I suppose that a postmodern take on the Sherlock Holmes semi-mythos was inevitable, but was it necessary? The appeal of reading the original Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are the images of Sherlock in his deerstalker, marching through foggy Victorian London on route to solve another mystery. The detective and his friend and chronicler, Dr. Watson, are characters like Superman, Tarzan, or James Bond, passing out of their original literary source material and into popular icon, and I like it that way.
That said, Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is certainly an interesting attempt at going deeper into the legend providing a semi-realistic account of the detective, played in this film by Robert Stephens. What Wilder finds is an accurate psychological portrayal considering the information from the Conan Doyle stories- a deeply arrogant and lonely man, unable to relate to others on anything other than an intellectual level, occasionally plugging his depression with cocaine. This is not much fun but a logical extrapolation of the character-which is something Conan Doyle never did and never had a reason to do, because it's not much fun.
A great, albeit depressing movie could be made with this approach, but Wilder's film gets bogged down by what is not taken seriously- virtually everything else. Watson (Colin Blakely) is a total idiot, something that was not in the original stories. Making Watson a moron was funny in the 40's series because the actor who played him, Nigel Bruce, was himself amusing. But Blakely's approach to the character is all wrong- he seems like he's Elliot Gould in a Robert Altman movie instead of the assistant and confident of a great detective.
After a long prologue involving a Russian ballerina, the main story of the film is unveiled, involving Holmes investigating the amnesia of a mysterious French woman named Gabrielle Valladon (Geraldine Page). The resulting mystery causes struggles in the highest reaches of the British government, and the detective is blocked from investigating by his brother, Mycroft (Christopher Lee). That doesn't stop him from pressing on, and he eventually meets a gang of little people, the Loch Ness monster, and Queen Victoria (Mollie Maureen) herself.
If you find the starkly realistic portrayal by Stephens described above does not mesh with the somewhat campy plotline, you are not alone. Somehow this movie seemed to be both too serious and too comic that same time. That is not to say that the film does not have its moments, especially when Lee is on screen, stealing every scene he's in. The movie has the trademark breezy Wilder dialogue, but that is not really appropriate to this sort of material.
It is worth noting that I might be giving this movie a much higher recommendation if I had seen the original director's cut of the film. A whopping fifty-five minuets was removed by the studio after a bad preview, and much of it has been destroyed. What is left is an entertaining picture, but one that is not particularly distinguished either in the canon of Holmes films or the oeuvre of Billy Wilder.
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)