The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is a 1970 DeLuxe Color film in Panavision written and produced by Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond, and directed by Wilder. Starring Robert Stephens as Holmes and Colin Blakely as Doctor Watson, the film offers an affectionate, slightly parodic look at Sherlock Holmes, and draws a distinction between the "real" Holmes and the character portrayed by Watson in his stories for The Strand magazine.
Plot
The film is divided into two separate, unequal stories. In the first and shorter of the two, in August 1887 Holmes is approached by Rogozhin, on behalf of a famous Russian ballerina, Madame Petrova. Madame Petrova is about to retire, and wishes to have a child. She proposes that Holmes be the father, one who she hopes will inherit her beauty and his intellect. Holmes manages to extricate himself by claiming that Watson is his lover, much to the doctor's embarrassment. Back at 221B, Watson confronts Holmes about the reality of the ensuing rumours, and Holmes only states that Watson is "being presumptuous" by asking Holmes whether he has had relationships with women.
In the main plot, a Belgian woman, Gabrielle Valladon, is fished out of the River Thames and brought to Baker Street. She begs Holmes to find her missing engineer husband. The resulting investigation leads to the shores of Loch Ness. Along the way, they encounter a group of monks and some dwarfs, and Watson apparently sights the Loch Ness monster. They see canaries and sulphuric acid being carried into a castle undergoing renovation, and conclude that the canaries are used to detect chlorine gas produced when the sulphuric acid is mixed with sea water.
It turns out that Sherlock's brother Mycroft is involved in building a submersible for the Royal Navy, assisted by M. Valladon, who has developed an air pump that is vital for the success of the project. When taken out for testing, the craft was disguised as the monster. The dwarfs were recruited as crewmen because they took up less space and needed less air. When they meet, Mycroft informs Sherlock that his client is actually a top German spy, Ilse von Hoffmanstal, sent to steal the air-pump. The "monks" are German sailors.
Queen Victoria arrives to inspect and launch the vessel, but objects to its unsportsmanlike nature. She orders the exasperated Mycroft to destroy it, so he conveniently leaves it unguarded for the monks to take (rigging it to sink when it is submerged). Fräulein von Hoffmanstal is arrested, to be exchanged for a British spy arrested elsewhere.
In the final scene some months later, Sherlock receives a message from his brother, telling him that von Hoffmanstal had been arrested as a spy in Japan, and subsequently executed by firing squad. Devastated, the detective retreats to his room to seek solace in a 7% solution of cocaine.
Cast
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Production
Casting
Billy Wilder, a long time Holmesian, had long aspired to create a musical adaptation of the Sherlock Holmes stories. Nicol Williamson, who went on to play Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, was also considered for Holmes.
Filming
Elaborate sets were built on the backlot at Pinewood Studios, including 150 yards of the Baker Street set, at a cost of £80,000.
- "The Dreadful Business of the Naked Honeymooners" - As Holmes and Watson travel back to England on an ocean liner, having solved a case for the Sultan in Constantinople, Holmes complains that anyone could have solved the case, even Watson. When a murder is discovered on board, Holmes tells Watson to attempt to solve the case himself. Holmes watches, without saying anything, as Watson proceeds to go to the wrong cabin, where he finds a honeymooning couple (Nicole Shelby and Jonathan Cecil) passed out drunk, naked, in bed. Mistaking them for the murder victims, Watson begins to deduce an elaborate solution based on the "evidence" he sees around him, while Holmes listens, amused. When the lovers wake up, Holmes tells Watson he has gone to the wrong cabin, and Watson decides not to try to solve a case again. Billy Wilder did not want the humps and asked that they be removed, despite warnings that it would affect its buoyancy. As a result, the model sank. The model was rediscovered in April 2016 during a Scottish expedition to find the Loch Ness Monster.
Subtext
Director Billy Wilder has said he originally intended to portray Holmes explicitly as a repressed homosexual, stating, "I should have been more daring. I have this theory. I wanted to have Holmes homosexual and not admitting it to anyone, including maybe even himself. The burden of keeping it secret was the reason he took dope." Holmes' personal interests and particularly his feelings for Watson remain ambiguous in the film, including but not limited to Holmes' admission that he is "not a whole-hearted admirer of womankind", the enjoyment he derives from implying to outsiders that he and Watson are lovers, and his statement that Watson is "being presumptuous" by assuming there have been women in his life, among others. Mark Gatiss called The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes "the film that changed his life" for this reason: "It's a fantastically melancholy film. The relationship between Sherlock and Watson is treated beautifully; Sherlock effectively falls in love with him in the film, but it's so desperately unspoken."
Reception
Upon its release at Radio City Music Hall in New York City, it received excellent reviews. Vincent Canby called it a "comparatively mild Billy Wilder and rather daring Sherlock Holmes, not a perfect mix, perhaps, but a fond and entertaining one". It grossed $150,000 in its opening week at the Music Hall, ranking 13th at the US box office. Kim Newman, reviewing it in Empire magazine, described it as the "best Sherlock Holmes movie ever made" and "sorely underrated in the Wilder canon". Roger Ebert was more critical, giving the film two-and-a-half stars out of four. He wrote that it is "disappointingly lacking in bite and sophistication", that it "begins promisingly enough" but that "before the movie is 20 minutes old, Wilder has settled for simply telling a Sherlock Holmes adventure". Gene Siskel gave the film one-and-a-half stars out of four and called it "a conventional and not very well written mystery" that made it seem as though "Wilder had enough of an idea for a television variety show skit but unfortunately saw fit to expand it into a movie". Charles Champlin of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "the whole effect of the picture is a kind of affable blandness which, given the expectations you have of Billy Wilder, constitutes a disappointment". Based on the sample cities covered by Variety, it grossed $536,927 from 39 play weeks in 1970.
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian, reviewing the film in 2002, wrote: "Billy Wilder's distinctive, irreverent slant on the world's greatest 'consulting detective' holds up reasonably well 32 years on; you wouldn't expect anything directed by Wilder and scripted by his long-time associate I. A. L. Diamond to be anything less than funny and watchable, and this is both".
Influences and adaptations
Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, the creators and writers of the BAFTA and Emmy Award-winning series Sherlock, credited The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes as a source of inspiration for their show.
Michael Hardwick and Mollie Hardwick authored a novelization of the film.
Home media
In 1994, Image Entertainment released the film on LaserDisc, in what was called Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, The: Special Edition. The release includes "The Dreadful Business of the Naked Honeymooners." The sequence was subtitled because no audio was available.
The Region 1 DVD release restored portions of cut scenes that consists of soundtracks and a series of stills. A Blu-ray was released 22 July 2014 by Kino Lorber. It includes deleted scenes and bonus material.