The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

Directed by Billy Wilder, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes follows Robert Stephens’ title character as he and Colin Blakely’s John Watson agree to help a woman (Geneviève Page’s Gabrielle Valladon) track down her missing husband. It’s almost astonishingly how little The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes ultimately manages to hold one’s interest and attention, as filmmaker Wilder, working from a script written with I.A.L. Diamond, delivers a sluggish and mostly interminable endeavor that’s saddled with as tedious a mystery as one could possibly envision – with the egregiously deliberate pace doing little to alleviate the predominantly uninvolving atmosphere. The arms-length vibe is, in addition, compounded by the lackluster efforts of both Stephens and Blakely in the central roles, as both actors offer up bland, far-from-charismatic work that essentially (and effectively) prevents the viewer from embracing their admittedly iconic protagonists – which, in turn, makes it almost impossible to muster up any interest in or enthusiasm for Holmes and Watson’s attempts at solving the less-than-enthralling case. And although Wilder has admittedly peppered the proceedings with a small handful of relatively entertaining sequences, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is, by and large, an entirely misguided and misbegotten misfire that surely marks the nadir of Wilder’s filmography.

* out of ****