The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

Trailer

As suggested by the title, legendary director Billy Wilder had intended his 1970 feature The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes to be a nearly three-and-a-half hour study of the often ignored tender inner workings of the usually robotic master detective. It was to be a biopic of sorts that saddled the viewer with the inimitable Holmes and Watson through a series of encounters that, while hitting on all of the standard tropes and tally marks that someone paying to see a Sherlock Holmes film would expect to see, would also create an understanding of the persona of Holmes––flesh out the underlying character and history that would cause the mastermind to be the mistrusting, dope-dependent way he is.

    The film's distributor, United Artists, left a sizable amount of celluloid on the cutting room floor, paring the film down from three hours and twenty minutes, to its current two hours and five minutes. While theater audiences never got to sit down to the spectacle Wilder had initially envisioned, much of the material was preserved, the picture's production well documented, and all is available to the modern audience as DVD extras.

    Despite its truncated running time, The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes is a damn enjoyable movie. If you're a fan of the recent hit television iteration Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman, then you might do well to seek out this film, as show creators / writers Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat cite it as the inspiration behind their series. Indeed they do faithfully replicate some of the beats on display here; particularly the tones of irreverent humor, the examination of the depth of the relationship between the characters of Holmes and Watson, and a closer look at the Holmes under his mask of mastermind hubris.

    The film opens fifty years after the death of John Watson, narrated in voiceover by the deceased doctor as his memoirs are produced from a trunk. It promises to be a previously untold tale of a somewhat compromising nature, which it is...somewhat. Our adventure begins with the famous duo returning home to 221b Baker Street, after successfully putting another tricky case to bed. Bored with inactivity, Holmes again turns to cocaine. Eventually he is driven out of his funk when a pair of tickets to a popular Russian ballet production of Swan Lake appear in the mail. Goaded into going by Watson, Holmes finds himself the object of desire of the show's head ballerina. She is determined to produce a child who is beautiful in body and mind, and Holmes is the genetic donor she's settled on for the "mind." 

    Sherlock finds his way out of the awkward situation by inferring that he and Watson are partners in more than just a professional sense. Apparently Wilder's initial aim was to have presented Sherlock as a repressed homosexual. The resulting dialogue between Holmes and Watson, when a livid Watson reprimands Holmes for destroying his reputation with the suggestion and inquiring to Sherlock's past dalliances with women, leaves the viewer with the impression that maybe there was more truth than deception in his answer to the irate Madame Petrova. 

    The film's second movement begins shortly after when a nearly-drowned mystery woman appears at Holmes' doorstep. Allegedly she had been fished out of the Thames with a wound on her head, a bout of temporary amnesia, and a slip of cardboard with 221b Baker Street scrawled on it, clenched in her hand.  Obviously the mystery is enough to draw Holmes and Watson into figuring out who the woman is, and, after her memory appears to return and they learn of her search for her missing husband, assist her in locating him. Of course things are never as they seem, and layers peel away revealing other wheels in motion that prove that perhaps even the brilliant Sherlock Holmes isn't impervious to deceit. Along the way we get German spies, a Loch Ness monster, a secret weapon being devised and guarded by the secretive Diogenes Club–under the direction of Christopher Lee as Holme's brother Mycroft–and a plot by Germany to bomb London. Much can be surmised from the busier, Robert McGinnis poster at the top of this post, and it wouldn't be prudent to give all of the turns away, other than to say the film ends with both an incredibly dark moment, and a remarkably tender one.

    I've not seen the supplemental material, so I don't know how the fully intended three hour running time plays, but at 125 minutes the film doesn't feel excessive or too short. There is enough levity and tongue-to-cheek lightheartedness to keep the film from being a maudlin character study, and enough Holmesian adventure to keep those looking for a standard, albeit somewhat quirky, mystery satisfied. While not one of Wilder's more well-known works, and perhaps not what he intended it to be, I still highly recommend it.  It features some great cinematography, a thoroughly engaging script by Wilder and his frequent collaborator I.A.L. Diamond (they worked together on Wilder's most name-associated films such as Some Like It Hot and The Apartment), and a wonderful score by Miklos Rosza.

Dir. Billy Wilder; Script - Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond; Music - Miklos Rosza; Cinematography - Christopher Challis; Producer(s) - Billy Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond.

 

Cast: Robert Stephens - Sherlock Holmes, Colin Blakely - John Watson, Genevieve Page - Gabrielle Valadon / Ilse Von Hoffmanstal, Christopher Lee - Mycroft Holmes, Irene Handl - Mrs. Hudson. 

-Josh