They Might Be Giants

A delightfully quirky movie about a New York lawyer (Scott) who imagines he is Sherlock Holmes, adopting the deerstalking garb and savouring four-pipe problems. The pressures of modern life and the death of his wife have, of course, turned him into a textbook case of paranoid delusion. His somewhat sinister brother sends him to a shrink, Dr Mildred Watson (Woodward), whose Freudian analysis of him is rather overshadowed by his Holmesian analysis of her. Watson's other case is a man who refuses to speak - he thinks he's silent screen star Valentino. Meanwhile, Scott refuses to get better; indeed, he lures everyone into his fantasy, gathering a bunch of Bleeker Street Irregulars who go into snowbound Central Park for a final showdown with the Napoleon of crime, Moriarty. Produced by Paul Newman, it was a box-office disaster (shorn of ten minutes on its original release) that now seems years ahead of its time.