Review of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) by Paul Z — 21 Mar 2011

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes begins as a dicey pic by a director who'd spent his career throwing dice. It magnetizes one's interest as it opens by showing how dependent Holmes was on crime. There is great mention of historical figures, as well as great raunchiness, what it might've been considered at the time, especially considering the material. There is even a very interesting historical insight into homosexuality played for pratfall effect. And I once again pleasantly find that Wilder and I share the same taste for voluptuous, sex-oozing women.

Disappointingly, it seems to only deal with the private life of Sherlock Holmes for the first twenty minutes. After setting us up for a fascinating speculative insight into "the real" Sherlock, it winds down into a rather silly mystery. It even begins to lose all hope as a good movie an hour and a half in but quickly picks itself up reasonably.

Its weaknesses do not derive inherently from its turn as a customary formula thriller but in its lack of conviction in being such. The use Miklos Rosza's loud, rich orchestral roller coaster is all wrong. His score is way too boisterous and charged for an English mystery. The Holmes character, snaking around with his magnifying glass and apparently having determined a murderer by calculating the measure to which the parsley had sunk into the butter on a hot summer day, is auspicious material for the kind of farcical dissection we expect from Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond. But they underdistance the opportunity and burn us out while Holmes toilsomely disentangles a mystery that includes midget acrobats, a missing husband, Trappist monks, the Loch Ness monster, dead canaries and a copper ring that has turned green. It takes Holmes longer to decide the case than it takes us, and Watson never gets it.

We crave the impression of sardonic amusement, though that alone needn't have been malignant. This disappointing early entry in the steampunk genre, which originally contained another two other plot strands, and a further flashback sequence showing Holmes in his university days, all of which unfortunately was cut, might have worked better if the case itself had been more dramatically intriguing: If, say, Wilder and Diamond had immersed Holmes in a story so replete with dilemmas, suspicions, catch-22s, cryptic narrative interlopers and jinxes that we were just as baffled as he was. It would be more of a reason for the case to have never reached the pages of Arthur Conan Doyle's series.