The Quest for Private Life

I love movies. I love sitting in half-empty theaters, eating popcorn, and sometimes will go see something awful just to be doing that. Which is the main reason I don't rent videos, because I've seen almost all of it in the theaters. But watching videos, made-for-t.v.-movies, old movies, late movies, Sunday afternoon movies, and every other kind of movie (except for "Based On A True Story" movies) is one of my basic staples of life.

I also love Sherlock Holmes, as should be evident from the duration of this monthly diatribe. So why is it that almost all Sherlock Holmes movies put me to sleep?

The most exciting detective in the history of mystery and his celluloid adventures always turn out to be so mind- numbingly plodding. Except, of course, for one. (Well, make that two. The Dudley Moore "Hound" doesn't put me to sleep, but it is hard to keep food down while watching it.)

The other is Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Seeing a preview for it in the Strand Theater in Fairfield, Illinois, was the thing that planted the kernel of Sherlockianism in this columnist's boyhood brain. (And also enabled me to forever say I first encountered Holmes in the Strand). Holmes fought the Loch Ness Monster and found clues on naked women. What a great guy he was!

It was years before I finally saw the movie on network television, and even then they cut the first twenty minutes out. I still loved it. More years passed and I got to see the first twenty minutes. Better still.

I became a Sherlockian, which lead me to another piece of the movie. Paul Herbert had a twenty-minute promotional film for the movie in his collection, and he showed it at a special Double-Barrelled Tiger Cubs event at the University
of Illinois. There I learned that Private Life was actually a much, much longer film that had been cut down to two hours. Whole cases had been removed, and Inspector Lestrade had been cut entirely.

More years passed. Taunting mentions of a restored, full-length Private Life surfaced every now and then, but nothing concrete. Finally, Peter Blau's Scuttlebutt from the Spermaceti Press informed me that Private Life was coming out on laserdisc with added footage.

Great, I thought, but I don't own a laserdisc player. So, once more, time went by, and I expected more years to pass. But one Saturday, my ever-so-modern friend Rad asked me to go with him down to Bloomington to see about buying a laserdisc player. I went, and while he looked at players, I looked at the discs available. Extra footage everywhere you looked. Movies I'd never heard of before. And The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes on laserdisc.

It had new footage (not completely restored, some video without sound and some sound without video). It had eighty-two never-before-seen stills. It had soundtrack music. It had the complete script, the music cue sheets, and the original preview ... the thing that brought me to Sherlockiana.

In perhaps the most extravagant move of my life, I bought it. I never intended to buy a laserdisc player, but I had to have it all the same. My only hope was that Rad would finally buy one. And, eventually, he did.

It was great. All new parts of my old favorite. So what if it wasn't fully restored, I was used to getting it one piece at a time, anyway. And the added material brought additional missing pieces to light, such as Holmes in school at Oxford. The quest continues.

But this time, I also discovered why I have an unnatural fondness for two non-Sherlockian items. One is the score to the movie Time After Time, which it turns out was also written by Miklos Rozsa, the man who scored Private Life. The other item is a bit more unusual.

As I watched Watson shouting at Holmes after their night at the ballet, a disturbing familiarity crept over me. I was watching "Seinfeld." Holmes was Seinfeld, and Watson was George. The likeness was incredible, and continued throughout much of the film. Billy Wilder had been doing the comedy of the nineties twenty years before.

"The old wheel turns and the same spoke comes up. It's all been done before and will be again," Holmes said in VALL. You just never know where that spoke will turn up.