jodyfranz I found myself laughing pretty hard at some of the scenes. "ONE OF THESE DAYS YOUR GOING TO ASSUME A BROKEN ASS!" < I am going to work this quote into life as much as possible from now on!One of the earlier scenes has Sigerson in a fight with two horse drawn buggies and gets into a whip fight... I have never scene a whip fight and it was funny. Up until this point I was kind of watching the movie while doing other things but it quickly grabbed my attention and I found myself really enjoying it.This is what I would consider a well done silly movie. Something you can sit back and laugh at. I just finished watching Speilberg's 1941 before this one and it too was supposed to be silly and failed. I would totally recommend watching this one.

MartinHafer Gene Wilder was a wonderful actor. Unfortunately, here with "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother" he bit off way more than he could chew, as he not only starred in the film but directed, wrote it and sang throughout the film. As an actor, he is wonderful...and he should have stuck with acting alone. The project is tedious, horribly unfunny and a waste of great talent.The film stars Sherlock Holmes' younger brother, Sigerson (Wilder). As far as his being smarter, he's certainly not....and again and again he makes a mess of things when Sherlock passes a case off to him. The film features many horribly unfunny things--most of which go on and on and on. Why does Wilder frequently break into song with Madeline Kahn? It's not funny and just seems weird. Why does Kahn constantly lie, it's not funny and just seems weird. And, why is Marty Feldman in the film when he's given nothing funny to do...and this seems REALLY weird. The bottom line is that this film was a misfire from the onset and I kept waiting, in vain, for it to start getting funny.

Robert J. Maxwell Wilder, the writer/director, is Sigurson Holmes, supposedly Sherlock's smarter brother. Marty Feldman is his exopthalmic sidekick, Orville Sacker. Leo McKern is an overweight Professor Moriarty, and Madeline Kahn is Jenny Hill, the pretty chorister. Kahn begs Wilder for help in unraveling a mystery and Wilder does so, though the task involves many tribulations.It's a comedy with occasional thrilling scenes but it struck me as a little deficient in the laugh department. I don't mean it's a stupid movie, because it's not. It isn't cheaply done and it's evident that some care went into its preparation. The name of Feldman's character, for instance, is Orville Sacker. "Ormund Sacker" is one of the names that Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle considered for his detective before settling on you-know-what. That in-joke reflects a little research on Wilder's part. Not much, necessarily, but we're not dealing with a slapdash job.The problem is that it's not really very funny. First, Wilder has a tendency, here and in his work elsewhere, to linger a while over reaction shots following a gag. The gags aren't usually that funny, although the performers put them over as well as they can.Some of the gags are repetitive. As Holmes, Wilder is always hearing footsteps outside the door, calling the person by name to enter, and it's the wrong person. Sherlock would never have made such errors. And they aren't entirely devoid of amusement. In one case, Wilder identifies the caller as a young lady but a heavy-set man enters. Wilder dresses him down, shouts at him to stop pussyfooting around in hallways.Some of the gags are slapstick and these are usually not very funny. A chase involving three hansom cabs down a cobblestone street just doesn't generate the smiles it's designed to.Wilder as Actor may be better than Wilder as Writer/Director. He has a face that's comic all over, and surrounded by that nimbus of frizzy hair. And his best moments come when he explodes after a particularly frustrating moment or two. I would guess that he had a fencing coach for the climactic bout on the rooftop because he appears to handle an épée fairly well.As I say, not insulting, not cheap, not careless -- but not too funny either. And that's a shame because, wow, what a set up for parody the canon is.

ppuhak Definitely an underrated film. One of my favorite scenes is where Professor Moriarty is having everyone bid for the letter and his assistant is eating from the bowl of potato chips and finally makes his assistant spit out the potato chips because they are for company. The scene with Gene Wilder and the ambassador where he is attempting to hide the fact that we eating the box of chocolates was hilarious. I would like to know if any of the songs from the movie are original to the movie or are they just old songs. They sound as if they could have been written years ago. I have seen this movie on cable and sometimes they edit some of the funny lines.