moonspinner55 Review of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976)

Talent everywhere, but film is barely formidable

[2/10 · 12 February 2006]

Director Herbert Ross enjoyed several commercial successes but never really gained the respect of the industry (perhaps it was all those seemingly-undemanding Neil Simon comedies?). So gathering a top-drawer cast like this must have been quite a boost for Ross, and the delicious possibilities behind a meeting of Master Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Sigmund Freud were endless. Unfortunately, Ross' crack comic timing gets lost in the woodwork in his quest to make the film more formidable, and the results are sedate in the very worst way. In 1891 England, paranoid, cocaine-addicted Sherlock Holmes is rescued by John Watson, who arranges a Viennese meeting between Holmes and Freud, who gets Sherlock through a tough detox; Freud then assists Holmes and Dr. Watson on a kidnapping case, and proves to be as adept at sleuthing as he is a hypnotist. Alan Arkin is totally miscast as Freud, giving what may be his least convincing performance ever (he approaches the part like a giddy kid playing dress-up, and his over-enunciation is theatrical and phony); Nicol Williamson is serviceable as Holmes, but all his sweating and shaking is a terrible drag on the action. This is really Robert Duvall's picture, giving us a more robust Watson, and yet Duvall's narration seems to be there just to fill in the gaps. Herbert Ross only gets inventive during one sequence (a series of cocaine-withdrawal nightmares), and even then he carries out the montage for far too long, so that the audience quickly becomes indifferent. There's a lot of talent here, but the results are stodgy and plodding, with an ugly art direction and uninteresting character chatter. * from ****