Sherlock & Humphrey Bogart: “Things I meant to say and never did.”

ninatypewriter:

I don’t know if anyone in the Sherlock fandom has written about this, but I just watched Tokyo Joe (1949), the Humphrey Bogart movie, for the first time, and much to my great shock, I noticed almost as many similarities between Tokyo Joe and Sherlock (BBC) as there are between The Princess Bride and Sherlock.

A line of dialogue at the end of Tokyo Joe made me gasp out loud, when Joe (Humphrey Bogart) says to the great love of his life, his ex-wife, Trina, after he’s been shot, not knowing if he’ll survive: There are “things I meant to say and never did.” Just as Sherlock famously said to John on the tarmac at the end of Sherlock S3 E3 “His Last Vow.”

I’m tagging you, @quietlyprim, in this post, because I think it’s worth analyzing in one of your TJLC videos, and I hope you’ll also share this with the many brilliant Sherlock fandom meta writers who could watch Tokyo Joe and write metas about the many, many Sherlock parallels.

The basics of the plot: In post-World War II, late-1940s Japan – filled with intrigue, and characters who parallel Sherlock, John, Mary, Mycroft, Moriarty, and more – when Joe (Humphrey Bogart) returns to Tokyo, he finds out that the great love of his life, his wife, Trina, hadn’t died during the war. Much to his surprise, she’s alive.

When Joe and Trina reunite, she tells him that during the war she’d been held captive by the Japanese military, gave birth, and then the Japanese military took her baby and forced her to broadcast propaganda aimed at allied troops. Trina (who loves Joe as passionately as he loves her) also tells Joe that she is now married to another man. She doesn’t love him, though, the way she loves Joe. She had divorced Joe after the war only because she thought that he’d abandoned her during the war, but when they meet in Tokyo after the war she learns that Joe hadn’t abandoned her, he actually thought she’d died during the war, and had no idea she’d been held captive. 

Joe is like Sherlock, expecting that John (Trina) will be waiting for him upon his return, and shocked to learn that he/she has moved on. Joe also didn’t know (until Trina tells him during their post-war reunion in Tokyo) that Trina had been pregnant when she was captured, and that the baby girl the Japanese had kidnapped was Joe’s. That baby is now seven years old, and living with Trina and her new husband in Tokyo.

Joe wants Trina to leave her husband and come back to him. There’s a lot of military and government intrigue. Bad guys kidnap Joe and Trina’s daughter. Joe rescues the little girl, but is shot. Trina shows up at the scene. Gravely wounded, Joe has a conversation with Trina, who promises to divorce her husband and come back to Joe. Joe promises that they’ll have a wonderful life, and as he’s gasping, he tells her that there were “things I meant to say and never did.” He’s taken away on a stretcher and, as the movie ends, it’s not clear if he’ll live or die.

Thanks in advance to @quietlyprim and the fandom!

Cool! But I hope Sherlock has a different ending.