Gene Wilder. Madeleine Kahn. Marty Feldman. A can’t-go-wrong combination of legends, right? But The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975), starring these three and Dom DeLuise, goes horribly wrong. Wilder stars as Sigerson Holmes, Feldman as the traditional sidekick, and Kahn plays a theatrical hussy who happens to be a congenital liar unless she’s sexually excited.
It’s wacky farce from beginning to end – but it failed to catch our sympathy, to engage our intellects as satirical farce must. Is it poorly made? Or is it just dated and beyond our understanding? The sad part is that the cast is there, and some elements are there. Feldman is a great comedic character actor. But consider the interrogation scene. This scene should have been hilarious: Wilder needs to know the identity of Kahn’s character’s father, and must use foreplay to entice it out of her. But rather than howling with laughter, we found our teeth itching. Thinking about it, it’s clear that the only plot-driven purpose of the scene is for Wilder to extract critical information from Kahn; perhaps it would have been funnier if Kahn had been slyly – in the vein of the Avenger’s Black Widow, whose own interrogation scene in The Avengers was really something to savor – extracting information from Wilder as well. The implied complexity engages the intellect and would have opened the way to more clever humor – upon which the best farce is built.
Compare it to another satire, The Cheap Detective, with Kahn and Peter Falk. This was much more successful, and I suspect it’s because there’s so much more going on between the lines. Ladies with multiple ploys and identities, witty plays on Hammett tropes, it has its lurches – but it’s affectionately remembered and I’ve watched it several times, picking out new implications every time. I doubt I’d pick out much new if I were to view The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother again.
Oh, and I may have lied. We don’t know it’s a wacky farce from beginning to end – because we didn’t make it to the end. It was that bad.
