I've been spending the past few weeks looking into past adaptations of Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot.
I wont list them all at this point, but let's take a look at this version of Sherlock Holmes
from 1931:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQNU_kwOYNE
Which is freely available on Youtube as public domain content. Yes, that's the whole film linked.
The sheer nostalgia it generates is quite indescribable. I mean, my parents weren't even born then, let alone me, and yet it conjures up so much nostalgia. Both the familiar character and settings plus the fact that these kind of films did used to be on television when I was growing up.
Everything about how films looked and sounded then is of a certain style, a style so conforming to all the other films of that era that you could watch any one of them and get very similar sensations.
And then you realise that the last Sherlock Holmes story Conan Doyle published was actually March 5th 1927, and you then apply that thought to the nostalgia of watching something that is, essentially, contemporary with it's original author. It would have been as contemporary to people in 1931 as Harry Potter was nearly 10 years ago.
And then it hits you. The fact that there are people still alive today who likely saw this film in the cinema on release day, or near enough, and saw it at an age that would have been memorable, like a 10 year old in 1977 going to see Star Wars. It looks so old, so old as to be from a whole different human age, and yet is still contemporary cinema in terms of being a film that could be of living memory.
Also, this film was, until very recently, thought lost forever. A copy was found in the USA & it's kind of a miracle it even now exists.
Truly fascinating.