The Seven Per Cent Solution

Yet another reimagining of a legendary English figure, but this one worked a lot better than Robin and Marian: Holmes and Watson hook up with Sigmund Freud in Vienna for detox and subsequent high adventure. Scored by John Addison, who was then coming to the end of his big-screen career (although he continued to work in TV for many years).

The score is terrific, but gets off to an uncertain start. The movie tries to at first strike a tone between cerebralness and almost-camp, and not only does Addison’s score seem to be mixed rather loud, but he seems to re-use the same suspenseful flourish at the end of every other scene for the first 20 minutes or so. The score soon settles down and figures out what it wants to be (as does the film) - a not-so-campy adventure, with the appropriate Straussian pastiches and romantic theme for the embattled (drugged-out) heroine. Still, Addison gets a gift for any composer — a rather lengthy sequence with no dialogue where Holmes hallucinates through his cocaine withdrawal. This part of the film actually comes out pretty well (if overlong), but there are one or two other scenes that are just plain silly (killer Lippizaner stallions, plus a train chase that goes on much too long) and Addison’s score sometimes just gets drawn into it and sounds… well, silly. (As does Robert Duvall’s alleged English accent.)

There was one fine detail in the score which I noticed that was a nice touch. Periodically, we see an unexplained flashback to Sherlock Holmes’ childhood which has underscore that is always finished with a single tap of a triangle. Then about 2/3 of the way through the film, Addison abandons this for the subsequent flashbacks. Just a tiny detail, but I was sort of like, “Aw, where’s the triangle?”