Movie Quote of the Day (Billy Wilder, on Sherlock Holmes’s Love Life)

Dr. Watson (played by Colin Blakely): “Holmes, let me ask you a question. I hope I'm not being presumptuous, but... there have been women in your life, haven't there?”

Sherlock Holmes (played by Robert Stephens): “The answer is yes...”

[Watson breathes a sigh of relief]

Holmes: “...You're being presumptuous. Good night.”—The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, screenplay by Billy Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond, directed by Billy Wilder (1970)

Bad enough that there’s an implication here (never entirely dismissed through the rest of the film) that this world-famous character might be, as Jerry Seinfeld might say, “not on our team” (or, at minimum, very distrustful of women) or even (anticipating the same point made later in The Seven-Percent Solution) that Holmes’ boredom with everyday life has triggered a fearsome cocaine addiction.

But did Billy Wilder really have to depict Holmes as less than perfect in solving crimes? From all over the world, the groans of the Baker Street Irregulars could be heard.

A year ago, I thought of writing about three great directors who came a cropper with disasters in 1964: John Ford (Cheyenne Autumn), Alfred Hitchcock (Marnie) and Billy Wilder (Kiss Me, Stupid). Ford made only one more film in the last seven years of his life (7 Women), while Hitch only created one work out of his last four that approached his masterworks: Frenzy.

Wilder had the most interesting final laps of the three. Unlike the Master of Suspense, he did not enjoy another hit comparable to Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard or The Apartment. But after Kiss Me, Stupid brought a storm of execration on his head for delivering up such louche work, he made another half-dozen films up to 1981, and kept going to his office, in the vain hope that he could concoct another property that would flourish under Hollywood’s new financing order, for some years after that. (The latter hope, of course, was in vain, and Wilder summed up his dilemma in typically witty fashion, noting that in the old days they made pictures, whereas now they made deals.)

Moreover, though his films never spun box-office gold again, they remained deeply individual and interesting, expanding the notion of what could be called the “Wilder touch” (in the manner of his great mentor who inspired “the Lubitsch touch”).

Case in point: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which premiered in the U.S. on this date 40 years ago. In the grand coffee-table interview book he did with Cameron Crowe, Conversations With Wilder, the venerable director bemoaned this as The One That Got Away, a film originally projected to run three hours and 20 minutes that ended chopped down, by another hand designated by studio execs, to only 125 minutes. (“I had tears in my eyes as I looked at the thing,” Wilder told Crowe.” “It was the most elegant picture I've ever shot.")

What The Magnificent Ambersons was to Orson Welles, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was to Wilder. In fact, Hollywood treated Wilder more criminally at this point than it had Welles. Both were irreverent about Hollywood but worshipful about film, yet one (Welles) was a one-hit wonder whose ego was so immense that thousands in Tinseltown wanted him taken down a peg, while the other (Wilder) was a three-decade veteran who had had box-office misses before (Ace in the Hole) but had rebounded with some of his strongest work.

Gone from The Private Life were entire sequences (and I do mean gone—unless a film reconstructionist of the stature of Ronald Haver or Robert Harris comes along, it’s likely that that excised hour is permanently missing in action).

In a way, it was an appropriate end to a star-crossed production, marked by the following:

* Wilder’s original wish—a musical with lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe—had to be shelved when he couldn’t find enough backers.

* Likewise, the original Holmes and Watson, Peter O’Toole and Peter Sellers, became unavailable (Sellers, because, on his honeymoon, he had a heart attack in a futile attempt to give pleasure to his frisky young Scandinavian bride, Britt Ekland).

* The entire, effects-laden “Loch Ness Monster” sequence had to be entirely reshot, in miniature, when a) shooting at dark proved difficult, and b) the “monster” capsized in the lake.

* Bean counters at United Artists, suffering several flops in 1969, got cold feet over Wilder’s ambitious project and forced deep cuts.

Holmes purists, as I’ve indicated, were not happy with the results onscreen. But all kinds of variations have been tried on Conan Doyle’s familiar formula, and in any case this was hardly the worst instance of cinematic violence done to a great literary detective. (That dubious prize, I submit, belongs to Robert Altman’s deconstruction of Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye, with a woefully miscast Elliott Gould offering an adenoidal Philip Marlowe instead of the hard-boiled knight of the mean streets.)

Beginning in mirth but ending in melancholy, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is utterly unlike anything else in Wilder’s teeming and magnificent filmography. Together with his penultimate film, Fedora (1979), it not only bookends the Seventies but calls for a reassessment of his autumnal works.