Conference bookie::movies

555.0. "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" by GALVIA::HELSOM (Don't mind that, sir. It's only a slowworm.) Tue May 24 1994 08:58

This was the first film I ever saw in the cinema on my own. I was under age for
the A certificate, and I was wearing a mini-skirt and wellington boots. I
remember that because I had to move seats twice before I found a place where the
man next to me kept his hands to himself.

I really enjoyed the film though--it suited my adolscence angst. It consists of
a funny episode about a Russian dancer, and a case where Holmes is taken in by a
beautiful spy. This episode clarifies his misogyny: he doesn't really hate
women, he's just a complete emotional disaster area and always falls for the
wrong ones.

It was on BBC1 last night, as a preface to a programme about Robert Stephens.
Every time I see it it goes higher up my list of favourites. You would expect it
to be good from the credits: Billy Wilder had never made a dud at the time,
Miklos Rosza (music) and Alexander Trauner (art director/production design, who
did the same job for Les Enfants du Paradis) are great names, and Robert
Stephens and Colin Blakely (Watson) wonderful actors. Stanley Holloway even
appears as a grave-digger. It's beautifully photographed and costumed. The only
odd detail (apart from some chronological quibbles, and The sign of four in the
Strand magazine) is Robert Stephens' (Holmes) haircut, which would have been
implausible on Oscar Wilde, though everyone had them like that in 1970.

Unfortunately, the film was a commercial flop. Wilder made two subsequence duds,
Robert Stephens blazed for a bit then disappeared for fifteen years, and The
Private Life of Sherlock Holmes failed miserably to reproduce the success of The
Private Life of Henry VIII. 

Part of the problem, IMO, is that it was trying to be the same sort of film as
Korda's London films efforts. It's a literate, civilised, European film, which
is not quite what people expect from Billy Wilder. (Literacy, yes.) It's
seriously mitteleuropaisch in outlook, which upset the Holmesian faithful and
puzzled some English-speaking audiences. The English and Americans can cope with
heroics and perversion, but not with ordinary sadness...(That explains the Oscar
Wilde haircut, by the way--Germans regard Wilde as the model of English (sic)
romanticism.)

Well worth watching on the box or on video.

Helen