CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
The Holmes Behind the Modern Sherlock
Shout! Factory
In “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” (1976), Nicol Williamson, center, embodied the Sherlock Holmes reimagined by Nicholas Meyer.
By MIKE HALE
Published: January 25, 2013
We’re lousy with Sherlock Holmeses right now: the Robert Downey Jr. version on the big screen, the competing television interpretations of Benedict Cumberbatch (“Sherlock”) and Jonny Lee Miller (“Elementary”) and all the Holmes-inspired geniuses in current and recent TV shows like “The Mentalist,” “Psych,” “House” and “Monk.” So “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” released this week in a new Blu-ray and DVD package, enters a crowded market.
Shout! Factory
From left, Robert Duvall, Alan Arkin and Nicol Williamson in “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” directed by Herbert Ross.
But its Sherlock deserves special consideration because he’s the father of all those modern Holmeses. Besides being a clever comic mystery with an absurdly talented cast, this 1976 film — based on Nicholas Meyer’s playful novel imagining the meeting of two great Victorian detectives, one of whom is Sigmund Freud — established the template for all the twitchy, paranoid, vulnerable, strung-out Holmeses to come.
It may be hard to countenance now, but for much of the 20th century there was just one Sherlock Holmes on screen: the hawk-nosed British actor Basil Rathbone, whose Shakespearean elocution and commanding physical presence defined the English-speaking world’s most famous detective in 14 movies in the 1930s and ’40s.
The Rathbone Holmes, familiar to generations of late-night TV viewers, could be energetic and impetuous, but he was decidedly rational, and his behavior was always in bounds — there was not much evidence of the Bohemianism and eccentricity the character exhibited in Arthur Conan Doyle’s original stories. Humor in the films was supplied by Nigel Bruce’s clueless Doctor Watson, a lovable buffoon who was always bewildered by the case at hand.
In his novel and his screenplay, Mr. Meyer reacted against the Rathbone films’ ossified notions of Holmes and Watson, giving the story a postmodern spin while in some ways returning the characters to their Conan Doyle roots. “ ‘The Seven-Per-Cent Solution’ is not a Sherlock Holmes movie,” he says in an interview included with the new release (Shout! Factory, two discs, $26.99). “It’s a movie about Sherlock Holmes. That’s different.”
The main difference, of course, was Mr. Meyer’s inspired idea of having the fictional Holmes (Nicol Williamson) work on a case with Freud (Alan Arkin), an encounter that takes place in the chronologically plausible year of 1891. To bring about their meeting, Mr. Meyer took a detail from Holmes’s background — his habitual use of cocaine, legally available in Victorian England — and made it the engine of the story, having Watson transport the hallucinating Holmes to Vienna in the hope that Freud, a fellow user, can work a cure.
It was that decision that propelled Holmes into the modern world, making him the model for today’s variously troubled Sherlocks, as well as an early example of the recovery-story hero. Williamson carried out this radical refashioning in a performance that was simultaneously manic and starched, marvelously comic but rooted in real pain.
“This is a movie about the inside of this man’s character and how he got to be who and what he is,” Mr. Meyer says in the interview. “You’re not meeting Holmes in a normal, high-functioning, operational mode.”
His intuition that a flawed Holmes would have comic appeal is signaled in a line barked by Freud, when the psychiatrist and the detective argue over who is to blame for a bad turn in the case: “What is this egocentric streak of melodrama that does not allow anyone to share in your triumphs or disasters?”
Tracing the history of the detective as hero is not the only reason to watch “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution,” which holds up quite well as entertainment; as directed by Herbert Ross, it’s a deft and unusual mix of light comedy and globe-trotting caper. It supplies the expected satisfactions of instantaneous deduction, cultured repartee between Holmes and Freud and allusions to Conan Doyle’s work, as well as a long and exhilarating chase across the European countryside involving real steam locomotives.
Mr. Meyer’s story, which would now be called meta, is couched as an alternate explanation for the period between Holmes’s supposed death at the hands of James Moriarty (recounted in Conan Doyle’s “Final Problem”) and his resurrection (in “The Adventure of the Empty House”). The hiatus that begins with Holmes’s drying out extends into a case involving a pasha, a baron and a redheaded temptress, during which Holmes instructs Freud in the mechanics of detection and gives him some ideas about the meaning of dreams.
The redhead is played by Vanessa Redgrave, one of the adornments of a supporting cast that includes Laurence Olivier as a drolly timorous Moriarty and, most surprisingly, Robert Duvall as a steadfast, levelheaded Watson, written by Mr. Meyer in conscious rebellion against the Nigel Bruce portrayal.
By the end of “The Seven-Per-Cent Solution” Mr. Meyer’s Holmes has diverged from his descendants in one important way: having done time with Freud and saved Europe from war, he is well adjusted and ready to face the world. For the current crop of Holmeses, dependent on future TV seasons or movie sequels, that kind of recovery is a nonstarter.
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