The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) on Netflix
PG-1319702h 5mAdventureComedyCrime
A cabbie pulls a woman from the Thames and brings her to Baker Street, where she asks Sherlock Holmes to find her missing husband. Mycroft, his brother, warns him away.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb7.0/1015,055 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes87%
Trailer
Plot summary
Pulled from the River Thames and taken to 221B Baker Street by a cabbie, a young woman cannot say who she is or why she was heard to mention Sherlock Holmes's name. She remembers nothing of how she entered the water. Holmes works out that she is Belgian, and her luggage, fetched from Victoria station, shows she reached London on the boat train not long before. Her purpose in England, she tells him, is to find her husband, an engineer who has disappeared. Holmes takes the case. His brother Mycroft asks him to drop it, saying it involves the security of the realm. Holmes refuses, and travels north with Dr. Watson and Gabrielle Valladon, toward Inverness and Loch Ness.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- A Loch Ness Monster model built for the film sank after Billy Wilder insisted its humps be removed despite warnings that this would affect its buoyancy, and it was rediscovered in April 2016 during a Scottish expedition to find the monster.
- Billy Wilder first planned to cast Peter O'Toole as Holmes and Peter Sellers as Watson; Nicol Williamson, later Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, was also considered, and Rex Harrison pursued the part but Wilder was not interested.
- The first cut of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes ran roughly three hours and twenty minutes, and large portions were deleted at the studio's insistence; what remained of the cut scenes was restored for the film's LaserDisc release.
- James Robertson Justice was offered the role of Mycroft Holmes but refused to shave off his beard, so Christopher Lee took the part after George Sanders' failing health removed him from it; Lee credited Wilder with helping him stop being consigned to horror movies.
- Editor Ernest Walter argued for the deleted scene of Rogozhin bringing Holmes the promised Stradivarius and offering roses to Watson to end the film, as a nod to the finale of Some Like It Hot, but Billy Wilder refused and preferred a more mournful ending.
- Elaborate sets were built on the backlot at Pinewood Studios, including 150 yards of the Baker Street set at a cost of £80,000, and the Diogenes Club set stood until 1973 and turned up in films such as Hands of the Ripper and Carry On at Your Convenience.
- Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, the creators and writers of the BAFTA and Emmy Award-winning series Sherlock, credited The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes as a source of inspiration for their show.
