Touches You

Crappy film

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Blistering performances.

Once the mystery got underway, I really enjoyed this movie.I wish it had spent less time at the beginning taking us into the very realistic details of Holmes' cocaine addiction. It does give Alan Arkin a chance to show what a very fine actor he is, but I confess I didn't particularly enjoy watching him suffer so.I admit that when we find out what has happened to Miss Devereux, and why, it seems almost silly - and therefore quite different from the early tone of the movie - but that does lead to a lot of lighthearted dueling, etc., on a train - two trains, actually - flying through the Balkan countryside.And a "borrowing" from *Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea*, when the second train runs out of coal.Still, if you can get through the seriousness of the first part, the rest of the movie is fun.And it even has a rather tacked-on, unexpected romantic end.

Ever since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote those immortal words "quick Watson the needle", people have been interpreting that to mean that Sherlock Holmes is a drug addict. That's the point in which Dr. Watson decides that his old friend has been abusing long enough and needs a cure. And there's this new doctor in Vienna named Sigmund Freud who is breaking new grounds with mental health therapy. That is the basis of The Seven-Per-Cent Solution where the fictional world of Holmes and the and real world of Freud meet and essentially mate.The Baker Street purists are like highbrow Trekkies, for them Holmes is an absolutely real character. In fact I just saw the John Mills-Leslie Banks film Cottage To Let where one of the characters, a young cockney lad proclaims that for him "Sherlock Holmes was the greatest person whoever lived". He's so real that within the time that Conan Doyle wrote his stories you can graft Holmes almost at any point within that time as a character as was done in this film.Robert Duvall as Dr. Watson has left Baker Street to resume his medical practice and soon enough gets a summons from Mrs. Hudson the landlady at Baker Street to come running. Holmes's craving for cocaine has gotten out of hand and she's at her wits end.Nicol Williamson plays Sherlock Holmes and he's going through some bad withdrawal, keeps raving about one Professor Moriarty as the root of all evil in the British Empire. Appealing to his inability to pass up a mystery and his obsession with the Professor who is a teacher of mathematics at some English public school, Duvall tricks Holmes into a trip to Vienna to see Dr. Freud.Alan Arkin plays Freud and the scenes between Dr. Freud and patient Holmes are something else. At the time Freud was using hypnotic techniques which up to that time were just parlor game tricks or used for more sinister purposes to get at the root of Holmes narcotic dependency. Later on when a mystery surrounding another of Arkin's addicted patients Vanessa Redgrave surfaces it is Williamson the teacher and Arkin the pupil when they start playing Holmes's ballpark.The greatest mind in Vienna also suffered cruelly from the anti-Semitism of his time. Freud's 'duel' on the tennis court with Baron Jeremy Kemp is a classic and as it turns out Kemp is the root of the mystery involving Redgrave.The Seven-Per-Cent Solution received two Oscar nominations for Best Costume Design and for adapted Screenplay. The recreation of the London and Vienna of the 1890s is marvelous and the final climax with the locomotive chase with Holmes, Freud, and Watson chasing down the villains is well staged.By the way, though his role is brief Laurence Olivier plays Moriarty and it turns out he did a worse sin to Sherlock Holmes than be the head of all the crime in the British Empire.

Odd casting all around, rather poor sound design, and some throwback choices (like fast-motion editing in a few places) make this an odd duck. Nicholas Meyer's Holmes fanaticism shows right from the beginning, as the characters are introduced with footnotes! Even the characters themselves refer directly to previous adventures at every opportunity.The cast largely pulls it off, tho, with Alan Arkin's German accent probably the weak link. The sets, costumes, and dialog are terrific, but there are some odd directorial choices, and the pacing is off. The first half drags with Victorian drawing room melodrama as Watson pulls Holmes out of his stupor, then the final act lurches to and fro, attempting to become cinematic with action set pieces.Occasionally inspired, sometimes ridiculous, Meyer's script tries to explain Holmes' psychology and comes off looking a bit like fan fiction rather than the real thing. But it retains its sense of fun, and that makes it pretty watchable.

The movie's wit ended with the opening credits. From the narration in the beginning to the "chance encounter" at the end, everything else was just downright silly. When it does abandon its outright attempts at humor, you aren't sure whether the movie was still trying to be funny in its seriousness or whether the actors really were just unintentionally embarrassing themselves.Not being a hundred per cent faithful to the book should not be a problem, except to make things more visual and much simpler the script called for dumbed down clues that make Toby the bloodhound seem like far better at detecting than Holmes. It was just so annoying and painful to watch.