This month at the ReelChange Drive In, the watch word is Sherlock. With the popularity of Fox’s “House” in the air we thought we’d look at some other unusual revisions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s greatest creation.

We start off the evening with the 1970 Billy Wilder curio The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. Wilder was beginning his elder statesman years when he and I.A.L. Diamond took on this massive virtuoso work, or at least that’s what it was supposed to have been. They wrote the picture like a symphony, with an overture and various movements in an episodic fashion. In many ways this format became its undoing. UA had lost a ton of dough in the previous few years and got dodgy about releasing a 3-hour-plus masterwork. The film’s road show format just didn’t seem feasible at the time. The episodic nature of the picture allowed the studio to “cleanly” cut more than an hour out of the work, leaving us with what we have today.

Don’t misunderstand, the picture is still a great one, but it is definitely hobbled a bit. Wilder opens the picture nicely with an episode that questions both Holmes’ stand on women as well as his relationship with Dr. John Watson. Interestingly, these are the most common subjects to come up in modern takes on the original consulting detective. Generally the revisionists seem to believe that Watson has made Sherlock too much of a “character” and he is forced to adhere to his public image, and that although Holmes shows distain for the majority of the human race our modern sensibilities panic when that distain pertains to women too.

This freak-out about Holmes and women far too often discounts or outright ignores Irene Adler or “That Woman.” The only woman (and damn near the only person) to outsmart Holmes was of course the only one to get near his three-sizes-too-small heart. This brings us to the second half of this month’s double feature, Zero Effect.

As much as Private Life is the work of an old master, Zero Effect is the work of a young, bright legacy. In his debut as a writer/director, Jake Kasdan, son of Lawrence, lands an almost perfect film his first time out. Zero Effect is a nicely aware, but not self-conscious update of Holmes and Watson. In Kasdan’s version, Sherlock Holmes becomes Daryl Zero, his homebodiness becomes agoraphobia, his detachment borders on sociopathic, and his eccentricity becomes annoying. Zero is so annoying that his Watson, Steve Arlo, is about to quit and refuses to chronicle the detective’s adventures.

Kasdan does what far too many modern quirky detective writers forget to do: in Zero Effect he actually constructs a clever and intriguing mystery along with fascinating characters. Zero Effect was praised by the critics when it was released, but it was forgotten at the box office and almost as ignored on home video. Here’s your chance to see two talents working with similar material at opposite ends of their respective careers.

Special late feature: The 7% Solution