And here’s the cast and director of the movie.
For a mostly pleasant, if slightly mindless, time, The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes (1970) is hard to beat. An exploration into the more salacious side of the famed detective’s life, it has not aged well. In its time, the suggestion that the detective was homosexual might have seemed risque, and such an intimation for Dr. Watson might be an outrage (a term mentioned multiple times, in true Brit fashion) for him, but today they come across as quaint and nearly irrelevant – a resolution to the matter that might have surprised director Billy Wilder.
The story itself, which centers around the development of the first working submarine by the British navy for Queen Victoria, and its secret technology, and how this connects to the mysterious cessation of letters from one of the men working on it to his wife in Belgium, is mildly interesting, but not as compelling as the actual Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Part of the problem is that the story is telegraphed, and with little subtlety.
But it’s also neither offensive nor incompetent. Dr. Watson may be a bit frenetic, but he’s not a bumbling boob, as he’s sometimes portrayed, and Holmes remains cool under pressure, even graceful in the face of failure.
The closest it comes to a theme is that some men rise above their hormone-laden ways to fall in love with women for their minds, as Holmes does with the doomed German spy who masquerades as the woman desperate to find her husband. It’s not as compelling as one might hope, though. Not Wilder’s best work.
But pleasant.
