Billy Wilder and John Huston, much of their lives, harbored dreams of making movies based on their boyhood heroes. Each worked separately for a decade or more on screenplays for these projects, which interestingly were about rather odd couples who were also Subjects of Victoria Regina's British Empire.

The films were to be "Buddy Movies," screenplays reflecting the kind of heroic relationships the Great Directors imagined themselves to have. Each Director, born in the same year (1906), honed and revised his script, stalking dream teams to play his heroes. In the final result, Huston's THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975), based on Kipling's classic story of the Indian Raj, revived his career, kept him working till the day he died, but Wilder's THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (1970) was a huge box office failure which started him on the way to a long retirement.

It is easy to see what attracted the Irish-American Huston to the tall, lean, wild and roguish Daniel Dravot, who yearned to be a Himalayan Prince. They were a match, and Huston originally saw Clark Gable as his alter ego (and Humphrey Bogart as sidekick "Peachy" Carnahan) before time and fate brought him to the lucky pairing of Sean Connery and Michael Caine. But what could have attracted impish, diminutive, cynical Viennese Billy Wilder to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's tall, very British, rather effete appearing master detective?

The answer is a mystery, if not an unsolvable one. Ironically, as we shall see, it is that fact which makes THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES an underrated, misunderstood motion picture, very much worth looking at again.

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Wilder's dream may have assumed its shape in the limpid strains Miklos Rozsa's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (Opus 24), commissioned and performed by Jascha Heifetz early in the 1960's, when the first draft of the Holmes project was begun. Rozsa, a fellow refugee from the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, had provided music for three successive Wilder films: FIVE GRAVES TO CAIRO (1943), DOUBLE INDEMNITY (AAN, 1944) and THE LOST WEEKEND (1945).

According to the Composer, the music loving Wilder conceived of THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES as a four part "composed film," cut to the movements of Rozsa's Concerto, in the way Orson Welles had photographed parts of CITIZEN KANE (1941) to fit musical themes by Bernard Herrmann, and how Michael Powell cut parts of THE RED SHOES (1948), and all of THE TALES OF HOFFMANN (1951), to the arrangements of Brian Easdale.

Wilder procured the rights to Sherlock Holmes from the Conan Doyle estate in 1955 for a proposed musical, but seven years later, he saw it as a "symphonic" intimate film biography of Holmes, with autobiographical touches of his own. He wanted to show the ironic, often absurd, sometimes tragic elements that underlies the life of a public figure -- even a fictional, almost mythic one like Sherlock Holmes.

Might THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES have been intended a metaphor for the influences which underlie our heroes in real life?

Perhaps, and certainly, the format of the Holmes stories reinforce that idea.

Because Conan Doyle chose to present Holmes through the distancing conceit of "memoirs" published in Strand Magazine by John H. Watson, M. D., late of the Indian Army, and because Holmes often denigrated Watson's view of him, THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES would deal with supposed stories which the loyal Watson had suppressed.

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From his screenwriter beginnings with Ufa and Aafa in Germany and Austria (Emil and the Detective, Lamprecht,1931, et al), Wilder had almost always had collaborator -- a Watson to his Holmes. He looked on most collaborators as brief artistic love affairs (or worse), but his associations with Charles Brackett and I. A. L. Diamond were more like marriages. (And here is a clue to what the film is really about.) Until their bitter divorce after SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950), Wilder co-wrote early on in Hollywood most successfully with Brackett (MIDNIGHT, 1939; NINOTCHKA, 1939; BALL OF FIRE, 1941, etc).

[When Wilder became a writer/director, with his own production unit, and a Final Cut, he worked with a variety of writers, including Raymond Chandler (DOUBLE INDEMNITY, 1944), until he found I. A. L. Diamond (SOME LIKE IT HOT, 1959; THE APARTMENT, 1960; ONE, TWO, THREE, 1961). It was Diamond, a Romanian more temperamentally suited to Wilder, who succeeded Harry Kurnitz on the Holmes project. He and Wilder worked on it, off and on, for over ten years.]

In 1967, during the final drafts of THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, sixty-one year-old Billy Wilder lost three of his longest collaborators for good. Doan Harrison, his editorial advisor for over 15 years, died that year, as did his music advisor and personal friend Franz Waxman (SUNSET BOULEVARD, 1950). Then Charles Brackett, still embittered over his final rejection by Wilder, suffered a stroke from which he would not recover. (He died two years later while Wilder was making THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES in England.)

Bracket, a tall, thin Harvard graduate, from a conservative family in upper New York State, was elegant, erudite, polished, and some whispered a closet gay, all things the younger, small, self-educated, earthy, womanizing Vienna ghetto kid, Wilder, was not. They argued continually, and when they were not writing, they played cribbage, much like an old married couple.

Or Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, except that in physical type, Wilder and Bracket were reversed.

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And so let us turn to THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES itself.

As conceived, the film begins with a prologue of Watson's grandson (Colin Blakey), a veterinarian from Canada, entering a bank in modern London to receive a strong box, kept in the firm's safe for 80 years. [The banker (John Williams) is a member of The Sherlock Holmes Society and remarks that he can't stand "that Secret Service chap -- the one with the hairy chest," referring to Sean Connery's 007.] Within the box is Holmes' deerstalker cap, photos of Holmes with various colleagues, a meerschaum, a magnifying glass coated with a curious white powder, an enameled address plaque marked 221b, a pair of handcuffs, a watch containing the picture of a woman we shall meet in the movie, a signet ring, a hypodermic needle with syringe in a dark blue case, a Citizen Kane-like globe holding a bust of Queen Victoria -- and most importantly, dusty manuscripts of four additional Holmes' cases, each one revealing a separate aspect of Holmes' personal life, and his relationship with Dr. Watson.. All the musical themes of Rozsa's Concerto are introduced, and the titles roll.

THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, as the globe indicates, was to be an homage not only to the lost paradise of Victorian Age Europe but to the great independent film makers and films which began to appear in the late 1930's and early 1940's, when Wilder became a writer/director himself; films from directors like Welles, Sturges, Powell, Disney, Dieterle, Olivier, as well as the earlier Von Stroheim and his mentor Ernst Lubitsch. That period, 25 years before, had been Wilder's Golden Age.

The film was also to be a gentle, somewhat reluctant acknowledgment of a new age in which longer, more adult, more complex pictures on almost any theme could be dramatized. If other directors such as David Lean could produce successful three or four hour films, openly making use of tabu subjects (instead of veiled, sly references), Billy Wilder would do so, too. As Wilder biographer Ed Sikov described Holmes in On Sunset Boulevard (1998), what could be more hip than a three and a half hour epic about "a brilliant, maladjusted, misogynistic gay drug addict"?

That would show 'em!

Most of all, THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES was to be Wilder's personal meditation on the very nature of collaboration. And the necessary conflicts and subterfuges it entails -- much like marriage.

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Well-financed by the Mirisch Brothers, the film was to be in four movements, like Rozsa's Concerto, each movement one of Watson's hidden recollections. Each movement was to begin with a narration of a return by Holmes (Robert Stephens) and Watson (Colin Blakey) to their digs at 221b Baker Street. The first one, beginning in September 1887, "The Curious Case of the Upside Room," was to humorously illustrate Watson's increasingly desperate attempts to treat Holmes' depression by inventing a "locked room murder mystery" with the help of Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard (George Benson).

The case was introduced by Holmes and Watson (Robert Stephens and Colin Blakey) returning to London from Yorkshire, where they have been working on a case. They encounter a wounded Italian tenor, and Holmes gives one of his amazing, bored deductions, establishing for the 128th time in Movies his deductive mastery, and causing the ejection of the man from the carriage (similar to a scene early in Huston's THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING). All of this and the bogus case of a dead man found in the upside down room has been excised.

Only the soundtrack still exists.

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The film really begins, as we now have it, with "The Singular Affair of the Russian Ballerina," in which Watson tries to interest Holmes in the fine arts, after the neurotic detective rejects as transparent a case about seven dwarfs who, dressed as little girls, may soon give bomb-loaded bouquets to Czar Alexander III. Watson persuades Holmes to attend a production of Swan Lake at Covent Garden. (That's Miklos Rozsa conducting the pit orchestra.) While there, Holmes is approached by Impresario Emil Rogozhin (Clive Revill) to give "a perfect child" to the Company's Prima Ballerina, Petrova (Tamara Toumanova), in return for a Stradivarius.

Much as Holmes is tempted, he avoids the relationship, weakly suggesting that he and Watson are more than working partners. Meanwhile, the bluff, vigorous Watson has been having a great old time with the ladies of the Corps de Ballet, but a soto voce word of revelation by Rogozgub causes a complete change of mazurka partners for him (and a whispered personal invitation from the Impresario). Enraged, Watson confronts Holmes about the subject of what we would term today his "sexual orientation," but Holmes demurs.

[When the film was being torn apart later to make it more commercial, Ernest Walter, the cutter, wanted to end the film with Rogozhin coming to Baker Street with a bouquet of roses for Homes, but Wilder rejected the idea, preferring a more melancholy conclusion. An inside joke may have been that the fragile looking Stephens, long married to Maggie Smith, was evidently very heterosexual, while stocky Colin Blakey was indeed gay.]

The longest, most well developed episode, "The Adventure of the Dumbfounded Detective," involves Watson's inability to prevent Holmes' boredom (over a Rube Goldberg/Walter Mitty-like cigarette smoking machine experiment) from seeking out where the good doctor has hidden the cocaine paraphernalia. Even when Watson persuades Holmes' to render a deeply felt and haunting love theme on the violin can he stop the Great Detective from finding the dope and retiring to his room. The situation is rescued by the sudden arrival of a cabbie with a beautiful woman wrapped in a horse blanket. Gabrielle Valladon (Genevieve Page) is the wife of a Belgian hydraulics engineer, who has disappeared somewhere in Britain. She says that she was hit on the head and thrown in the Thames.

The story involves a lead spy named Von Tirpitz, seven dwarfs, a trip to Scotland, the Loch Ness Monster, Queen Victoria and a secret weapon (lusted after by half the governments of Europe), all monitored carefully by Sherlock's smarter Intelligence officer brother, Mycroft Holmes (a balding Christopher Lee).

[There is a funny little homage to Laurence Olivier in the episode where Holmes, Watson and Madam Valladon spy on some of the dwarfs at an interment in a Scottish graveyard. Afterward, the trio questions the grave diggers, one of whom turns out to be Stanley Holloway, who played the First Grave Digger in Olivier's Academy Award winning film production of HAMLET (1948).]

The final story, "The Dreadful Business of the Naked Honeymooners," is a farce in which, on returning from a working vacation to the Middle East, Watson attempts to demonstrate to Holmes how much he has learned from his partner about the art of detection. He attempts to solve a murder aboard a ship returning them to England by way of the Mediterranean -- with disastrous and hilarious results.

This entire section was also removed, and in a kind of cosmic joke, whereas the sound track of the first episode exists, only the visuals of this part have been found.

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So what happened to THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, this tragi-comedy intended to be roadshowed at three hours and twenty minutes? Blake Edwards' STAR happened (a real bomb!), and the collapse of the market for long, widescreen pictures, which had lured movie goers away from their TV sets for ten years. The Mirisch Brothers took a good look at the Director's epic film, and insisted that it be condensed to two hours. Wilder, who had Final Cut, was heartbroken, but he agreed and approved the editing.

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It has been said that any story which uses a narrator is likely to be "unreliable" because the subject is always the Narrator himself or herself, who is either hiding something, or at least leaving something out. By that reasoning, Watson is really what the Cases of Sherlock Holmes are about. It has also been argued that Billy Wilder is attracted to betrayed and confused couples, so often buddies or teams (DOUBLE INDEMNITY, THE LOST WEEKEND, SUNSET BOULEVARD, ACE IN THE HOLE, THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH, THE APARTMENT, KISS ME STUPID, THE FORTUNE COOKIE, etc) because he is a deeply divided artist, part cynic, part rueful romantic, reduced to the role of a pitiless observer. If so, both these principles are illustrated in THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES.

For instance, Watson clearly comes off in the film (and in the stories) as a likable, intelligent, faithful, if slightly fussy, sometimes absurd kind of fellow. He is what we see when we analyze ourselves, which is why he is so effective as a narrator and foil, and why we can believe in Holmes and his genius. His struggle to help his friend, rather than dominate the quaint cases they must solve, is what appeals to us in THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES.

We also can see, for instance, in the course of a brilliantly photographed, edited and scored sequence of a bicycle tour of Scottish castles not only the development of a genuine romance between Holmes and Madam Valladon (posing as man and wife) but that Watson is observing the couple speeding ahead of him on their bike built for two. He shows both barely concealed happiness for his friend's rare romantic success but polite ambivalence at being displaced. [Might the sequence be a bow to a similar one in BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE SUNDANCE KID, released the year our film was being made?]

And it may not be too great an exaggeration to note that Madam Valladon takes over this central episode's viewpoint, acting as both love object and observer. Wilder, as was sometimes was his practice, named his divided heroine after Suzanne Valladon, a favorite French artist in his extensive art collection. Early in the episode, we learn that Valladon is communicating with Von Tirpitz by opening and closing her parasol in Morse Code, while the Seven Dwarfs stand by.

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Unfortunately, the film that we have needs something. Fair enough, that the prologue is reduced to a minute or two under the titles, and even that two of the episodes are gone, though the early demonstration of Holmes' power, and the pause of the sea voyage before the sad denouement, would have been useful. (It is hard to imagine how the episodes might have been integrated successfully in an artistic sense.) I believe what is really missed is a scene on the train to Scotland when, falling in love with Gabrielle Valladon (after his professional fashion) as they lay in their separate bunks, Holmes confesses his first sexual experience.

He tells her (and us) a story, the only time in the film he would have done so. As a young man, he had admired a young woman at a distance, but remained too shy to approach her. Then, he led his University sculling crew to victory. As a reward to their captain, the team collected enough money to buy the services of a prostitute. She was waiting in the boat house for him. And, you guessed it, she was the young woman of his infatuation. The scene was shot, but we know little about it. Only a couple of stills remain.

Late in "The Adventure of the Dumbfounded Detective," Holmes learns (humiliatingly from snide Brother Mycroft) that Gabrielle Valladon is neither French nor Belgian but an ace German spy, Ilse von Hoffmanstahl.

Drawing on interviews given when Wilder was more forthcoming, Maurice Zoltow, an earlier biographer of the director (Billy Wilder in Hollywood, 1987), tells a similar story, later disputed. Wilder as a young man fell fully in love for the first time with a young woman in Vienna. He squired her to the Ringstrasse; he was prepared to marry her. One day, he discovered that she turned tricks on the side to help support herself.

According to Zoltow, her first name was Ilse.

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THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES, wonderfully designed by Alexander Trauner, strikingly photographed by Christoper Challis, cut to the music of Miklos Rozsa, remains a very poignant, enigmatic personal movie by Billy Wilder. I give it four stars, partly for what it might have been, and very much for what it is.




Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: Fit for Friday Evening
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 9 - 12