Women are not to be trusted; not the best of them—a twinkle in the eye, and the arsenic in the soup.
—Robert Stephens as Sherlock Holmes
in the film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, like Agatha Christie, was one of the foremost writers of classic British detective stories. Conan Doyle’s armchair sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, can find the solution to any mystery with his ingenious faculties of deduction. But Conan Doyle’s stories are not merely exercises in puzzle solving; he portrays his hero’s encounters with the evils of society in a vivid and compelling fashion.
Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh in 1859; he was educated in a Jesuit school and at Edinburgh University, where he earned his medical degree in 1885. He decided to augment his meager income as a doctor by trying his hand at writing detective stories. The character of Sherlock Holmes was inspired by Joseph Bell, a physician who taught Conan Doyle in medical school. Bell employed his astute powers of deduction to diagnose patients’ ailments and even infer details of their past lives.1 Conan Doyle said that he created his fictional detective with similar powers of deduction, “to treat crime as Dr. Bell treated diseases.” Holmes became the world’s first consulting detective, a genius at unraveling the threads of a mystery.2
William Gillette wrote a play, Sherlock Holmes (1899), in which the playwright played Holmes on tour for three decades. It was Gillette who coined the celebrated phrase, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” The first important Sherlock Holmes on film was John Barrymore, who starred in Albert Parker’s silent film version of Gillette’s play in 1922. Although some exteriors were shot in London, the film is too faithful to the Gillette original, with some scenes seeming stage bound. Still, critics thought that Barrymore had captured Holmes, as when he fixes the villain with a penetrating, hawklike stare. Gillette’s play was revived on Broadway in 1974 in a production that I saw at the Broadhurst Theatre. Robert Stephens, who would play the title role in Wilder’s film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, also starred in the revival in New York.3 But the best-known interpreter of the Holmes character was Basil Rathbone, who played the detective in fourteen films between 1939 and 1946. Rathbone told me in correspondence in 1966 that the first film in which he played Holmes was also the best: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), directed by Sidney Lanfield.
At that film’s end, Holmes says, “I’ve had a strenuous day; oh, Watson, the needle!” No screen hero had ever made such a daring and nonchalant confession to drug addiction. Not until Wilder’s film thirty-one years later would Holmes indulge his drug habit on-screen. Between the release of Lanfield’s film and the release of Wilder’s, Geoffrey Shurlock had, on December 11, 1956, announced that, “in keeping with present-day conditions,” his office was rescinding the ban on illegal drugs as a subject for films.4 So Wilder was free to treat Holmes as an addict.
Wilder set his movie in the Victorian era, the period in which Conan Doyle wrote his stories of the great detective. In their original screenplay, Wilder and Diamond devised new adventures for Holmes, none of which were derived directly from the Conan Doyle stories. “I didn’t want merely to do a remake of The Hound of the Baskervilles,” Wilder said. He did not incorporate any one story into his scenario; he borrowed from two stories for the cases he invented for his movie, using these two stories as points of departure.
Conan Doyle’s “The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans” (1905) deals with Colonel Valentine Walters’s theft of the secret blueprints of a submarine from the British navy office. Walters attempts to sell the plans to a German espionage agent. This story inspired the episode in Wilder’s picture that revolves around Britain’s secret efforts to perfect a submarine for wartime use.5 Queen Victoria is mentioned in the original story,6 but she makes an actual appearance in Wilder’s film. In the picture, Queen Victoria “rejects the use of a submarine as a warship” and calls a halt to the development of the submarine for wartime use. Bernard Dick comments that this is Wilder’s “ironic gloss on Britain’s unpreparedness for submarine warfare at the outbreak of World War I.”7
Irene Adler is the model for Ilse von Hoffmanstahl in Wilder’s movie. In “A Scandal in Bohemia,” Irene is the devious female who outwits Holmes at every turn and finally manages to flee England before he can expose her for endeavoring to blackmail the king of Bohemia. Like Irene, Ilse outwits the master sleuth, “the only woman ever to do so.”8 In Conan Doyle’s story, Watson says, “The best plans of Mr. Sherlock Holmes were beaten by a woman’s wit. . . . When he speaks of Irene Adler, it is always under the honorable title of the woman.”9
Holmes’s perennial popularity helped Wilder convince Walter Mirisch, the studio chief, to approve his own Holmes movie.10 UA, the distributor, followed suit. “The three greatest figures in fiction for the screen,” Wilder said in his pitch to Mirisch, “are Robinson Crusoe, Tarzan, and Sherlock Holmes.” Wilder aimed to do an in-depth study of Holmes, whom he esteemed as a most intriguing character. “I think of this picture as my valentine to Sherlock,” he said.11 Mirisch assigned the movie a $6 million budget, one of the largest of Wilder’s career.12
“I wanted to show Holmes as vulnerable, as human,” said Wilder. “In my picture he does not solve the mystery; no, he is deceived” by Ilse, the beautiful German spy who masquerades as Gabrielle Valladon, a Belgian damsel in distress.13 “We treated Holmes with respect,” Wilder insisted, “but not reverence.”14 The screenplay does not hesitate to examine Holmes’s apparent disdain for women and his addiction to cocaine, not to mention Holmes’s ambiguous relationship with Watson. “It’s more The Odd Couple than Conan Doyle,” Wilder said, “only with a Victorian backdrop—two bachelors cohabiting.”15
Wilder conceived the film as an opulent costume drama that would run just under three hours—his longest movie. “It’s not how long you make it, but how you make it long,” he observed. He was confident that his Holmes movie should be a large-scale road show attraction: there would be two performances daily with a reserved seat policy “and an intermission to give your kidneys a break.”16
Wilder aimed to settle on the actors playing Holmes and Watson early on, so that he and Diamond could write the roles with actors in mind. Wilder wanted Robert Stephens, a member of Laurence Olivier’s prestigious National Theatre company in London. Wilder was mightily impressed by Stephens’s performance in his latest film, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), which Wilder saw at an advance screening. The role of Watson went to Colin Blakely, also associated with Olivier’s company, who had appeared in the film A Man for All Seasons (1966). Admittedly Wilder’s lead actor was not well known to American filmgoers, but Stephens looked to Wilder very much like he thought “Mr. Sherlock Holmes” should look.17 Besides, Wilder wanted Holmes and Watson to be portrayed by actors whom viewers did not associate with other roles. Wilder cast Christopher Lee, who was likewise not familiar to American audiences, as Sherlock Holmes’s older brother, Mycroft. Lee had played Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962).
Wilder and Diamond perused the Holmes stories to immerse themselves in the world of Sherlock Holmes. Then they mapped out the screenplay, on which they toiled throughout 1967. “I don’t think I’m being pretentious in saying that I structured my film in four parts, like a symphony,” said Wilder.18 Each of the richly detailed episodes was complete in itself. In the early winter of 1968, the writing team completed the first draft of the script—except for the ending, which they had not finalized. When Stephens said he would like to know how the story ended, Wilder replied, “So would I.”19
One afternoon when Wilder and Diamond were chatting, Wilder exclaimed that he had a brainstorm for the episode in which the experimental submarine figures. While the sub is doing trial runs in Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands, the Loch Ness monster materializes. Of course, it is not really the legendary sea creature but the experimental sub; the Royal Navy has camouflaged it with a gargoyle-like periscope that resembles the Loch Ness monster to scare the locals away from the area.20 With that, Wilder and Diamond plunged into the task of finishing the shooting script.
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is the second Wilder film that foregrounds male friendship. Wilder called the movie the story of “the friendship between Holmes and Watson when they were young.”21 Their longstanding friendship is brought into relief in the episode that is labeled in the script “The Singular Affair of the Russian Ballerina.”
In the screenplay, Holmes is summoned to Covent Garden, to the presence of Petrova, a neurotic Russian prima ballerina who is appearing in London, played by Tamara Toumanova (Torn Curtain, 1966). She wants Holmes to father her child so that their offspring will have her beauty and his brains. Holmes politely declines the invitation by owning himself a bachelor who has enjoyed several fulfilling years living with another bachelor. He hints that he is homosexually attached to Watson “through a cruel caprice of Mother Nature.” Rogozhin, the ballet company’s impresario (Clive Revill), tells Holmes that Petrova’s first choice was Tchaikovsky, who declined because “women were not his glass of tea.” Holmes responds, “Tchaikovsky was not an isolated case.” Rogozhin asks, “Dr. Watson is your glass of tea?” Holmes replies, “If you want to be picturesque about it.”
Chris Steinbrunner and Norman Michaels, the authors of The Films of Sherlock Holmes, emphasize that “Holmes is slyly utilizing this ploy to extricate himself from the situation. . . . For Holmes it is merely a way to escape the attentions of a madwoman.”22 They maintain that Holmes and Watson share nothing more or less than an easy camaraderie in the picture.
Watson is appalled when he hears of Holmes’s “confession” to the ballerina; he insists that they cease to share a bachelor flat. Holmes replies, “Of course, we can continue to meet clandestinely, in the waiting rooms of suburban railway stations.” This is an implicit reference to Brief Encounter (1945), in which the lovers meet secretly in a train depot. But Holmes in point of fact is merely suggesting a parallel between the secretive liaisons that occur between a heterosexual couple and those that occur between a homosexual couple—which some think he and Watson are. Since Watson’s faith in Holmes has been shaken by this incident, he boasts that he can get several women to testify to his manhood. Then he asks Holmes pointedly, “I hope I’m not being presumptuous, but there have been women in your life?” Holmes responds icily, “The answer is yes—you are being presumptuous.” And so Watson’s question remains unanswered.
Other reviewers believe that Wilder meant the filmgoer to take Holmes’s remarks at face value—that Holmes does seem to be homosexual in the movie. The Variety critic writes that Holmes “fakes a story about his being not at all masculine” to duck out of a ticklish situation. “But is he really faking?” Moreover, Variety notes, “Stephens plays Holmes in a rather effete fashion under Wilder’s tongue-in-cheek direction.”23
The court of last resort is, of course, Billy Wilder. He stated flatly to interviewer Doug McClelland, “I wanted to make Holmes a homosexual—that’s why he is on dope. . . . But unfortunately the son of Conan Doyle,” Adrian Conan Doyle, who represented his father’s estate, would not allow it.24 Wilder accordingly portrayed Holmes as homosexual very subtly. Moreover, Wilder said, he chose Stephens to play Holmes partly because he thought Stephens “looked” homosexual, even though Stephens was married and had a family. Indeed, Wilder had Stephens wear a touch of mascara in some scenes; the actor never objected.25 Wilder told me that Adrian Conan Doyle could not pin anything down in the script to which he could take exception concerning Holmes’s sexuality. The cognoscenti, concluded Wilder, perceived the implications in the ballerina sequence that Holmes was homosexual.
Film historian Richard Valley writes perceptively that “the film remains refreshingly ambivalent about Holmes’s sexuality.” Wilder implied that the Baker Street bachelor was homosexual, “but he never went so far as to actually say so, . . . while taking into account Holmes’s fascination with Ilse, the woman in the case.”26
The shooting script finally weighed in at 260 pages, the longest screenplay of Wilder’s career. He estimated that the finished film would run ten minutes short of three hours. The film was scheduled to be shot at Pinewood Studios on the outskirts of London, where Wilder engaged British production artists like Christopher Challis and film editor Ernest Walter. Challis had photographed three movies for Michael Powell and was known for his lush color photography, particularly on Tales of Hoffman (1951). Walter had edited two Agatha Christie mysteries, George Pollack’s Murder, She Said (1961) and Murder Most Foul (1965). In addition, Wilder enlisted composer Miklos Rozsa for the fourth time and production designer Alexander Trauner for the seventh.
Wilder asked Trauner to reconstruct Victorian London at Pinewood. Trauner built Baker Street in the 1880s on the back lot at Pinewood with staggering authenticity. The set was 150 yards long and was designed in forced perspective to create the illusion of greater length. Trauner’s Baker Street set included the elaborate facades of all of the buildings facing the thoroughfare, plus a cobblestone street and period street lamps.
Holmes’s bachelor flat occupied a soundstage at Pinewood. Wilder concerned himself with the set decoration of Holmes’s apartment, just as he had done when dressing Baxter’s Manhattan digs in The Apartment. Once again Wilder accompanied Trauner on a shopping tour to decorate the shelves of Holmes’s Baker Street apartment. Adrian Conan Doyle, who had gotten over his disputes with Wilder about the screenplay, visited the apartment set and declared, “If Sherlock Holmes were to enter this room, he would immediately feel right at home. Everything is exactly in its place.”27
Principal photography got under way at Pinewood in mid-February 1969. After enduring the nightmare of shooting One, Two, Three in Berlin, Wilder had vowed never to make another movie in Europe. But he relented when it came to Sherlock Holmes. “This is an English story and has to be made here,” he explained. “Its cast and crew throughout the shooting will be as English as the weather.”28 Location shooting was scheduled to be done in London and in Inverness, Scotland, where Holmes goes searching after the missing husband of his Belgian client, Gabrielle Valladon (played by the French actress Genevieve Page). Scotland has seldom looked better than it does in Challis’s color photography—all misty mountains and glimmering lakes.
Wilder, as usual, joked with the cast on the set. During the ballet sequence at Covent Garden, Colin Blakely was called on to execute an impromptu Russian folk dance with six women in the corps de ballet. “Colin, I want you to act like Laughton and dance like Nureyev,” Wilder said. Afterward Wilder commented with mock disappointment, “Colin, why did you act like Nureyev and dance like Laughton?”29 Ernest Walter noted, “Mr. Wilder—and he was mostly called Mr. Wilder—is a funny man; and to try to top him was not the best thing to do.”30 It would take a Walter Matthau to do that. Wilder’s sense of humor did not desert him when he was shooting on location in a church cemetery near Pinewood. The gravedigger, who gives Holmes information about the occupant of a freshly dug grave, was played by Stanley Holloway, who sang “I’m Getting Married in the Morning” in My Fair Lady (1964). Wilder warbled “I’m getting buried in the morning” to Holloway.
For his part, Stephens found working with Wilder taxing. Wilder was determined to explore every possible way of staging the action of a scene, and he would continue rehearsing long after Stephens felt he was ready to shoot it. Stephens writes in his autobiography that he felt that he was “being put through a meat grinder every day.” Wilder “would spend hours” rehearsing a scene “until the whole thing was squeezed completely dry, and you felt like running, screaming off the set, which is more or less what I did.”31
Like Peter Sellers, who kept all of his gripes about Wilder to himself while shooting Kiss Me, Stupid, Stephens privately fretted about his frustrations in working with Wilder but never told him how he felt. He was not satisfied with the way he played a single scene, and he convinced himself that he was giving a second-rate performance. Halfway through the shoot, he collapsed from exhaustion and tension. Totally depressed, he swallowed a handful of sleeping pills and washed them down with scotch.
Wilder was terribly upset and confessed contritely that he had pushed Stephens too hard. Wilder promised, Stephens writes, that “we would carry on and finish the picture, and we’d go a little slower and not hurry things.” But, Stephens concludes, “When I returned, it was all exactly the same.”32 As in the case of Marilyn Monroe’s suicide attempt during Some Like It Hot, the studio hushed up Stephens’s brush with suicide; the public relations department reported to the press only that Stephens was suffering from exhaustion. Stephens loyally expressed unstinting praise of Wilder to the columnists: “Fantastic! He’s always good-humored and immensely knowledgeable.”33
Wilder was just as loyal in his observations about Stephens. “He was a very fine actor, who took direction very well,” said Wilder. After Stephens’s try at suicide, “we had to wait until he recuperated” to finish the film.34 As in the case of Matthau’s heart attack on The Fortune Cookie, filming had proceeded too far to consider replacing Stephens. At any rate, principal photography wrapped on December 13, 1969. Waiting out Stephens’s convalescence was one reason that the picture, scheduled for a nineteen-week shoot, lasted for twenty-nine weeks. Another was that Wilder’s 260-page script took longer to shoot than either he or the studio had anticipated.
During postproduction, Ernest Walter found it easy to cut the footage together. Wilder had allowed him to spend time on the set during shooting, just as Doane Harrison had always done, and for the same reason: Wilder would plan with Walter how each scene would be edited into the completed film. “You didn’t find Mr. Wilder a very easy man to get close to,” Walter said, “but as long as you knew your job, there was no problem.”35
Wilder was familiar with Miklos Rozsa’s violin concerto. Rozsa writes in his autobiography that Wilder asked him to work it into his score for the present film.36 Wilder, notes Tony Thomas, “was inspired by the fact that Holmes liked playing the fiddle.”37 Wilder wanted Rozsa’s background music to reflect Holmes’s sense of loss after he discovers that Gabrielle, for whom he has developed a deep regard, is a German secret agent. Rozsa accordingly employed the bittersweet romantic theme from the concerto, “but with an urgent, pulsating rhythm underneath.”38 “Rozsa’s achingly lovely concerto,” writes Robert Horton, “distills in the score the essence of loss” and an air of melancholy.39 Wilder paid tribute to Rozsa by showing him conducting Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in the orchestra pit at Covent Garden during the ballet sequence.
When Walter finished editing the rough cut of the film in London, it ran three hours and twenty minutes. The full-length movie is a compendium of self-contained units in which Holmes confronts a variety of cases. The first is titled “The Adventure of the Upside-Down Room.” The corpse of an elderly Chinese man is found in a rented room where all of the furniture is nailed to the ceiling. On observing the bizarre crime scene and asking Watson pointed questions, Holmes astutely deduces that Watson concocted the baffling case, with a corpse borrowed from a morgue. He did so in an effort to alleviate the boredom Holmes endured between cases, which induced him to take refuge in cocaine.
The second episode is “The Dreadful Business of the Naked Honeymooners,” which takes place aboard an ocean liner in the Mediterranean. The naked bodies are found in bed in their cabin; Watson volunteers to take charge of the investigation to impress Holmes with his own powers of deduction. After disturbing the nude newlyweds, who have merely been asleep in their bed, exhausted by a night of sex, Watson discovers to his chagrin that he has led Holmes to the wrong cabin!
The third episode is “The Singular Affair of the Russian Ballerina.” The fourth and longest is “The Case of the Missing Husband,” discussed below. In addition, there is a flashback, titled in the screenplay, “The Adventure of the Dumbfounded Detective,” which takes place at Oxford University in Holmes’s student days, while he is a member of the university rowing team. His teammates hold a lottery, in which the victor is to spend the night with a prostitute. Holmes is the winner, but he is reluctant to claim his prize because he has a crush on a girl he has seen around town. He is devastated to learn that the trollop is the very girl he secretly idolizes. This flashback, of course, recalls an incident from Wilder’s youth, in which the girl Wilder had been dating in Vienna turned out to be a harlot.
Wilder also prepared a prologue in the script in which a young Dr. Watson, the grandson of Holmes’s confrere (also played by Colin Blakely), opens a safety deposit box at Barclays Bank and finds the manuscripts for the four adventures, which, his grandfather explains in a covering letter, were not published during his lifetime because they contained potentially scandalous material.
It seems that king-size period pictures were beginning to go out of fashion at the time, as evidenced by the box office failure of epic-scale costume dramas like Far from the Madding Crowd (1967). (In fact, after showing some historical epics of this sort, one small-town exhibitor is said to have written to his distributor, “Don’t send me no more pictures about people who write with feathers!”40)
UA held a disastrous preview of Sherlock Holmes at the Lakewood Theatre near Long Beach, after which the preview cards were “uniformly bad,” Walter Mirisch writes. “We had a tremendous number of walkouts.” The cards pronounced the movie too episodic. In fact, “as each of the segments ended, we lost part of our audience.”41 Mirisch and the other nervous studio officials declined to distribute the movie at its original length; they pressured Wilder into carving more than an hour out of the movie to bring it closer to average length. They also decreed that it would not be showcased as a road show presentation.
Wilder acknowledged that the rough cut was half an hour longer than he had anticipated. So he was willing to sacrifice “The Adventure of the Upside-Down Room,” which ran exactly thirty minutes. But UA insisted that the film be cut to two hours or it simply would not distribute it. Wilder was already committed to go to Paris to begin work on another film, so he conferred with the Mirisches about shortening the film and then met with Ernest Walter. “I told the editor, ‘Cut this, cut that,’ ” Wilder remembered. Then he headed for Paris.42
Because the film consisted of individual episodes, Wilder was able to retain intact “The Singular Affair of the Russian Ballerina” and “The Case of the Missing Husband,” the two key episodes, and drop the other two. To bring the film in at two hours and five minutes, however, Walter also had to delete the Oxford flashback and the prologue. This was more than Wilder had bargained for. Still, he had no choice but to acquiesce, to honor his commitment to UA of a two-hour release print.
In all, seventy-five minutes of footage was removed from the final cut, but because of the film’s structure, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes in its truncated form was not marred in any essential way by UA’s meddling. Still, after Wilder viewed Walter’s final cut, he remarked, “I was saddened by what was left out.” He added, “Perhaps enough of it remains; I hope so.” But when the project that Wilder went to Paris to work on was shelved, he further regretted that he had not personally supervised Walter’s final edit of Sherlock Holmes. “We previewed the new version in Santa Barbara,” Mirisch recalls; “we had few or no walkouts.” This was “somewhat of a victory for the recut version,” which lost 30 percent of the original version.43
At least the industry censor passed the final version of the movie without any further cuts. Sherlock Holmes was the first Wilder film to receive a classification from the new CARA. It was classified as PG, “parental guidance suggested.” That the movie flirted with the subject of homosexuality was not a problem for the present censor, Eugene Dougherty, who replaced Geoffrey Shurlock in 1968, when the new rating system began. Homosexuality was no longer a taboo subject for a Hollywood movie.
During the opening credit sequence, Dr. Watson reads a letter addressed to his heirs in voice-over on the sound track. The voice-over was incorporated into the credit sequence from the eliminated prologue. Watson explains that he intends to recount some of Holmes’s cases that involve “matters of a delicate and sometimes scandalous nature.” One delicate issue that is raised in the film is the question of Holmes’s attitude toward the opposite sex. Holmes discusses this subject with Watson early in the movie. Essentially, Holmes explains, “I don’t dislike women; I merely mistrust them” because they are unreliable. “The most affectionate female I ever knew was a murderess.” She led him down the garden path “until she could steal some cyanide from my laboratory to sprinkle on her husband’s steak-and-kidney pie.” Holmes fears that an emotional entanglement with a female could warp his judgment and cloud his powers of deduction. Holmes’s remarks about women introduce the central episode in the film, “The Case of the Missing Husband.” “The time has come to reveal the most intimate aspect of Holmes’s life,” Watson says in his voice-over narration. “His one and only involvement with a woman.”
Gabrielle Valladon comes to Holmes’s Baker Street flat, seeking the private detective’s assistance. She has come to London from Belgium, searching for her husband, Emile, an engineer and inventor who is missing. An item in a newspaper gives a clue to Emile’s possible presence in Scotland, so Holmes, Watson, and Gabrielle take the Highland Express to Inverness. As Holmes declares, “The game’s afoot!” They manage to trace Emile Valladon to a village cemetery, where his corpse has been interred. Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s brother, who is associated with British intelligence, knows of Sherlock’s presence in Scotland and invites him to a secret meeting at a Scottish castle. Mycroft informs his brother that the government has been conducting secret experiments with a type of primitive submarine. Emile Valladon was involved in the experiments and died accidentally when one of the trial runs of the submarine went awry. Mycroft then reveals that the woman his brother knows as Gabrielle Valladon is an impostor; she is actually Ilse von Hoffmanstahl, a notorious German spy. Ilse ingratiated herself with Holmes to dupe him into helping her track down Emile Valladon and uncover the secret plans for the submarine. “In helping Ilse,” Mycroft concludes, “you have been in the service of the Kaiser.”
It is a severe blow to Holmes’s pride to acknowledge that he has allowed himself to be outwitted by the feminine wiles of a charming foreign spy. Ilse endeavors to soften the blow by saying that she volunteered for this assignment because she “couldn’t resist the challenge of coming up against the best.” Steinbrunner and Michaels note that, although Ilse has admitted to Holmes that she is a foreign spy, “there is an unspoken tenderness in their parting.”44 Holmes and Ilse have developed in the course of their journey together a reticent but nonetheless genuine affection for each other. Dick calls their farewell “two intelligent people saying goodbye to one another.”45
As Ilse proceeds up the path in a carriage on her way to be exchanged by the Germans for a British prisoner, she signals to Holmes in Morse code by opening and closing her umbrella. Holmes reads her departing message: “Auf Wiedersehen” (Until we meet again). But they will not. In the movie’s epilogue, Holmes learns of Ilse’s execution as a foreign agent while she is on a secret mission in Japan, spying on the Yokohama Harbor naval installations. He retreats to his bedroom with the container of cocaine that is hidden in a file case to assuage his grief over the death of Ilse, with whom he shared a platonic relationship. As Holmes observes at the end of The Sign of the Four, “For me there still remains the cocaine bottle.”46 The scene is accompanied by Rozsa’s bittersweet theme.
Jonathan Rigby writes that Holmes’s emotions have been stirred by Gabrielle, a woman whose pluck and acumen he admires, so he is shattered when he learns of her execution. Stephens’s “mournful Holmes is a triumph. It’s by no means the standard issue Sherlock of the popular imagination, but remains much the most human and affecting interpretation on film.”47
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, at a running time of 125 minutes, had its American premiere at Radio City Music Hall in New York City on October 19, 1970. It opened to a batch of mixed reviews. Vincent Canby in the New York Times found the movie amusing. Focusing on the film’s treatment of the ambiguous nature of Holmes and Watson’s friendship, Canby stated that the material was “rather daring” for a Sherlock Holmes picture. Nevertheless, “there is simply no reason to cavil with Billy Wilder’s mostly comic, charming movie,” which is fundamentally “a fond and entertaining film.”48 Pauline Kael, as usual, filed a negative report in the New Yorker. She thought the movie ranged from mildly diverting to downright dull: “Wilder has made a detective picture that fails to whet our curiosity,” she opined. “So one must content oneself with the occasional wit,” along with Trauner’s magnificent Victorian production design and Challis’s handsome color cinematography.49
The movie had been booked at the music hall in late October as its Thanksgiving attraction, but it was withdrawn before Thanksgiving in the wake of the lukewarm public reception. The film likewise proved to be a box office disappointment when it went into general release across the country. Its total domestic gross was a paltry $1.5 million.
“When the picture was released,” Walter explained, “people were disappointed because they expected a thriller like The Hound of the Baskervilles with Basil Rathbone. But this was a more tongue-in-cheek picture, and a more personal story.”50 Moreover, writes Allen Eyles, “the downbeat epilogue was not calculated to please the masses.”51 Though the movie failed in the United States, Wilder emphasized, “in England it was popular.”52 Tom Milne’s notice in the Observer in London was typical of the British response to the picture. Milne, who placed the movie on his “ten best list” for 1970, proclaimed that, Wilder’s “acid wit” notwithstanding, the film was really “an affectionate homage” to Holmes.53
Although the film was not a notable success when it was released, it has steadily built a strong reputation among film scholars as one of the best Sherlock Holmes films. As Michael Pointer observes, it is “the only Holmes film to be made by a major director.” In the course of the movie, “we are able to savor many of the delights of Wilder’s unique piece, which revealed Holmes as human and fallible in a most moving way.”54
Nowadays the film is seen as an archetype for the detective movie, with its crackling dialogue, elegant visuals, rousing score, and dark-hearted characters. It is “a masterpiece of the highest order,” in George Morris’s words.55 Eyles writes in his survey of the Holmes movies, “It is the screen’s most intelligent, coherent, and convincing representation of the detective and his world.”56
When a fully restored version of Sherlock Holmes was scheduled for release on DVD by MGM Home Entertainment in 2003, there was renewed interest in the sequences that had been excised from the movie, for inclusion in the Special Features section of the DVD. Wilder had often said over the years, “If it takes my permission to help restore Sherlock Holmes, I’m delighted; if they can get ahold” of the missing material, “they can show it.”57 The restoration team found the sound track for “The Upside-Down Room” but no film footage to go with it, so they filled in the missing visuals with still photos of the episode. For “The Naked Honeymooners,” the technical team uncovered all of the footage, but no sound track, so they employed subtitles for the dialogue. For both “The Adventure of the Dumbfounded Detective” and the prologue at Barclays Bank, the restoration crew utilized script excerpts, with visuals supplied by still photos. Wilder heard before his death in 2002 of the plans to recover the lost footage, but he did not live to see it in the DVD. When the DVD finally arrived in 2003, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes met with fresh acclaim. It has at last come to occupy a prominent place in the canon of Wilder’s work.