The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976)

(London, and Austria; 1891)

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary Sherlock Holmes has inspired an unusually high number of revisionist cinematic portals, including ’Without a Clue’, ’The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes’, ’The Adventures of Young Sherlock Holmes’, ’The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’s Smarter Brother’, and tangentially ’They Might Be Giants’ which features George C. Scott as a doctor convinced that he’s Sherlock Holmes. Of all these extra-canonical incarnations perhaps the best is ’The Seven-Per-Cent Solution’, which is not only a thoroughly enjoyable romp, but also provides clever and insightful explanations for the master detectives eccentric character and for his associated mythology.

The title comes from Holmes preferred medium for the injection of cocaine, a substance to which he is addicted, and an important part of the Holmes character to which those not well versed in Conan Doyle’s stories may be unaware. In the film Holmes (A worthy Nicol Williamson) addiction has come to a dangerous point, leaving him paranoid and in danger of death. Dr. Watson (Robert Duvall) and Holmes older brother Mycroft (Charles Gray) conspire to trick the ace detective in journeying to Vienna, under the pretense of following Professor Moriarty (in this case presented as Holmes drug-influenced and deluded conception of his childhood math tooter), but in fact as a means to get him into treatment under the hands of a not yet fully established Dr. Sigmund Freud.

The paring of Freud and Holmes is genius, and while at first its largely a doctor/ patient relationship, they do come upon a case to peruse together involving one of the Sigmund’s patients, a famed singer played by Vanessa Redgrave, who is also a recovering cocaine addict. A very satisfying reinvention that succeeds in accomplishing what Wilder and Diamonds ’The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes’ set out to do even more effectively.