Monday 9 September 2013

Movie: 'The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes' (1970)

The legendary director Billy Wilder had quite the checkered career. In between classics such as 'Stalag 17', 'Sunset Boulevard', 'Double Indemnity', 'Some Like It Hot', 'The Apartment' and 'The Fortune Cookie' he made many movies you might not have heard of. Some of those movies are too heavily rooted in their timeframe ('Kiss Me Stupid', which is also quite weird), while others are rather misconceived in their origins (again 'Kiss Me Stupid', as well as 'Irma La Douce'). Quite often he pushed the boundaries of crumbling censorship to the detriment of his own films, but 'The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes' falls into a funny little category of its own.

'Holmes' was intended to be a roadshow movie, a mammoth epic that would tour the country, showing with an intermission, and comprising four independent but inter-related episodes in the career of Sherlock Holmes that would otherwise not have been revealed. This would have been a capper on Billy Wilder's career as his twilight approached, but instead fate intervened and the cinema roadshow died a death, leading instead to a theatrical release. The movie was mauled in theatrical editing, losing two of its stories, and resulting in two tonally disparate cases that make up a minimal version of the film. The other two cases are apparently and unfortunately lost to posterity.

The reality of 'Holmes' is that we see the bookends of a mammoth story that do not quite have the substance required to make a truly coherent movie. The first portion is effectively a sex farce while the second and longer portion is a kidnapping case that eventually morphs into an international espionage mystery. The unifying theme is the mystery or heartbreak that lurks in Sherlock's personality, that bleakness that motivates him in his lonely course of life, and which remains untouched since in his era no-one would dare to approach him on the topics of love and sex. Indeed, the farce of the first act is constructed entirely to force Watson to ask Holmes about his romantic past, which question is seemingly answered for the audience in the second portion by Holmes' heartbreak at being deceived by the beautiful German spy Gabrielle. Presumably these two points in the arc would have been complemented by events in the missing portions.

It should not be said that this is a bad film, though, as it is in no ways that. It is merely intangibly slight and bizarrely patched together in the middle so that we move from farce to irony over a small chasm. The acting is solid, especially Robert Stephens as Holmes himself, managing to pull off an aristocratic air as well as a cynicism and urbane worldliness that is not normally seen in portrayals of the Great Detective. Colin Blakely in contrast is almost ridiculously buffoonish to the point of caricature, partially defusing the dramatic bombs that could easily have detonated more effectively. This is surely one of the best Sherlock Holmes films made to date, that collection being replete with noble attempts that never quite seem to hit the mark. The problem with a Sherlock movie is that remaining close to the source material is more limiting than anyone can ever quite imagine; The movies which seem to succeed more take new turns and distance themselves while remaining true to the core of the character, as in 'The Seven-Per-Cent Solution' and 'Murder By Decree'.

Points of interest for this movie include the presence of Christopher Lee as Mycroft Holmes, the excellent score by Miklós Rózsa, some witty banter scripted expertly for Holmes, and that strange sense of melancholy that permeates the piece. It's not for nothing that this film is referred to often as inspiration for the modern day BBC series 'Sherlock' in the commentaries for those shows. It does have a similar air to it quite frequently.

This is a well motivated patchwork of a film, but one well worth viewing. It's my second favourite Sherlock film after the aforementioned 'Seven-Per-Cent Solution' and might one day become my favourite as tastes change over time. Of course the main crime here is that we will never see the full and coherent film, and that more than an hour of footage is lost forever. Perhaps it would have been a bloated mess, but just as equally it could have been the masterpiece that crowned the career of the late great Billy Wilder. At the very least it's better than 'Kiss Me Stupid', which I shall talk about quite soon.

O.

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