Customer Reviews

A memorable Sherlock Holmes adventure - By: Lou Knee, 03 Mar 2008
A marvellously crafted & witty take on the legendary detective Sherlock Holmes for all fans of his. It is a slanted, almost subversive reading of him, giving us a real man, with real vices & defects, & a real sense of humour, & gives us a far from stodgy Dr. Watson, much more a real friend of his thanin other versions. This is all intended to give us something new, something quite tantalising, & something quite rewarding. It utterly succeedsin this, & throwsin an adventure drippingin that dark Victorian quality all Holmes adventures have. It is clearly made by a huge fan of his, & Wilder revels at the chance of giving Sherlock's mysterious brother a prominent role. Stephens as Holmes is sensational. The screenplay is sparklingly good, & the story itself is as well detailed & entertaining as any of the Conan Doyle tales. It is a magnificent piece of work that should disappoint no one with the faintest of interestsin Sherlock Holmes. The DVD itself is fine, no extras but at this price, who can complain! A great addition to anyone's collection.

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A forgotten gem! - By: Mr. J. Andrew, 08 Jan 2008
Excellent take on Holmes. The interplay between Holmes & Watson is delightful. It may flag slightly towards the end, but this has class written all over it.

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A truly great movie - but go for the Region 1 DVD! - By: Trevor Willsmer, 01 Dec 2007
A long-time dream project for Billy Wilder, beginning life as a musical, going through several years of rewrites & casting proposals - at one point even a vehicle for Peter O'Toole & Peter Sellers until the director found both impossible to make a deal with - before going into production as a hugely expensive $10m budgeted three-hour plus roadshow picture only to be cut down to little over two hours when exhibitors refused to book the uncut version, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is something of a legendin itself. The whereabouts of all the elements for a full restoration has long defied the finest mindsin film restoration, adding a layer of mystique & what-if? to the film's reputation.

The best way to watch The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is to forget what could have been & marvel at what is left. For all its problems, evenin the heavily cut version that was eventually released, this is one of Billy Wilder's greatest & certainly most heartfelt achievements - & a pretty good yarn as well, throwing missing dwarves, dead canaries, Trappist monks, Swan Lake, Sherlock's mysterious brother Mycroft, Queen Victoria & the Loch Ness Monster into the mix, as well as an amnesiac woman who rouses more than Holmes' professional curiosity, to tragic results.

Throughout, Wilder presents a much less self-assured vision of the great detective than had been seen before. In the opening scene he castigates Watson for the expectations the Doctor's storiesin Strand Magazine have instilledin the public, & the film proceeds to ultimately explore that painful gap between expectations & reality with no mercy to the character's feelings but much compassion.

Where to Watson's spirit of adventure, all things are possible, to Holmes all things can be disassembled & found wanting. There's real pain, loneliness & despair behind his façade of dry wit. Robert Stephens' Holmes is a genuinely tragic figure, a victim of his own intellect whose descent into becoming a thinking machine is more an act of self-defence at his poor judgementin matters romantic. The final shots of him reaching for a shot of cocaine to hide a broken heart are one of the most haunting images of its era.

Colin Blakely's Watson too is a great creation. He is never mere comic relief or the all-too-familiar buffoonish stereotype but a fully realised figure pained by his inability to deal with his friend's drug use (and discomfort with being his unwitting supplier). There's a humanity, familiarity & genuine emotional interdependence to their partnership that most other screen pairings have missed, aided immensely by some remarkable writing. If there's such a thing as a script so sharp you could cut yourself on it, then parts of this could cause fatal injury. To quote every good line would mean typing out half of the script, & certainly the entire Bolshoi Ballet where Clive Revill's impresario makes an unusual business proposal to Holmes. But it's not all highbrow. Example: "Who's that at this hour?" "Maybe Mrs Hudson is entertaining?" "Really? I've never found her so."

But more than amusing dialogue, this is a film which has been clearly thought throughin every detail - at one point, Holmes' is even glimpsed through a haze of smoke as boredom clogs his mind. Even though Wilder's visual imagination is limited, the film is sumptuous to look at, particularlyin its proper widescreen ratio, but for many, the major impetus for buying this DVD will be the location of the soundtrack (but not the picture) for the original opening half-hour of the picture (including The Case of the Upside Down Room) & the picture (but not the sound) for The Dreadful Business of the Naked Honeymooners. Unfortunately you won't find them on the PAL DVD - thanks to MGM/UA's old policy of dropping extras from special editions of back-catalog titles outside the USA that wasin place when this disc came out, you won't even find the trailer! Picture quality is somewhat disappointing, especially compared to the laserdisc - a bit soft & definitelyin need of a remastering.

If you have a multi-system player, go for the Region 1 disc instead - the transfer is equally disappointing, but the extras package goes a long way to compensating!

As for the extras that can only be found on the Region 1 NTSC disc...

The weight of expectation that comes with what has thus far been located of the missing footage is,in truth, more than two of the episodes can bear. The real gem is The Curious Case of the Upside Down Room, less for the case itself but for what it tells us about the relationship between Holmes & Watson, precipitating a crisis that is only resolved by deceit on Holmes' part (Holmes' admission to Watson is very affecting). It's also the only deleted section that seems to serve a real purposein the film's design. Neither the original opening scenein the train, more of a skit than anything of significance, or The Dreadful Business of the Naked Honeymooners advance the plot or illuminate the characters, being little more than overextended, very mildly amusing sketches.

The supplementary section is also mildly disappointing, not because of the effort putin by the producers of the original laserdisc who collated many of them: again, it's a case of decades of expectation working against it. The laserdisc included an early draft script that was intriguing - apparently almost everything was filmed - but it also contained some crudely misplaced elements. Mycroft's line about the last doctor who warned him about his gout falling on an orange peel & breaking his neck originally replaced the fruit with a very unconvincing use of the word 'turd,' while the original addenda to the ending, with Lestrade asking Watson if Holmes will help solve the Jack the Ripper case, seems particularly lame. However, for the NTSC DVD release only script & stills montages for the deleted scenes are included.

The stills archive is good, although it is a shame that it limits itself to purely colour shots. However, there is far too little of the pressbook for those who want to know more about the film. For some reason a panned-and-scanned version of the quite brilliant but spoiler-heavy trailer has been used, & a well-worn one at that (note to newcomers to the film: avoid it until you've seen it, as it gives away two major plot twists). A lengthy on-camera interview with editor Ernest Walter is also included, although be warned that he gets one detail wrong (it is indeed Jenny Hanley who played Holmes' university `sweetheart'in a lost flashback sequence), while, exclusive to the DVD, there's also a 15-minute interview with Christopher Lee. The isolated music track of Miklos Rozsa's superb score that was on the laserdisc is NOT included on the DVD (the track was problematic: with the masters long lost, a dubbing mix track was used with the volume varying wildly).

Picture quality is somewhat disappointing, especially compared to the laserdisc - a bit soft & definitelyin need of a remastering.

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Grand even as an edited version - By: Kurt Messick, 29 Nov 2005
This film is sometimes described as a comedy, & while it has humourous bits (a more sardonic & biting form of humour most of the time), it has never really felt at home being classified as a comedy,in my estimation. I do like the rapid-fire wit that Holmes seems to have here (a bit morein abundance thanin the canonical Conan Doyle stories), but the Holmes presented here is a bit more dark & brooding, more akin to the extra-canonical 'Seven Percent Solution' Holmesin many ways.

Wilder was an extraordinary director & genius who sometimes gets carried away with his subject (in this regard, he is sometimes compared with Stanley Kubrick). His films are often of epic-proportions, even though they are not essentially 'epic' subjects. This film is reputed to have been nearly twice as long as the final cut version, but this tale may be apocryphalin that the raw footage every made it to final print & production. The restoration available on this disc is,in fact, rather minimal - a few scenes & a few extras, but not much more than the original release of the film. This is disappointing to many fans, butin fact is more than most of us have had for a long time, as the somewhat choppy film was often mercilessly cut for television broadcast.

Holmesin this case is played by Robert Stephens, an unlikely Holmesin comparison to standards such as Rathbone, Brett, or Gillette, but still an interesting choice - quintessentially British, reserved but daring, brilliant yet flawed & faltering. Colin Blakely presents a stronger Watson than often portrayed before (this film, being madein 1970, presented this as a newer idea for Watson, one that has been picked up by many subsequent productions). Wilder has the actors play at various issues of Victorian sensibility & morality, including the implication (dismissedin the end) that Holmes might have a sexual identity issue. Christopher Lee, who himself plays Holmesin other productions, plays Holmes' smarter brother Mycroft here, to good effect.

The story line does have some inspiration from the canonical stories (the Bruce-Partington Plans, for one), & from Gillette's play (the strange case of Miss Faulkner, introducing an ending that allowed for a love interest for Holmesin the end), but for the most part takes the characters from Conan Doyle & runs far afield. Still, this is must-see film for any fan of Holmes, & any fan of Wilder, who saw this as one of his last great productions.

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Oh so close - By: , 31 Aug 2004
This offers a wonderfully intruiging narrative that is charmingly redolent of Conan Doyle's most relentlessly coiling stories. Additionally it chucksin some excellently human & humorous touches.

There are great performances from Richard Stephens as Holmes, & Christopher Lee as Mycroft.

It's a lovely film, which is spoiled by only two things: 1) the constantly, infuriatingly annoying Watson who is neither funny or endearing but is just an absolute persistent pain & who is completely intolerable by about twenty minutes in, leaving the viewer with a recurring desire to see him stabbedin the eye by a cocaine-crazed Holmes. 2) The picture quality, which is pixellated & frequently blurry, exceedingly reminiscent of something like a Granada TV dvd transfer. Ie. it's shockingly poor.