Some Like It Wilder
Page 42
Wilder conceived the film as an opulent costume drama that would run just under three hours—his longest movie. “It’s not how long you make it, but how you make it long,” he observed. He was confident that his Holmes movie should be a large-scale road show attraction: there would be two performances daily with a reserved seat policy “and an intermission to give your kidneys a break.”16
Wilder aimed to settle on the actors playing Holmes and Watson early on, so that he and Diamond could write the roles with actors in mind. Wilder wanted Robert Stephens, a member of Laurence Olivier’s prestigious National Theatre company in London. Wilder was mightily impressed by Stephens’s performance in his latest film, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), which Wilder saw at an advance screening. The role of Watson went to Colin Blakely, also associated with Olivier’s company, who had appeared in the film A Man for All Seasons (1966). Admittedly Wilder’s lead actor was not well known to American filmgoers, but Stephens looked to Wilder very much like he thought “Mr. Sherlock Holmes” should look.17 Besides, Wilder wanted Holmes and Watson to be portrayed by actors whom viewers did not associate with other roles. Wilder cast Christopher Lee, who was likewise not familiar to American audiences, as Sherlock Holmes’s older brother, Mycroft. Lee had played Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes and the Deadly Necklace (1962).
Wilder and Diamond perused the Holmes stories to immerse themselves in the world of Sherlock Holmes. Then they mapped out the screenplay, on which they toiled throughout 1967. “I don’t think I’m being pretentious in saying that I structured my film in four parts, like a symphony,” said Wilder.18 Each of the richly detailed episodes was complete in itself. In the early winter of 1968, the writing team completed the first draft of the script—except for the ending, which they had not finalized. When Stephens said he would like to know how the story ended, Wilder replied, “So would I.”19
One afternoon when Wilder and Diamond were chatting, Wilder exclaimed that he had a brainstorm for the episode in which the experimental submarine figures. While the sub is doing trial runs in Loch Ness in the Scottish Highlands, the Loch Ness monster materializes. Of course, it is not really the legendary sea creature but the experimental sub; the Royal Navy has camouflaged it with a gargoyle-like periscope that resembles the Loch Ness monster to scare the locals away from the area.20 With that, Wilder and Diamond plunged into the task of finishing the shooting script.
The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is the second Wilder film that foregrounds male friendship. Wilder called the movie the story of “the friendship between Holmes and Watson when they were young.”21 Their longstanding friendship is brought into relief in the episode that is labeled in the script “The Singular Affair of the Russian Ballerina.”
In the screenplay, Holmes is summoned to Covent Garden, to the presence of Petrova, a neurotic Russian prima ballerina who is appearing in London, played by Tamara Toumanova (Torn Curtain, 1966). She wants Holmes to father her child so that their offspring will have her beauty and his brains. Holmes politely declines the invitation by owning himself a bachelor who has enjoyed several fulfilling years living with another bachelor. He hints that he is homosexually attached to Watson “through a cruel caprice of Mother Nature.” Rogozhin, the ballet company’s impresario (Clive Revill), tells Holmes that Petrova’s first choice was Tchaikovsky, who declined because “women were not his glass of tea.” Holmes responds, “Tchaikovsky was not an isolated case.” Rogozhin asks, “Dr. Watson is your glass of tea?” Holmes replies, “If you want to be picturesque about it.”
Chris Steinbrunner and Norman Michaels, the authors of The Films of Sherlock Holmes, emphasize that “Holmes is slyly utilizing this ploy to extricate himself from the situation. . . . For Holmes it is merely a way to escape the attentions of a madwoman.”22 They maintain that Holmes and Watson share nothing more or less than an easy camaraderie in the picture.
Watson is appalled when he hears of Holmes’s “confession” to the ballerina; he insists that they cease to share a bachelor flat. Holmes replies, “Of course, we can continue to meet clandestinely, in the waiting rooms of suburban railway stations.” This is an implicit reference to Brief Encounter (1945), in which the lovers meet secretly in a train depot. But Holmes in point of fact is merely suggesting a parallel between the secretive liaisons that occur between a heterosexual couple and those that occur between a homosexual couple—which some think he and Watson are. Since Watson’s faith in Holmes has been shaken by this incident, he boasts that he can get several women to testify to his manhood. Then he asks Holmes pointedly, “I hope I’m not being presumptuous, but there have been women in your life?” Holmes responds icily, “The answer is yes—you are being presumptuous.” And so Watson’s question remains unanswered.
Other reviewers believe that Wilder meant the filmgoer to take Holmes’s remarks at face value—that Holmes does seem to be homosexual in the movie. The Variety critic writes that Holmes “fakes a story about his being not at all masculine” to duck out of a ticklish situation. “But is he really faking?” Moreover, Variety notes, “Stephens plays Holmes in a rather effete fashion under Wilder’s tongue-in-cheek direction.”23
The court of last resort is, of course, Billy Wilder. He stated flatly to interviewer Doug McClelland, “I wanted to make Holmes a homosexual—that’s why he is on dope. . . . But unfortunately the son of Conan Doyle,” Adrian Conan Doyle, who represented his father’s estate, would not allow it.24 Wilder accordingly portrayed Holmes as homosexual very subtly. Moreover, Wilder said, he chose Stephens to play Holmes partly because he thought Stephens “looked” homosexual, even though Stephens was married and had a family. Indeed, Wilder had Stephens wear a touch of mascara in some scenes; the actor never objected.25 Wilder told me that Adrian Conan Doyle could not pin anything down in the script to which he could take exception concerning Holmes’s sexuality. The cognoscenti, concluded Wilder, perceived the implications in the ballerina sequence that Holmes was homosexual.
Film historian Richard Valley writes perceptively that “the film remains refreshingly ambivalent about Holmes’s sexuality.” Wilder implied that the Baker Street bachelor was homosexual, “but he never went so far as to actually say so, . . . while taking into account Holmes’s fascination with Ilse, the woman in the case.”26
The shooting script finally weighed in at 260 pages, the longest screenplay of Wilder’s career. He estimated that the finished film would run ten minutes short of three hours. The film was scheduled to be shot at Pinewood Studios on the outskirts of London, where Wilder engaged British production artists like Christopher Challis and film editor Ernest Walter. Challis had photographed three movies for Michael Powell and was known for his lush color photography, particularly on Tales of Hoffman (1951). Walter had edited two Agatha Christie mysteries, George Pollack’s Murder, She Said (1961) and Murder Most Foul (1965). In addition, Wilder enlisted composer Miklos Rozsa for the fourth time and production designer Alexander Trauner for the seventh.
Wilder asked Trauner to reconstruct Victorian London at Pinewood. Trauner built Baker Street in the 1880s on the back lot at Pinewood with staggering authenticity. The set was 150 yards long and was designed in forced perspective to create the illusion of greater length. Trauner’s Baker Street set included the elaborate facades of all of the buildings facing the thoroughfare, plus a cobblestone street and period street lamps.
Holmes’s bachelor flat occupied a soundstage at Pinewood. Wilder concerned himself with the set decoration of Holmes’s apartment, just as he had done when dressing Baxter’s Manhattan digs in The Apartment. Once again Wilder accompanied Trauner on a shopping tour to decorate the shelves of Holmes’s Baker Street apartment. Adrian Conan Doyle, who had gotten over his disputes with Wilder about the screenplay, visited the apartment set and declared, “If Sherlock Holmes were to enter this room, he would immediately feel right at home. Everything is exactly in its place.”27
Principal photography got under way at Pinewood in mid-February
1969. After enduring the nightmare of shooting One, Two, Three in Berlin, Wilder had vowed never to make another movie in Europe. But he relented when it came to Sherlock Holmes. “This is an English story and has to be made here,” he explained. “Its cast and crew throughout the shooting will be as English as the weather.”28 Location shooting was scheduled to be done in London and in Inverness, Scotland, where Holmes goes searching after the missing husband of his Belgian client, Gabrielle Valladon (played by the French actress Genevieve Page). Scotland has seldom looked better than it does in Challis’s color photography—all misty mountains and glimmering lakes.
Wilder, as usual, joked with the cast on the set. During the ballet sequence at Covent Garden, Colin Blakely was called on to execute an impromptu Russian folk dance with six women in the corps de ballet. “Colin, I want you to act like Laughton and dance like Nureyev,” Wilder said. Afterward Wilder commented with mock disappointment, “Colin, why did you act like Nureyev and dance like Laughton?”29 Ernest Walter noted, “Mr. Wilder—and he was mostly called Mr. Wilder—is a funny man; and to try to top him was not the best thing to do.”30 It would take a Walter Matthau to do that. Wilder’s sense of humor did not desert him when he was shooting on location in a church cemetery near Pinewood. The gravedigger, who gives Holmes information about the occupant of a freshly dug grave, was played by Stanley Holloway, who sang “I’m Getting Married in the Morning” in My Fair Lady (1964). Wilder warbled “I’m getting buried in the morning” to Holloway.
For his part, Stephens found working with Wilder taxing. Wilder was determined to explore every possible way of staging the action of a scene, and he would continue rehearsing long after Stephens felt he was ready to shoot it. Stephens writes in his autobiography that he felt that he was “being put through a meat grinder every day.” Wilder “would spend hours” rehearsing a scene “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.”31
Like Peter Sellers, who kept all of his gripes about Wilder to himself while shooting Kiss Me, Stupid, Stephens privately fretted about his frustrations in working with Wilder but never told him how he felt. He was not satisfied with the way he played a single scene, and he convinced himself that he was giving a second-rate performance. Halfway through the shoot, he collapsed from exhaustion and tension. Totally depressed, he swallowed a handful of sleeping pills and washed them down with scotch.
Wilder was terribly upset and confessed contritely that he had pushed Stephens too hard. Wilder promised, Stephens writes, that “we would carry on and finish the picture, and we’d go a little slower and not hurry things.” But, Stephens concludes, “When I returned, it was all exactly the same.”32 As in the case of Marilyn Monroe’s suicide attempt during Some Like It Hot, the studio hushed up Stephens’s brush with suicide; the public relations department reported to the press only that Stephens was suffering from exhaustion. Stephens loyally expressed unstinting praise of Wilder to the columnists: “Fantastic! He’s always good-humored and immensely knowledgeable.”33
Wilder was just as loyal in his observations about Stephens. “He was a very fine actor, who took direction very well,” said Wilder. After Stephens’s try at suicide, “we had to wait until he recuperated” to finish the film.34 As in the case of Matthau’s heart attack on The Fortune Cookie, filming had proceeded too far to consider replacing Stephens. At any rate, principal photography wrapped on December 13, 1969. Waiting out Stephens’s convalescence was one reason that the picture, scheduled for a nineteen-week shoot, lasted for twenty-nine weeks. Another was that Wilder’s 260-page script took longer to shoot than either he or the studio had anticipated.
During postproduction, Ernest Walter found it easy to cut the footage together. Wilder had allowed him to spend time on the set during shooting, just as Doane Harrison had always done, and for the same reason: Wilder would plan with Walter how each scene would be edited into the completed film. “You didn’t find Mr. Wilder a very easy man to get close to,” Walter said, “but as long as you knew your job, there was no problem.”35
Wilder was familiar with Miklos Rozsa’s violin concerto. Rozsa writes in his autobiography that Wilder asked him to work it into his score for the present film.36 Wilder, notes Tony Thomas, “was inspired by the fact that Holmes liked playing the fiddle.”37 Wilder wanted Rozsa’s background music to reflect Holmes’s sense of loss after he discovers that Gabrielle, for whom he has developed a deep regard, is a German secret agent. Rozsa accordingly employed the bittersweet romantic theme from the concerto, “but with an urgent, pulsating rhythm underneath.”38 “Rozsa’s achingly lovely concerto,” writes Robert Horton, “distills in the score the essence of loss” and an air of melancholy.39 Wilder paid tribute to Rozsa by showing him conducting Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake in the orchestra pit at Covent Garden during the ballet sequence.
When Walter finished editing the rough cut of the film in London, it ran three hours and twenty minutes. The full-length movie is a compendium of self-contained units in which Holmes confronts a variety of cases. The first is titled “The Adventure of the Upside-Down Room.” The corpse of an elderly Chinese man is found in a rented room where all of the furniture is nailed to the ceiling. On observing the bizarre crime scene and asking Watson pointed questions, Holmes astutely deduces that Watson concocted the baffling case, with a corpse borrowed from a morgue. He did so in an effort to alleviate the boredom Holmes endured between cases, which induced him to take refuge in cocaine.
The second episode is “The Dreadful Business of the Naked Honeymooners,” which takes place aboard an ocean liner in the Mediterranean. The naked bodies are found in bed in their cabin; Watson volunteers to take charge of the investigation to impress Holmes with his own powers of deduction. After disturbing the nude newlyweds, who have merely been asleep in their bed, exhausted by a night of sex, Watson discovers to his chagrin that he has led Holmes to the wrong cabin!
The third episode is “The Singular Affair of the Russian Ballerina.” The fourth and longest is “The Case of the Missing Husband,” discussed below. In addition, there is a flashback, titled in the screenplay, “The Adventure of the Dumbfounded Detective,” which takes place at Oxford University in Holmes’s student days, while he is a member of the university rowing team. His teammates hold a lottery, in which the victor is to spend the night with a prostitute. Holmes is the winner, but he is reluctant to claim his prize because he has a crush on a girl he has seen around town. He is devastated to learn that the trollop is the very girl he secretly idolizes. This flashback, of course, recalls an incident from Wilder’s youth, in which the girl Wilder had been dating in Vienna turned out to be a harlot.
Wilder also prepared a prologue in the script in which a young Dr. Watson, the grandson of Holmes’s confrere (also played by Colin Blakely), opens a safety deposit box at Barclays Bank and finds the manuscripts for the four adventures, which, his grandfather explains in a covering letter, were not published during his lifetime because they contained potentially scandalous material.
It seems that king-size period pictures were beginning to go out of fashion at the time, as evidenced by the box office failure of epic-scale costume dramas like Far from the Madding Crowd (1967). (In fact, after showing some historical epics of this sort, one small-town exhibitor is said to have written to his distributor, “Don’t send me no more pictures about people who write with feathers!”40)
UA held a disastrous preview of Sherlock Holmes at the Lakewood Theatre near Long Beach, after which the preview cards were “uniformly bad,” Walter Mirisch writes. “We had a tremendous number of walkouts.” The cards pronounced the movie too episodic. In fact, “as each of the segments ended, we lost part of our audience.”41 Mirisch and the other nervous studio officials declined to distribute the movie at its original length; they pressured Wilder into carving more than an hour out of the movie to bring it closer to average length. They also decreed that it would not be sho
wcased as a road show presentation.
Wilder acknowledged that the rough cut was half an hour longer than he had anticipated. So he was willing to sacrifice “The Adventure of the Upside-Down Room,” which ran exactly thirty minutes. But UA insisted that the film be cut to two hours or it simply would not distribute it. Wilder was already committed to go to Paris to begin work on another film, so he conferred with the Mirisches about shortening the film and then met with Ernest Walter. “I told the editor, ‘Cut this, cut that,’ ” Wilder remembered. Then he headed for Paris.42
Because the film consisted of individual episodes, Wilder was able to retain intact “The Singular Affair of the Russian Ballerina” and “The Case of the Missing Husband,” the two key episodes, and drop the other two. To bring the film in at two hours and five minutes, however, Walter also had to delete the Oxford flashback and the prologue. This was more than Wilder had bargained for. Still, he had no choice but to acquiesce, to honor his commitment to UA of a two-hour release print.
In all, seventy-five minutes of footage was removed from the final cut, but because of the film’s structure, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes in its truncated form was not marred in any essential way by UA’s meddling. Still, after Wilder viewed Walter’s final cut, he remarked, “I was saddened by what was left out.” He added, “Perhaps enough of it remains; I hope so.” But when the project that Wilder went to Paris to work on was shelved, he further regretted that he had not personally supervised Walter’s final edit of Sherlock Holmes. “We previewed the new version in Santa Barbara,” Mirisch recalls; “we had few or no walkouts.” This was “somewhat of a victory for the recut version,” which lost 30 percent of the original version.43