October 29, 1970 –
One of the last films directed by Billy Wilder, and scripted with his long time collaborator I. A. L. Diamond, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and starring Robert Stephens, Geneviève Page, Colin Blakely, and Christopher Lee, opened on this date.
According to Billy Wilder, since because of schedule conflicts, he couldn’t supervise the bowdlerization of the picture demanded by the Studios, he entrusted the task to Editor Ernest Walter. Nevertheless, Wilder supposedly strongly disliked the cuts made by Walter, and couldn’t re-edit the movie because all of the deleted scenes were lost or thrown away. Some of those scenes are available today, but never with both the audio and the video intact.
