The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

“Dust, Mrs Hudson, is an essential part of my filing system.”

Wow. That was amazing. Fanwank this film may be, and somewhat light on star wattage, but the script just sparkles with wit and metatextual knowingness. This is certainly the finest Sherlock Holmes film I’ve seen to date. It’s the only Billy Wilder film I’ve seen to date, but it certainly not the last.

I know little about Robert Stephens (Holmes) and less about Colin Blakeley (Watson), and both of them reminded me, rather oddly, of Leonard Rossiter in their styles of performance. Stephens gives us an arch, knowing Holmes, who always seems to be aware of his nature as a character in a film; we know when the film’s final act is dawning because Holmes tells us so! Blakely plays Watson more-or-less as the buffoon of legend, although he’s shown to be an intelligent and competent physician, and as something of a ladies’ man.

The first scene proper (after a short modern-day framing device)  starts the metatextual fun straightaway, as Holmes compares the “reality” with Watson’s published stories, complaining that the public now expect him to wear the ridiculous clothes from the illustrations in The Strand! We then move on to a rather interesting bit of speculation as to Holmes’ sexuality. This is a rather obvious thing to do, perhaps, but 1970 is probably about as early as it could be done in a Hollywood film. A rather haughtily attractive Russian ballerina with seemingly supernatural menopause-dodging powers (“I must say that she doesn’t look 38.” “That is because she is 49…”) wants to spend a week shagging Holmes so she can have a child by him as an exercise in eugenics. Nice work if you can get it.

Holmes isn’t keen, though. So much so, that he resorts to claiming that he’s, er, like Tchaikovsky, a previous choice (“You couldn’t go wrong with Tchaikovsky.” “We could, and we did.”, and claims to be shagging Watson. This has unfortunate consequences for the good doctor, who has up to this point been having rather a lot of fun with some attractive young ladies. He’s not in the best of moods, unsurprisingly, once he gets back to Baker Street and, this being 1887, starts to fret about scandal, leading to some wonderfully arch retorts from Holmes. The whole sequence ends with Holmes refusing to discuss his sexuality, which remains a great big question mark.

This sequence takes up the first thirty minutes, after which the main plot begins. The whole thing is rather more coherent than might at first be expected, though. The sequence sets up the theme of the film- Holmes’ relationship with women, and the question which it poses is more or less answered.

The arrival of a mysterious, amnesiac Belgian lady, Gabrielle Valladon, starts off the larger part of the film, and this leads to some rather sexually charged scenes between her and Holmes. The case doesn’t get very far, however, before Holmes receives a summons from his brother Mycroft (the justly ubiquitous Christopher Lee). There’s a delicious little retcon here, as we’re told that the outwardly eccentric “Diogenes Club” is in fact a front for British Intelligence. Mycroft warns Holmes off the case which, of course, only encourages him.

Holmes seems to make a real connection with Mme Valladon, and they have a rather interesting discussion about his experiences with women. Most interestingly, he claims, in an interestingly light-hearted tone, that his mistrust of women ultimately stems from his fiancée (!) inconveniently dying just twenty-four hours before their wedding. Are we to believe this, or do we have a case of unreliable narrator syndrome here? We should probably remember Holmes’ fourth wall-breaking tendencies at this point.

To Inverness, then, and some rather gorgeous location filming in the Highlands. It soon becomes clear that things are mixed up with the legend of the Loch Ness Monster- oops! This is a bit of a clanger, as the legend of the Loch Ness Monster is not anywhere near as old as you’d expect, dating back only back to 1933. The whole thing really kicked off with a famous photograph which appeared in 1934. April 1^st 1934, to be precise…

The monster, it turns out is mechanical. It seems that Holmes is close to solving the mystery, when he receives a summons from Mycroft. It’s revealed that the “monster” is an experimental submersible, and that Mime Valladon’s husband died accidentally while testing the device. In a nice twist, it’s revealed that “Mme Valladon” is in fact an agent of the Kaiser, Fraulein Von Hofmannsthal, and that she has rather cleverly enlisted Holmes to do all the work for her. He’s fallen hook, line and sinker for her charms.

The best bit’s near the end, though. Queen Victoria- a Holmes fangirl, naturally- is such a delight. Wonderfully, she refuses to allow the submersible project to continue, because it’s “unsportsmanlike” and “un-English”!!! She dismisses Mycroft’s protests by insisting that she will write to her nephew Willie (who won’t succeed his grandfather and his unfortunate father as Kaiser until next year, but never mind!) and get him to abandon any similar plans by Germany.

We end, sixteen months later, on a sad note, as Holmes reads of Fraulein Von Hofmannsthal’s death at the hands of the Japanese, having been caught spying. He’s clearly deeply affected. It seems that Holmes is, after all, susceptible to certain women (although he may still be asexual). She did, after all, defeat him.