Time Lost, Time Regained: Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

Abstract

This article discusses Billy Wilder's 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which, though not enthusiastically received by audiences at the time, has subsequently become a work highly valued by critics and cineastes. Radically cut from its original four-part structure by the studio, it has come to be perceived as a film about loss. This relates both to its themes – suppressed love, the vanished world of Holmes and Watson – and to the history of the film itself, whose missing episodes exist only in fragmentary form. The first part of the essay looks at the ways in which the film constructs an image of Sherlock Holmes (played by Robert Stephen), with a focus on the question of his sexuality, while the second part turns to the ways in which the film became an ‘obsession’ for one writer in particular, the novelist Jonathan Coe.