movie review the private life of sherlock holmes

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

Billy Wilder's "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes" is disappointingly lacking in bite and sophistication, the first two qualities we'd expect from the director of " The Apartment " and "The Fortune Cookie." It begins promisingly enough with Sherlock being offered five pounds to trace six missing midget acrobats and complaining: "That's less than a pound a midget." There are also some sly innuendoes about his relationship with Dr. Watson, introduced solely to be disproved (Sherlock, you'll be glad to learn, is satisfactorily hetero in the Wilder version). But before the movie is 20 minutes old, Wilder has settled for simply telling a Sherlock Holmes adventure.

I read all the Sherlock Holmes stories when I was 10 or 11, feeling a sense of sheer delight when Holmes and Watson lounged away the evening in the upstairs rooms in Baker St., and a cab appeared out of the night, the rain and sleet, depositing at their door a visitor with a bloody handkerchief and a strange tale to tell. But a year or so ago, rereading a dozen or so Holmes cases, I made a melancholy discovery: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle really wasn't very good at constructing devious plots.

Holmes, so clever he could tell your occupation by looking at your boot or the thumb of your left hand, isn't very clever at all in most of his famous cases. Have another look at the case of the red-headed league, for example, or the mystery of the orange pips, and you'll find yourself leaping ahead of Sherlock's supposedly brilliant deductions. They are indeed, as he tells Watson, elementary.

The same kind of obviousness takes the fun out of "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," and that's a shame. The Holmes character, creeping around with his magnifying glass and (Watson tells us at the film's beginning) identifying a murderer by measuring the extent to which the parsley had sunk into the butter on a warm summer day, is a promising subject for the kind of satirical examination we expect from Wilder and his frequent co-author, I. A. L. Diamond. But they pass up the chance and bore us while Holmes laboriously unravels a case involving the midget acrobats, a missing husband, Trappist monks, the Loch Ness monster, dead canaries and a copper ring that has turned green. It takes Holmes about half an hour longer to solve the case than it takes us, and poor Watson never catches on.

We miss the sense of satirical fun, as I've suggested. But that alone needn't have been fatal. The movie might have worked better if the case itself had been more interesting: If, say, Wilder and Diamond had submerged Holmes in a story so filled with complications, clues, dead ends, mysterious strangers and double-whammies that we were just as confused as he was.

The fun of a good detective story isn't in the solution, anyway, but in the complications. My favorite Raymond Chandler novel is " The Big Sleep ," which is so complicated that Chandler never does pull the case together. Same thing happens in Howard Hawks' movie version, with Humphrey Bogart . Watch carefully, and you'll discover that the loose ends are never tied up, and the case ends without being solved (and with no one, apparently, noticing). So what?

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

• Christopher Lee as Mycroft Holmes
• Genevieve Page as Gabrielle Valladon
• Irene Handl as Mrs. Hudson
• Colin Blakely as Dr. Watson
• Stanley Holloway as Gravedigger
• Robert Stephens as Sherlock Holmes

Produced and directed by

• Billy Wilder

Photographed by

• Chris Challis
• Miklos Rozsa

From a screenplay by

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The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes Reviews

It’s all meant to be an exercise in a Sherlock Holmes failure of sorts (and a rare love story of sorts), but when it’s not presented purely as comedy, it becomes a rather unamusing way to watch the iconic shamus work.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/10 | Nov 8, 2024

...an entirely misguided and misbegotten misfire that surely marks the nadir of Wilder's filmography.

Full Review | Original Score: 1/4 | Jun 18, 2021

The entire effort may, I think, be ascribed to an insufficiency of imagination.

Full Review | Feb 8, 2018

The film is still enjoyable enough, with good support from Christopher Lee as Holmes' brother Mycroft and a criminally brief appearance by Irene Handl as Mrs. Hudson and it is the performances throughout that maintain the interest.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Dec 14, 2017

Holmes is an extremely amusing and engaging picture, taking care of all the expected detective work as it offers a few surprises of its own.

Full Review | Original Score: A- | Sep 27, 2014

The plotting is weak, and ill-served by the movie's generally lackadaisical approach; but the dialogue is witty, and Wilder and Diamond get a lot of mileage out of the idea that Sherlock Holmes is as fragile as he is brilliant.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jul 22, 2014

This existing version is still fascinating, funny and clever.

Full Review | Aug 18, 2008

Billy Wilder's endearingly romantic The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is...worth seeing just for Alexandre Trauner's sets, especially a magical Baker Street.

Full Review | Aug 14, 2007

This unjustly forgotten Billy Wilder film takes on the much-loved character of Sherlock Holmes and attempts to humanize him by examining his vulnerabilities.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 14, 2007

It is in large part old-fashioned, in that it's mile-wide and ancient-history Sherlock Holmes, but it's also handsomely produced and directed with incisiveness by Wilder.

A true evocation of the spirit of the Strand Magazine, this is the best Holmes movie ever made and sorely underrated in the Wilder canon.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 30, 2006

Stage actor Robert Stephens brilliantly plays Holmes with a nod and a wink.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Jun 24, 2006

A wonderful, cruelly underrated film.

Full Review | Feb 9, 2006

Wilder's second most underrated masterpiece.

Full Review | Sep 29, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jun 26, 2005

Billy Wilder's psychological angle on Holmes is compelling.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jun 12, 2005

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | May 7, 2005

Wilder's after something more profound than a simple mystery tale here and to a large extent he succeeds in his quest to cast the man in relief when held up against The Legend

Full Review | Original Score: 82/100 | Oct 25, 2004

Before the movie is 20 minutes old, Wilder has settled for simply telling a Sherlock Holmes adventure.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/4 | Oct 23, 2004

The picture has enough virtues and the flaws are sufficiently interesting for trivia enthusiasts that The Private Lives of Sherlock Holmes is worth dropping in on for a relaxing two hours.

Full Review | Nov 20, 2003

The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes Review

06 Dec 2002

121 minutes

Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes, The

Originally a three-hour epic, this 1970 movie was taken from its creator and mutilated by the wholesale lopping of entire episodes. What remains is so wonderful that those meddling studio philistines should be sought out in their retirement homes and cemetery plots, and shouted at very loudly.

A loving, wry recreation of the Victorian world of Arthur Conan Doyle, it has Robert Stephens as a Holmes whose deductions and repartee are tossed off with a touch of Oscar Wilde. To the fury and discomfort of Watson (Colin Blakely), he even pretends to be gay, though we learn he is really a cynical romantic. The hero is satirised, but remains a hero. Elsewhere, the period settings are sumptuous, the Miklos Rozsa score is seductive, and there's great character work from Irene Handl (a sarcastic Mrs. Hudson) and Christopher Lee (a pompous brother Mycroft).

• Cast & crew

User reviews

The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

A surprisingly melancholy celebration of conan doyle's most famous creation.

• Feb 18, 1999

Strange but enjoyable

• Sep 4, 2003

Particular adaptation based on the classic characters about famed sleuth and his helper

• Jun 11, 2012

Thoroughly civilised, delightful entertainment

• Mar 29, 2003

"I don't dislike women, I merely distrust them. The twinkle in the eye and the arsenic in the soup..."

• Dec 27, 2007

The curious case of the missing masterpiece.

• Nov 1, 2020

"You think this is funny, but we're both in the same boat!"

• classicsoncall
• Sep 19, 2016

Grand even as an edit

• kurt_messick
• Dec 20, 2005

Holmes in a minor key

• Mar 13, 2021

Subtle and atmospheric

• May 30, 2005

Billy Wilder and Scooby-Doo walk into an English bar

• Jun 21, 2016

A marvelous, delightful, and must see look at the best know and most famous consulting detective.

• ronaldlaporte
• May 18, 2002

Interesting, but flawed....

• May 20, 2005

A dry, plodding, flatly conceived movie that had the elements of much more.

• Dec 22, 2012

DVD treasures

• Jul 19, 2003

What Holmes Did Not Want Known

• Jan 15, 2007

Arthur Conan Doyle knew what he was doing...

• grizzledgeezer
• Jun 18, 2016

Unconventional detective movie.

• Mar 30, 2001

My brief review of the film

• Sep 25, 2005

An older Wilder takes on Sherlock Holmes

• Jun 13, 2009

superb lost neglected masterpiece

• Nov 7, 2000
• movieswithgreg

Sherlock Holmes the Man Vs Sherlock Holmes the Legend.

• hitchcockthelegend
• Feb 8, 2011

Wilder's Sherlock Holmes

• Feb 9, 2013

Very Disappointed

• james-still
• Mar 1, 2006

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The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes

Sad, funny and cynical, Billy Wilder's 1970 movie presents a classically Holmesian mystery—a missing person case which ends with the Loch Ness Monster—as cover for an exploration of the great detective's myth, seeking to identify the crippled man behind the machine-like facade. Beautifully shot, the movie was cut by the studio and ignored by critics, but it's gorgeous. Robert Stephens is a complex Holmes, Colin Blakely a most human Watson.

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Sad, funny and cynical, Billy Wilder’s 1970 movie presents a classically Holmesian mystery?a missing person case which ends with the Loch Ness Monster?as cover for an exploration of the great detective’s myth, seeking to identify the crippled man behind the machine-like facade. Beautifully shot, the movie was cut by the studio and ignored by critics, but it’s gorgeous. Robert Stephens is a complex Holmes, Colin Blakely a most human Watson.

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