Elementary Work

By JAY COCKS

THE SEVEN-PER-CENT SOLUTION

Directed by HERBERT ROSS

Screenplay by NICHOLAS MEYER

Something is much amiss here, and Sherlock Holmes should be just the man to put it right. Unfortunately, Holmes may be on hand in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, but he is not fully present. He appears quite prominently--gamely played by Nicol Williamson--but the spirit of the master sleuth is nowhere to be found. Instead of pursuing his customary invigorating adventures, Holmes becomes enmeshed in a slack, sorry matter involving anti-Semites, a pasha, an abducted actress, a train race and Dr. Sigmund Freud.

All of this was pretty good fun, at least for a while, in Nicholas Meyer's bestseller, an affectionate if not exactly orthodox salute to Conan Doyle. High spirits and some adept literary parody helped carry along a rather shaky narrative. In the screenplay, however, Meyer is at the mercy of his own dialogue, which sounds too arch, and the same structural problem that hobbled his book.

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution is two stories, neither one sturdy enough to support the weight of a full plot. The first has Holmes strung out on cocaine -- his dosage is the pun in the title -- and railing crazily against his nemesis, Professor Moriarty (Laurence Olivier). Dr. Watson (Robert Duvall) tricks his friend into following Moriarty's trail to Vienna. There they find not the archvillain, but the only man who can possibly save Holmes: Sigmund Freud (Alan Arkin). All this uses up time that might have been better spent drumming up suspense or demonstrating some elementary deduction. When Holmes finally beats his habit and flies off on a new adventure, the entire case is beyond hope.

Director Herbert Ross (Funny Lady, The Sunshine Boys) is uncertain throughout about whether to play things straight or risk a little satire. Ross made a neat if rather prissy puzzle a few years back called The Last of Sheila, but here all clues are obvious, all deductions self-evident. Ross is usually adept with actors too, but in this case, Williamson's Holmes is too wired, even for someone giving up coke, and Duvall's Watson resembles a vaudeville Englishman, all jowls and bluster. This excess is echoed in the accents of Arkin, Vanessa Redgrave (who plays the abducted actress) and Georgia Brown (Frau Freud), who sound as if they are revving up to address a bund rally. Joel Grey also appears, but so briefly that he accents nothing. The ace in this poorly shuffled deck is, no surprise, Olivier. He has not often done comedy on screen, but his extravagantly funny Moriarty is a creation of wit and invention.

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution puts one wistfully in mind of Billy Wilder's The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970), a lovely, melancholy evocation of the master sleuth. It was a ravishing movie, misunderstood and ignored on its first release. Now should be just the time for another look at it. The movie features portraits of Holmes (by Robert Stephens) and Watson (by Colin Blakely) that are virtually definitive and thoroughly captivating. Director Wilder showed respect for Conan Doyle, with out slavish devotion, and managed to make the two sleuths real men even as he dealt with them as myths. Watching The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, which tries to do much the same thing, is mostly a reminder of how richly Wilder succeeded.

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