I’m going to be saying this a lot over the next week or two as I review a handful of singular works: this is fascinating simply because of what it is.
I’m catching up on some Billy Wilder films. You know him: Sunset Blvd, The Seven Year Itch, The Lost Weekend—all amazing movies. (Also—ptooey—Some Like It Hot.) But who would ever dream that his Big One, his White Whale, his Magnum Opus was meant to be this…the poorly titled Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. (Spoiler: it’s not about his private life but a series of “unpublished cases.”)
Firmly outside anything I would identify with Wilder, this film had a difficult birth (hence the very visible scars). At first, Wilder wanted to do a play about Holmes. Then, he changed it to a musical film. Finally, he devised a “Road Show” three-hour picture made of four episodic chapters that would be rolled out as a special cinematic event with a higher-than-usual ticket price. He filmed it arduously, calling it his “most elegant picture.” And then the studio hacked it to bits.
What remains is two hours and five minutes of clearly-truncated material from two episodes. No longer separated into chapters, the first part of the film is a funny bit of cheek involving a Russian ballerina. It’s wonderful, as the script shows Wilder’s panache for comedy. The rest of the film is a somewhat tiresome case that ends up (knowingly?) high above the proverbial shark.
It’s hard to know exactly what tone and style Wilder was shooting for, because the studio chopped it apart and made it into a regular B-movie. I think, in the context of all four chapters, the final case would prove more obviously winking with “how about this, eh?” It’s not bad. The humor remains good, but this case is played mostly straight. It ends up feeling like a pilot for a Holmes & Watson serial—and, indeed, that would have been pretty cool. I really like this pairing of (relatively unknown) actors, and I would watch them on a continual basis. Alas, no such luck, as only this mutilated corpse of Billy Wilder’s proudest achievement survives today, the lost footage truly lost (for now).
But, knowing the genius of so many of Wilder’s films, it’s quite a statement that this was the one he was initially most proud of and eventually most embarrassed by! The real mystery afoot here is what the original film might have been. Still, it’s a fascinating question to ask of a true peculiarity by a true master of cinema.