While Sherlock Holmes is easily avoiding yet another attempt on his life, he pawns a case off on his buffoonish brother, Sigerson (Gene Wilder). The case concerns a woman who says her name is Bessie Bellwood (Madeline Kahn). Her story is that she is being blackmailed. Apparently she wrote a sexy letter to a man other than her fiancé, and if she doesn't steal a document from her father, her fiancé will receive the incriminating letter. Can Sigerson and accomplice Sgt. Orville Sacker (Marty Feldman) help her? And what truths will they uncover on the way?
Even though Wilder, Kahn and Feldman were just coming off the comic masterpiece that is Young Frankenstein (1974), and like that film, Wilder also wrote this script (adding helmer duties here in his directorial debut), The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother is wildly uneven. It's at its best when Wilder forgets about trying to tell an A. Conan Doyle-ish story and concentrates instead on absurdism. In fact, there are moments of genius during the more ridiculous segments. But too often the very pedestrian and almost incoherent story gets in the way, too often Wilder seems to secretly desire to make a serious musical instead, and most shockingly, too often even the gags fall flat.
We can tell we're in for a rough ride from the start. The film begins with a prologue featuring Douglas Wilmer as Sherlock Holmes and Thorley Walters as Dr. Watson. These scenes aren't particularly funny, and they sorely pale as serious Holmes fare compared to the Basil Rathbone classics from the 1940s. Wilder doesn't make the exposition very clear, so we're left trying to figure out the story while we watch half-hearted jokes pass by. Things do not even recover when Wilder first appears on screen as Holmes' brother. There is an extended scene in Sigerson's apartment when he's first talking to Sacker and first meets "Bellwood" that gradually builds momentum, but very gradually.
By the time the scene is funny enough to make you laugh out loud, it's because Wilder has forgotten about the story and is instead concentrating on gags, including manically shouting at Bellwood that she's a liar, testing her with snippets of increasingly bizarre songs, and finally, breaking out into a hopping song and dance number. The scene ends up being one of the film's moments of comic genius--impeccably melding writing, performances and direction (just check out those hilariously nearing close-ups of Wilder, ala Boris Karloff's first appearance in James Whale's Frankenstein (1931))--but it takes forever to get there.
Sadly, Wilder can't keep that momentum going. Our introduction to Moriarty (Leo McKern) falls almost embarrassingly flat. I can't recall another film at the moment where the humor and overall effectiveness vacillates so drastically and so often between uproarious and groaningly bad.
It's often difficult to place a finger on what exactly goes wrong. Maybe Wilder didn't really write all of the material? All of the performances are fine, and Wilder's direction rarely seems noticeably off. It's just that about every other scene, on average, doesn't click. Half of the time I was wishing I could give the film a 10 (or, as it progressed, at least hoping that it would remain excellent for the rest of its length so I could give a relatively high score), and half the time I wanted to turn it off and do something else instead.
By the end, Wilder seems to have abandoned the film altogether. The climax between Sigerson and Moriarty is bizarrely bland, even if not exactly bad, and any pretense at a mystery plot has been effectively thrown into the river. I ended up not quite knowing what the secret was, or why I should care. Threads are just abandoned, and there's nothing riotously funny in the end to make up for it.
I'm a huge Gene Wilder fan. I was saddened by his tragedy with Gilda Radner, and even more saddened by the fact that he basically avoided the public eye for a long time. So it's not that I didn't want to enjoy The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother. I also remember seeing it in the theater as a kid and enjoying it more at that time. It's definitely worth seeing for its moments of brilliance, but you have to slog your way through a lot of dreck to get to all of them, and in light of Young Frankenstein, which is one of my favorite films of all time (as is another Wilder film from only a few years before, Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971)), The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother is almost tragic.
Even though Wilder, Kahn and Feldman were just coming off the comic masterpiece that is Young Frankenstein (1974), and like that film, Wilder also wrote this script (adding helmer duties here in his directorial debut), The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother is wildly uneven. It's at its best when Wilder forgets about trying to tell an A. Conan Doyle-ish story and concentrates instead on absurdism. In fact, there are moments of genius during the more ridiculous segments. But too often the very pedestrian and almost incoherent story gets in the way, too often Wilder seems to secretly desire to make a serious musical instead, and most shockingly, too often even the gags fall flat.
We can tell we're in for a rough ride from the start. The film begins with a prologue featuring Douglas Wilmer as Sherlock Holmes and Thorley Walters as Dr. Watson. These scenes aren't particularly funny, and they sorely pale as serious Holmes fare compared to the Basil Rathbone classics from the 1940s. Wilder doesn't make the exposition very clear, so we're left trying to figure out the story while we watch half-hearted jokes pass by. Things do not even recover when Wilder first appears on screen as Holmes' brother. There is an extended scene in Sigerson's apartment when he's first talking to Sacker and first meets "Bellwood" that gradually builds momentum, but very gradually.
By the time the scene is funny enough to make you laugh out loud, it's because Wilder has forgotten about the story and is instead concentrating on gags, including manically shouting at Bellwood that she's a liar, testing her with snippets of increasingly bizarre songs, and finally, breaking out into a hopping song and dance number. The scene ends up being one of the film's moments of comic genius--impeccably melding writing, performances and direction (just check out those hilariously nearing close-ups of Wilder, ala Boris Karloff's first appearance in James Whale's Frankenstein (1931))--but it takes forever to get there.
Sadly, Wilder can't keep that momentum going. Our introduction to Moriarty (Leo McKern) falls almost embarrassingly flat. I can't recall another film at the moment where the humor and overall effectiveness vacillates so drastically and so often between uproarious and groaningly bad.
It's often difficult to place a finger on what exactly goes wrong. Maybe Wilder didn't really write all of the material? All of the performances are fine, and Wilder's direction rarely seems noticeably off. It's just that about every other scene, on average, doesn't click. Half of the time I was wishing I could give the film a 10 (or, as it progressed, at least hoping that it would remain excellent for the rest of its length so I could give a relatively high score), and half the time I wanted to turn it off and do something else instead.
By the end, Wilder seems to have abandoned the film altogether. The climax between Sigerson and Moriarty is bizarrely bland, even if not exactly bad, and any pretense at a mystery plot has been effectively thrown into the river. I ended up not quite knowing what the secret was, or why I should care. Threads are just abandoned, and there's nothing riotously funny in the end to make up for it.
I'm a huge Gene Wilder fan. I was saddened by his tragedy with Gilda Radner, and even more saddened by the fact that he basically avoided the public eye for a long time. So it's not that I didn't want to enjoy The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother. I also remember seeing it in the theater as a kid and enjoying it more at that time. It's definitely worth seeing for its moments of brilliance, but you have to slog your way through a lot of dreck to get to all of them, and in light of Young Frankenstein, which is one of my favorite films of all time (as is another Wilder film from only a few years before, Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory (1971)), The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother is almost tragic.