The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (Billy Wilder; US/UK, 1970)

Opening with a lengthy boondoggle designed to establish Sherlock Holmes's sexual proclivities and, in true Wilder fashion, leaving the question wide open, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes is riddled with false clues, beginning with its title. Wilder and screenwriter I.A.L. Diamond play with a typically hyperbolic adventure involving twenty-four canaries, eight Trappist monks, six midgets, and guest appearances by Holmes' own Machiavellian brother Mycroft and the queen of all Victorian heroines, Victoria herself. Here is a film that revels in its artifice, and in the bold theatrics under which all—Holmes, the helpless heroine, and perhaps even the ingenuous Watson—hide their private lives. Robert Stevens plays Holmes with a Wilderesque mixture of bitter sardonicism and false naiveté, at once inviting us into and shutting us out of his inner world. Trapped in the mind's work, trapped in sexual ambivalence under the parasol of Victorian womanhood, trapped in the eye of his worshipful biographer and in the fiction of his life, in short, he is trapped on the screen. When this Holmes shuts his bedroom door on us, retreating with his needle, we might well conclude that Wilder's is, indeed, the last of the great Sherlock Holmeses.

• Written by Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond. Photographed by Christopher Challis. With Robert Stevens, Colin Blakely, Genevieve Page, Christopher Lee. (125 mins, Color, ‘Scope, 35mm, From Park Circus)