontner’s The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes for $1 in the discount bin at a local department megastore beginning with the letter “W” (which shall remain nameless), but all three copies they had were defective, crashing Windows and refusing to be read by either Mac OS X or Linux. And so it was a pleasant surprise to trip across four Wontner and Owen films online in a BitTorrent archive, free for download in several different formats and qualities, including iPod-ready video. (The films actually fell into the public domain years ago.) They can be found in the Mystery section of site called PublicDomainTorrents.com.

The quality is not the greatest, of course –the films were made in the 30’s, and these copies are not taken from the masters– but they’re still a great find for me nevertheless. If you’re interested in downloading some of these little treasures, point your favourite BitTorrent client (I use Azureus) to PDT and catch Reginald Owen in A Study in Scarlet (1933, and bearing no resemblance whatsoever to the novel), and Wontner in The Sign of Four (1932), The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes (1935), and Murder at the Baskervilles (1937, a.k.a., Silver Blaze). There are also four of Universal’s Rathbone/Bruce films from the 1940’s, namely Dressed to Kill, Terror by Night, The Woman in Green, and Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon. You may have noticed the latter four films offered cheaply from many different distributors, and the reason is elementary: no copyrights = no royalties.

Note that getting torrents requires you to have a high-speed connection, and sometimes a lot of patience — the download speed depends on how many other people are downloading and/or sharing the same files. If you’re stuck on dial-up, find the downloads too slow, or the technology of torrents proves intimidating, you can also have them mailed to you as DVDs, AVI files, or even iPod-ready videos, for just a small copying and shipping fee.

If you’re so inclined, you can also convert and burn these files to make your own DVDs. Ah, a weekend project! And don’t forget: VLC is an excellent free player that handles all these media files with aplomb.