A Study in Scarlet

I watched the movie, Brigham Young. It starts out with the saints in Missouri having a dance, being attacked by the mob. The Mormons are left, tied to trees, and their meeting house is destroyed. Joseph Smith, the prophet, is arrested and put on trial where he heads to Carthage Jail, where he is murdered. Brigham Young, a convert to the church, stands up for him in court, denouncing their attackers as people who will go down in history as the wrong side of the law, not the Mormons. Brigham Young becomes the new prophet and leader of the church. An army man advises Young to leave Illinois, because "the law can't help them" and Brigham says, "The law? What law? The law that let's a pack of scoundrels come in here and hunt us down like wild animals, burn our homes, ruin our crops, arrest our leader on trumped-up charges and then look the other way when a mob breaks in and murders him? If they call that law, let 'em keep it. We don't want any more of it!" This statement shows Young's clear frustration with how the people are being treated. Brigham Young leads the saints westward to Mexico, via wagons, in pursuit of religious freedom. Several members quit in response to having to travel so far to the unknown. The members who stay with Young, encounter harsh weather, death, sickness, and Indians on the way. Young says, "Indians can't be any worse than some Christians I know. But just the same, until we find a little more about them, we mean to trust in you, Lord, and keep our powder dry.." The movie also focuses on Jonathan Kent, a member, and Zina Webb, a non-member who joins them on their trek, who fall in love on the way to Utah.



A Study in Scarlet describes the first meeting of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson and their first case together. Dr. Watson has been in Candahar, during the second Afghan War, as an assistant surgeon in the army. While he is recovering from his war wound during the Battle of Mainwand, Watson gets Enteric fever and is forced to leave the war to return to England. Watson is introduced to Sherlock Holmes through Young Stamford, because both Watson and Holmes are looking for lodging in London. Holmes is studying Anatomy and Chemistry when they meet and trying to come up with a new test to match blood stains. Watson becomes more and more intrigued with Holmes's personality and eccentricities. There's been a murder and so Watson and Holmes investigate their first case together. At the scene there is a gold wedding ring, Drebber's body has no wound, and there someone else's blood on the wall, spelling the word "Rache." Sherlock Holmes deducts the murder weapon is poison and the murderer is a six foot tall man based on foot prints, length of strides, and the height of the writing on the wall. Drebber's assistant, Stangerson's body is also found at a local hotel. After they find the suspect is the cab driver, Jefferson Hope, Hope tells them about his life in Utah and how the woman he loved and her father were mistreated by the Mormons. After Hope leaves to work in the Sierra mountains, his love, Lucy Ferrier, a non-member is forced to marry Drebber under Brigham Young's leadership and her father John is murdered. Lucy dies a month after her marriage of a broken heart. Hope tracks Drebber and Stangerson to London and murders them with poisoned pills, leaving Drebber Lucy's wedding ring Hope took off her finger before she was buried. The blood he used for the writing on the wall comes from his nose, as he has aorta aneurysms, which Hope dies from in his jail cell. During the case Holmes is very simple, saying very few words like, "The plot thickens," while knowing much more than he lets on. It shows his clever personality.



In the movie "Brigham Young- Frontiersman," I thought the plot of the Mormon's persecution and eviction from Missouri and Illinois was historically accurate, but the actors such as Vincent Price and Dean Jagger didn't really represent the true historical figures' personalities. Usually films made in Hollywood have Anti-Mormon messages most of the time, because they think they are just evil polygamists. I liked how this film was pro-Mormon for a change, showing the history of what they truly went through. The film seems like a typical western film made in the 1940's era, melodramatic with music with over the top actors, trying to make light of a serious subject, and unrealistic scenery and representation. The film seemed to have a slow pace, where as the book was more intense. The film cut a lot out of Mormon history, such as polygamy, which played an important role in the book. The mob scenes in Illinois didn't seem as intense as they could have been and seemed melodramatic rather than frightening. I guess it was standards and practices who forced the director to not show the violence of certain parts of the story due to the morals as the time. I liked how the soundtrack used hymns, such as "Come Come Ye Saints" that are familiarly associated with the Mormons, on the journey to remind us how important it was for them to settle in Utah. I liked how they provided a historical background on Joseph Smith and showed what happened to the saints after the states' people were harassing them. I liked how they showed the struggle between Young and certain members after Smith's death, as to who would lead the church and the departing members. I think the children reading in the wagons, was an never before seen element of the journey, but could have been totally possible.



The film, "Brigham Young," showed a different viewpoint from "A Study in Scarlet," so it was a good counterbalance for the novel. The book showed the Mormons in Utah in a negative light, while the movie showed their journey to Utah in a positive light. The book says that every non-member of the church "vanished away" if they "held out" on becoming a member. Brigham Young is a evil tyrannical leader in the book who forces young girls to marry people they don't want to marry, while he is a kind and compassionate leader who encourages non-members to join them on their journey in order to pursue freedom in the movie. The book showed more of an outsider's view point of Mormons being persecutors of new people arriving in Utah after they were persecuted themselves in the East, showing us they have turned evil after hard times. The movie showed an outsider's view point of Mormons as human beings and welcoming, who had to endure a lot of pain, and rose above it, becoming better for it. The movie is more historically accurate with plot details than the book, although the tone of the movie isn't as serious as the book. The book focuses on Mormons being polygamists while the movie hardly references it, which is probably all they were known for in England at the time. I wasn't familiar with the Joseph Smith code they referred to in the book, that said "Let every maiden of the true faith marry one of the elect; for if she wed a Gentile, she commits a grievous sin," so I don't know if it is a true code or just made up for the novel. It seems like Doyle was writing about a subject based on the rumors he had heard, not knowing whether it was true or not.