The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

In which Sherlock Holmes is pursued by a lustful Russian ballerina, takes on the case of an amnesiac woman found drifting in the Thames, ponders the disappearance of a group of performing dwarfs, becomes embroiled with a foreign spy plot and solves the mystery of the Loch Ness Monster. Billy Wilder’s epic spoof and pastiche of Conan Doyle is both affectionate and extraordinarily detailed, as witty as you’d expect from Wilder and regular co-writer I.A.L. Diamond and if the plot is at times rather episodic, it all ultimately hangs together satisfactorily.

Originally conceived as an even longer film (it already runs 125 minutes), The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes would have featured several other story strands that were shot but later removed by the producers. As it is, the film starts with what an entirely self-contained extended vignette that has no bearing at all on the bulk of the film featuring a Russian ballerina, Madame Petrova (Tamara Toumanova), who wants Holmes (Robert Stephens) to father a child for her. Suggesting that he and Watson (Colin Blakely) are in fact in a gay relationship, Holmes manages to extricate himself from the awkward situation, much the dismay of a furious Watson.

The main story begins when a cab driver arrives at 221B Baker Street with a woman he has found drifting in the Thames, a woman who can’t remember who she is or where she comes from but who is clutching a piece of paper with Holmes’ address on it. As her memory returns, she is reveled to be the Belgian Gabrielle Valladon (Geneviève Page) who is searching for her missing engineer husband. Holmes is briefly distracted by the disappearance of a group of dwarf acrobats but focuses on the search for Valladon which leads him to a castle on the banks of Loch Ness in Scotland. After Watson spots the fabled monster, Holmes comes to realise that his brother Mycroft (Christopher Lee) is behind the mystery, testing a primitive submersible in the loch and disguising it as the monster. The dwarfs are revealed to be the submarine’s crew, a group of mysterious Trappist monks that Holmes and Watson keep encountering turn out to be German spies and Gabrielle, it transpires, is not who she claims to be.

In an interview with the website Den of Geek, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat hailed The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes as their favourite Holmes film and admitted its influence on their subsequent hit BBC drama Sherlock (2010-). Gatiss called it the “perfect combination of reverence and irreverence. That’s why it’s absolutely authentic. He plays very fast and loose with some of the most revered concepts, but in the end is an incredibly affecting, moving piece of cinema.” Elsewhere, writing for Empire, Kim Newman called it “the best Holmes movie ever made.” It’s not that, not by a very long way, but it is a fascinating if deeply flawed attempt to ring a few changes and try something different with a character that had already been done to death on the big screen.

Robert Stephens’ Holmes (originally envisioned by Wilder as repressed homosexual and due to be played by Peter O’Toole) is much admired by many and it is indeed a fantastic and very funny performance though at times he seems to be channeling Oscar Wilde more than the Great Detective. Blakely provides the real fun though as a rather earthy Watson, given to cavorting with dancing girls, getting wildly excited at the prospect of seeing the Loch Ness Monster and doing his best to keep up with the mercurial Holmes and the complications that their latest case has plunged him into. The supporting cast is wonderful too, from Lee’s cold and humorless Mycroft to Irene Handl’s very funny Mrs Hudson and from Page’s enigmatic amnesiac with a secret to Mollie Maureen’s rather eccentric Queen Victoria.

Wilder, an admitted Holmesian who had twice before tried to launch a musical based on the character, was brilliantly aided and abetted in his endeavours by cinematographer Christopher Challis and production designer Alexander Trauner whose marvellous sets ate up most of the budget and were, according to Alan Barnes’ book Sherlock Holmes on Screen, used again in films as disparate as Carry on at Your Convenience (1971) and Hammer’s Hands of the Ripper (1971). It sounds good too thanks to a stirring score from Miklós Rózsa.

Distributors United Artists and the film’s producers were rather jittery when Wilder presented them his original, three hour cut of the film which included a flashback to Holmes’ university days and two additional mini-cases for him and Watson to investigate, including their attempts to unravel the mystery of a corpse found in a room where all the furniture was attached to the ceiling and Watson’s solo investigation of a murder on board a ship. These scenes, along with a modern-day prologue and a scene in which Inspector Lestrade (George Benson) asks Holmes to help in the case of the murders of several prostitutes in Whitechapel, were cut from the film (incomplete versions of the key missing scenes were later included as extras on the film’s laserdisc release) without any input from Wilder. It’s difficult to say just how much the retention of these scenes would have improved or detracted from the film but more of Stephens and Blakely would certainly have been very welcome.

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was a financial disappointment, not much liked by the critics and indifferently received by the public. It has grown in stature over the years and if its not quite Wilder at the peak of his powers or the best Holmes film, there’s still so much to enjoy, particularly the performances and the glorious set designs. It probably has too many ideas for a single film and one regrets the fact that Wilder and Diamond didn’t get the chance to spin the various strands out into a series of comic adventures featuring Stephens and Blakely. It’s a clever, predictably very funny and often surprisingly moving film (the final scenes are heart-breaking) that strangely doesn’t always get the credit it’s due these days.