by Ed Sikov
WATSON: What possible motive could I have?
HOLMES: I told you—narcotics. You wanted to involve me in an insoluble case, in order to wean me away from cocaine. You had me fooled for almost ten minutes.
WATSON: I guess I’m not very bright.
HOLMES: No, but you’re most endearing. No one could ask for a better friend.
But friendship is not enough to get Holmes through the rest of the day, let alone the night. So he demands a new hypodermic needle from Watson. The old one, he says, is “getting rather blunt” from overuse. Watson, furious and hopeless, packs his bags and prepares to move out. Mrs. Hudson bursts into tears. “I know how it feels,” she cries. “I went through a divorce once meself.”
“I didn’t want to remake The Hound of the Baskervilles,” Wilder said just before filming began. “I don’t think I’m being pretentious in saying that I structured my film in four parts, like a symphony: one for the drama, one for the comedy, one for the farce, and one for romance.” The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes would be a multitextured study of a complicated, prickly man—too smart for contentment, too prodigious for sanity. “How I envy you your mind, Watson,” Holmes reflects at one point. “It’s placid, imperturbable, prosaic. My mind rebels against stagnation. It’s like a racing engine tearing itself to pieces because it’s not connected up with the work for which it was built.” Only work and drugs make life tolerable. They are the only activities that soothe his breakneck nerves. “Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” Watson demands when Holmes prepares to shoot up. “Thoroughly,” Holmes replies, “but this will take care of it.”
Holmes’s romantic life is the subject of two of the symphony’s movements; in neither case is the romance fulfilled. Holmes begins “The Singular Affair of the Russian Ballerina” by describing his contempt for ballet: “It’s not the music. What nauseates me is the sight of muscle-bound nymphs on tiptoe being pursued by dainty young men in tights who would much rather be chasing each other.” In a series of slow revelations, Holmes discovers that the great Petrova wishes him to father her child. Holmes was not her first choice, the ballet master Rogozhin declares, speaking on Madame’s behalf. She considered Tolstoy (“too old”), Nietzsche (“too German”), and most recently Tchaikovsky. Holmes asks what was wrong with Tchaikovsky. Rogozhin is circumspect: “Tchaikovsky … how shall I put it? Women not his glass of tea.”
For reasons that Wilder and Diamond treat simply as a given, Holmes declines the chance to spend a week in Venice with this beautiful, elegant, and talented woman. Forced to come up with an excuse for the expression of amused revulsion on his face, he explains that he is not a free man: “A bachelor living with another bachelor for the last five years. Five very happy years. Some of us, through a cruel caprice of mother nature….” “Get to point,” says Rogozhin.
HOLMES: The point is that Tchaikovsky is not an isolated case.
ROGOZHIM: Surely you and Dr. Watson …! He is your glass of tea?
HOLMES: If you want to be picturesque about it.
A visually elaborate but wordless sequence follows, as the news of Holmes’s relationship with Watson spreads through the corps de ballet. A string of exquisite young women celebrating a wild Russian folk dance with an overjoyed Watson gives way to a line of dancing, leering men. Watson is confused. “No need to be bashful—we are not bourgeois!” Rogozhin explains. Watson becomes hysterically aghast at this slight on his manhood and storms home in a rage.
“So there’ll be a little gossip about you in Saint Petersburg,” Holmes says offhandedly. Watson snaps: “Obviously we cannot continue to live under the same roof. We must move apart.” Holmes humors him: “Of course we can still see each other clandestinely, on remote benches in Hyde Park, and in the waiting rooms of suburban railway stations.…” Played for laughs, the episode nevertheless severely undermines Watson’s faith in his friend. “I can get women from three continents to testify for me!” he shouts hopefully. “And you can get women to vouch for you too, can’t you, Holmes?” He turns and approaches Sherlock, looking him in the eye in a two-shot. “Can you, Holmes?”
“Good night, Watson,” says Holmes, whereupon Wilder pans with Sherlock as he walks away, alone. “Holmes?” asks Watson without his usual pedestrian stiffness. “Let me ask you a question. I hope I’m not being presumptuous, but there have been women in your life?” Holmes answers by receding into the isolated refuge Alexander Trauner designed for him, saying, “The answer is yes—you’re being presumptuous. Good night.”
Wilder and Diamond conclude “The Singular Affair of the Russian Ballerina” with a gag. Rogozhin shows up later at Baker Street bearing the gift of a violin. “I did nothing to deserve it,” says Holmes, to which Rogozhin replies, “Neither did Tchaikovsky, but she gave him grand piano.” Rogozhin then turns: “And these, Dr. Watson, are for you,” he says, producing a bouquet of flowers.
WATSON: From Madame?
ROGOZHIN: No.
Rogozhin then whispers to Watson an invitation to meet him later at the Savoy Grill and exits happily. Watson, horrified, explodes in yet another rage.
Twelve years after its inception, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes began filming at Pinewood studios in London in mid-May 1969, with a budget of $10 million, by far the largest of Billy’s career. There were several elaborate sets to build, including a large expanse of Baker Street, an entire ocean liner built to sizable scale, and a working submarine shaped like the Loch Ness monster. United Artists and the Mirisches justified these pricey items by planning special treatment for The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Following the pattern of some of the biggest blockbusters of the 1960s, Holmes was devised as a special engagement “road show” picture. The Sound of Music, My Fair Lady, Lawrence of Arabia, Dr. Zhivago—these gargantuan, hugely popular productions were initially released in limited venues with reserved seating and inflated ticket prices for only two performances a day. They were sent into wide release later, by which time they had acquired a patina of class and exclusivity. The road show was a strategy for important pictures; it gave them even more weight.
Colin Blakely, a far cry from Peter Sellers, was cast in the role of Dr. Watson. Like Stephens, Blakely was a member of Olivier’s National Theatre Company. For the role of Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock’s authoritarian brother, Billy approached George Sanders, whose urbane and cynical screen persona reached its apotheosis in All About Eve nearly two decades earlier. The trouble was, Sanders was ailing and didn’t know if he could withstand the rigors of filming a serious movie for a perfectionist. Sanders flew to London and met with Wilder, but he was uncertain he could do it. “I would rather do some crummy guest spot in a second-rate movie and take my time to get well,” Sanders wrote to a friend. A few weeks later, the opportunity vanished. “I’m afraid that I lost the Billy Wilder picture. Was not able to get well quick enough.” The part of Mycroft was taken instead by Christopher Lee.
The cast was rounded out by the marvelous Clive Revill as Rogozhin, Tamara Toumanova as the ballerina, and Genevieve Page as Gabrielle Valladon, a beautiful Belgian woman who seeks Holmes’s aid in finding her missing husband. (Billy may have named her after Suzanne Valadon, the French painter of the early twentieth century whose work appeared in his collection.) Graceful, delicate, and thoroughly duplicitous, Gabrielle turns out to be a mercenary German spy named Ilse who thus breaks Holmes’s otherwise callous heart. Intertwined with this romantic and devastating subplot is a lengthy business involving the Loch Ness submersible, six midgets on the lam from a circus act, a group of ominous Trappist monks, a flock of birds, and prim, plump Queen Victoria.
As filming continued throughout the summer of 1969, Wilder harped on details. A reporter caught him personally measuring out the exact amount of liquid he wanted in a particular glass. The shoot was originally supposed to last nineteen weeks but inflated to twenty-nine—an unusually long schedule for Billy. But then this was an unusually long and elaborate film, and it mattered to him more than most.
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Dressed usually in the finest menswear accompanied by white tennis shoes, a scarf, and a small brown hat (indoors or out, it didn’t matter), Billy paced around the set snapping orders and instructions, a cigarette inevitably hanging out of his lips. Diamond, reunited with Billy for the shoot, sat in a chair chewing gum and smoking, often simultaneously, mouthing the words as the actors spoke them during each take. If they were wrong he corrected them. Watching hawklike from the sidelines for violations, Iz was even empowered to say “Cut” if he didn’t like what he heard. He used this power with some regularity.
The more footage Robert Stephens shot, the more exasperated he became with Wilder’s and Diamond’s demands for precision. Stephens’s confidence eroded with each passing day as he struggled to give shape, sound, and gesture to what Billy kept calling his “love story between two men.” When they were filming the scene in which Holmes, in a warehouse with Watson and Gabrielle, saws through some grillwork, slips through the passage, and jumps onto a mattress underneath, Wilder didn’t like what he saw at all. Waving directions furiously with a handkerchief, Billy shouted, “Come on! There’s brain and muscle there! Make it seem difficult!” They tried it again. “There’s a lack of elegance in that sawing!” Billy yelled. The actors were shaken, particularly Stephens. Wilder headed off for a long pace around the set. Lucky for them all the next take was good. Still, Stephens felt like he was “being put through the meat grinder every day.” Referring to the way he sometimes treats his actors, Wilder once said that “sometimes you just have to do it with a whip and they like you for it.” Sometimes they don’t.
Blakely wasn’t happy either, but he dealt with the strain better than Stephens did. Both men were shocked by Billy’s insistence on timing every gesture to the last syllable. “We would spend hours on a line such as ‘If the study door was open …’ which meant nothing at all,” Stephens bristled, “changing the emphasis, banging a gavel or an ashtray on the desk just as we said one or other syllable until the whole thing was squeezed completely dry and you felt like running, screaming, off the set. Which is more or less what I did.” Stephens had been warned about this in advance from a surprising source—Jack Lemmon. At a party the Wilders threw in Hollywood before shooting began, Lemmon privately confessed to Stephens that (as Stephens put it) “he adored Billy Wilder but that he drove him crazy with all that Germanic regimentation and matching of action to the slightest inflection.”
When September rolled around, the company found itself in a cemetery. Billy was directing the sequence in which Holmes, Watson, and Gabrielle watch three coffins being buried. Touchy and diligent as ever, Wilder abruptly declared that the grass around the graves wasn’t nearly green enough. The props crew was immediately dispatched to dig up some fresher clods and replant them around the pits Billy had ordered to be dug. On a more comical note, Billy welcomed one of the gravediggers, the actor Stanley Holloway, to the cast by singing “I’m getting buried in the morning.” The film’s publicist told reporters not to mention the name of the church because of the difficulty the production company had in getting permission to film on consecrated ground. “Difficulty? Why?” asked Billy. “We have no naked girls here. No marijuana, no orgies. Just four midgets praying. You can’t get any humbler than that.”
The naked girl came later. A scene involving Gabrielle waking up in Holmes’s bedroom caused a bit of tension when Billy told Genevieve Page to slip the negligee off her shoulder. It would be difficult, the madam from Belle de Jour (1967) responded, since she wasn’t wearing anything underneath. “Okay,” Wilder snarled, “be Debbie Reynolds if you want to.” He paced, grumbled, and smoked cigarettes until he won the point.
Of Trauner’s production design, Wilder said, “I asked him to reconstruct the Victorian era, with its plush reds—but not too red. I like David Lean a lot, but do you remember that nightclub scene in Dr. Zhivago?” At first, Trauner thought about dressing up the real Baker Street for a location shoot, but as he found, “It has changed a lot and there are tons of cars there.” In addition, the address where Conan Doyle places Holmes’s house doesn’t exist. Trauner and his staff looked around London and finally decided to build the interiors and some of the exteriors, particularly Baker Street, at Pinewood. It took four months. Characteristically, the 150 yards of Baker Street Trauner conceived was designed in forced perspective to exaggerate its length, but here, in addition to the elaborate facades, sidewalks, streetlamps, and road surface, there was an extra element: pipes were run overhead to produce special-effects rain on command.
The Loch Ness monster-submarine brought with it its own set of technical difficulties. Wally Veevers, who was in charge of special effects, came up with a long-necked, hump-backed contraption that slithered and plunged on command. They took it out for a test run. As Trauner described it, “I was watching our monster on the lake—it was superb. All of a sudden I see it plunge. I asked Wally if this was intentional. It wasn’t.” The one-of-a-kind monster had sunk to the bottom of the loch and couldn’t be retrieved. Wilder may have been worried, but he didn’t show it; instead he made it a point to console Veevers, who was truly upset. After the first Nessie’s failure, Wilder, Trauner, and Veevers decided to shoot the monster scenes in the studio pool at MGM’s facility in Elstree.
As for the scale-model ocean liner the Mirisch brothers paid to build for “Case of the Naked Honeymooners,” the thing was too big to fit into the pool and instead had to be set afloat off the Isle of Wight. Wilder was putting this thunderingly expensive set to the service of a comedy scene in which Watson proves, all too redundantly, that he is an inept detective. (He offers to solve a case involving two corpses found in a stateroom, but after casing the wrong stateroom and deducing a farcical solution to a nonexistent crime, he succeeds only in waking up the passed-out wedding couple asleep in their bed.)
In mid-October, a tiny blurb appeared in Variety: “Robert Stephens, who has been emoting in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes for Billy Wilder, has had to withdraw on doctor’s orders from the cast of the film The Three Sisters, which Laurence Olivier is directing for Alan Clore Productions at Shepperton. Stephens has been replaced by Alan Bates.” British newspapers reported later that Stephens had collapsed from exhaustion and stress, but in point of fact he nearly committed suicide. His nerves were shot. Billy wanted him to be rail thin, so he’d lost a lot of weight for the role, and he didn’t feel very strong. He was working twelve-hour days, every day, for weeks on end while his wife, Maggie Smith, had gone off to Sussex with their two sons to star in a play. Incompetence, failure, fraudulent, loneliness, abject self-contempt—Wilder induced these raw feelings in the actor he’d chosen to play his on-screen surrogate. So in the middle of filming, his leading man ate a pile of sleeping pills and washed them down with a bottle of whisky.
Suicide wasn’t Stephens’s aim, at least not on a conscious level, or so he said. He came close to succeeding nonetheless. Laurence Olivier’s personal intervention kept the story out of the newspapers, but the production had to shut down for a few weeks. Wilder blamed himself. How could he not, the way he’d been nagging him? As Stephens put it, “Billy was terribly upset and said that it was all his fault. But it wasn’t, really. It was a culmination of things.” Billy, shaken and contrite, told his star not to worry—“We’d carry on and finish the picture and we’d go a little slower and not hurry things,” Stephens recalled Wilder saying. “But of course when I returned it was all exactly the same.”
There were moments of levity along the way, of course. It was a Billy Wilder set, after all—exacting directions peppered by entertaining ad-libs. During the filming of the hilarious, dialogue-free balalaika dance between Watson and the ballet boys, Billy told Colin Blakely to “move like Nureyev and act like Laughton.” After the first take, Wilder was disappointed: “Colin, why did you act like Nureyev and move like Laughton?” For a scene in which Gabrielle breaks into tears, Genevieve Page managed to produce real teardrops right on cue, but Wilder wasn’t
satisfied with reality. Makeup! Billy cried. “Glycerine tears! Great, big, Hollywood false tears! You’d never see those in one of Godard’s films,” he added, “except on the face of his financier.”
Even though Doane Harrison was no longer there to advise Wilder on editorial strategies during shooting, Wilder was still a master craftsman as far as setups were concerned. Sherlock Holmes was the twenty-first film he directed; he knew what he was doing. As Ernest Walter, the film’s editor, puts it, “He shot the film in such a way that my work was relatively easy. It was a question of just taking the clappers off, more or less, and hooking it all together.” Walter’s memories of the personal side of Billy Wilder are typically limited: “You didn’t find Mr. Wilder—and he was mostly called Mr. Wilder—a very easy man to get close to. We had a wonderful working relationship, there’s no question about that. As long as you knew your job, there was no problem. But there were other people on that unit who either were a little bit confused about their job or tried to be the funny man. Mr. Wilder is a funny man, and to try and top him with funny stories wasn’t the best thing to do.”
Blakely and Stephens are said not to have known how The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes would end until they actually filmed it. Wilder had a melancholy conclusion in mind. In a cold British November and December, the Baker Street set was covered in artificial snow, and the sad, final scenes of Sherlock Holmes were shot.
As the critics Joseph McBride and Michael Wilmington astutely observe of Ilse von Hoffmannstahl, the character Wilder uses to explain why Holmes doesn’t trust women, “We become aware of her deception of Holmes long before he does, and our attention is turned quickly from the ostensible spy plot to an exploration of the desperation and fragility which seem to lie beneath her disguise. And it is Holmes’s gradual intuition of her desperation which, perversely, begins to attract him to her…. (Wilder) respects professionals because they do not attempt to conceal their corruption; and we respect Fräulein von Hoffmannstahl even though she is deceiving Holmes, because she is not deceiving us.”