The Seven-Per-Cent Solution

A film that brings Sherlock Holmes and Sigmund Freud together. Holmes is using cocaine and getting worse. He believes Professor Moriarty is after him and tells everyone so. Watson looks into it and finds that Moriarty is in fact a harmless mathematics tutor: the obsession is not real. Watson makes a plan to get him treated. He tricks Holmes into travelling to Vienna and puts him in front of Freud. Freud takes him on. At the same time a real case appears: one of Freud's patients is abducted. Holmes enters the investigation while still recovering. The idea is that Holmes's method and psychoanalysis do the same work. Both read detail and deduce a past. In the second half an explanation about Holmes's childhood arrives, and the character's condition is accounted for that way. The source is Nicholas Meyer's novel; he wrote the screenplay himself and was Oscar-nominated for it. Nicol Williamson plays Holmes, Alan Arkin plays Freud and Robert Duvall plays Watson. Laurence Olivier and Vanessa Redgrave are in the cast. Herbert Ross directed. An interesting production for anyone who likes Holmes adaptations and unusual approaches. For a viewer expecting a classical Holmes case, the film is more interested in the character than the investigation.