The Seven-Per-Cent Solution

Conan Doyle's description of Holmes' ultimate struggle with Moriarty, The Final Problem, was written with such a quasi-religious intensity that it was a sacred text of popular fiction until 1974, when Nicholas Meyer conceived that the story had been written to disguise both Holmes' cocaine dependency and his encounter with Freud in Vienna. As a book, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution was a pertinent pastiche. As a film, it is an almost unrelievedly insipid costume drama. Once the basic coup of teaming Holmes (Williamson) and Freud (Arkin) has been achieved, the 'mystery' simply degenerates into a spectacularly silly chase across Europe, blandly staged and staggeringly boring. The whole cast appear to be struggling, and ultimately it's camp whodunit.