Ubiquitous <
weberm@polaris.net> wrote:
The day DoJ-certified imbecile Resident Joke Biden called half the nation "garbage", I watched:
What did you watch?
Hey, thanks for asking!
THE PRIVATE LIFE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES (1970)
One of the few Sherlock Holmes films I’d never seen. There was a poster posted on the Facebook featuring a steampunk submarine so I had to track it down. I started watching it on the Pluto, but after showing the titles in Cinemascope, they cut to pan and scan so I ended up relying on the gray.
Short version – absolutely the worst live action Sherlock Holmes movie I’ve ever seen. Only those horrible cheaped out metric cartoons are worse.
Incompetently produced at every possible level. Starting with the script
which routinely uses the wrong words, such as saying, he deduced something
when he observed it. They go through a history of all kinds of cutely named made up cases with stupid clues like seeing how deeply the parsley had sunk into the butter. The first half hour has nothing to do with the rest of the movie being just a red herring case. According to Ian‘s Wikipedia entry
they cut a full hour of crap like that out of the movie before it was
released and then lost different elements of all the different scenes so
they can’t even restore it.
Say something good? The music was good and it was still good a few years
later when it was used for time after time.
The sets are laughable. I actually checked to see if this was a play
because that’s what it looked like. 221B Baker Street has literally at
least 16 corners in Holmes’s office none of which are at right angles and there are windows just everywhere.
Say something else good? Christopher Lee plays Mycroft! I had no idea that Christopher Lee was actually bald.
Anachronisms abound. They read cases published in the strand that wouldn’t
be published for another 30 years. Nobody has ever heard of a submersible
20 years after Verne published 20,000 leagues Under the Sea. The histories
of dirigibles and the royal families are completely wrong. Ian would be screaming. And let’s not even discuss the science.
It has a sad end that comes out of nowhere because apparently writer
Director Billy Wilder just decided it should end badly.
But the worst part is apparently the whole reason for the movie: to present Sherlock Holmes as gay. And to constantly accuse Dr. Watson of being gay,
even though he denies it, so there are all these little bits, about as
clever and well produced as a sketch on the Carol Burnett show, like drying
his butt at the fireplace and you think what the hell was the point of that
and then you remember, oh, it’s funny because the woman that caught him thinks he’s gay, tee hee.
They built a full size mock up above the submarine, but never go anywhere
with it except its dry dock. Whenever it’s supposed to be in the water, we just see the surface of the water. When Christopher Lee sabotages it and
lets the godless Germans steal it and sink to their deaths in Loch Ness, we just see bubbles and a bottle of champagne, and a Bible bob to the surface, Neither of which would in fact bob to the surface. It’s impossible to tell
if that’s supposed to be funny or what.
I’m absolutely certain that the evil German villainess sending messages in Morse code by opening and closing her parasol is intended to be funny on a
Pink Panther level. I’m equally certain that it’s not.
You can’t sail a submarine from Loch Ness to Germany because the loch is
land locked, no matter what you may have seen on Voyage to the Bottom of
the Sea.
The goofy paper Mâché monster head, stuck on top of the submarine was appropriate when it was done a decade earlier on SUPERCAR.
Sherlock and Watson attend a performance of Swan Lake in 1887 when it wouldn’t be staged in London for another quarter of a century.
Fred-Bob says: forget about it.
--
"The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters,"
-- DoJ-certified imbecile Joe Biden
--
The last thing I want to do is hurt you, but it is still on my list.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
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