The Seven-Per-Cent Solution
Short description
Sherlock Holmes has sunk deep into cocaine addiction, and his friend Dr. John H. Watson can no longer stand by. Watson arranges a journey to Vienna so that Holmes can be treated by Sigmund Freud, the young physician whose ideas about the unconscious are still new. Holmes resists the treatment, but Freud's methods draw him into his own buried memories even as he turns his attention to a case at hand. A patient of Freud's, the actress Lola Deveraux, has been left unable to speak by a severe trauma, and she is soon linked to a kidnapping that Holmes sets out to unravel.
Herbert Ross directed the film, the fifth of the thirteen features he made, between Funny Lady and The Goodbye Girl. Nicholas Meyer wrote the screenplay, adapting his own novel, and Ross also produced. Alan Arkin plays Freud, Nicol Williamson is Holmes, Robert Duvall takes the part of Watson and Vanessa Redgrave plays Lola, with Laurence Olivier as Professor James Moriarty and Joel Grey as Lowenstein. The picture was made for about 5 million dollars by Universal with Alex Winitsky and Arlene Sellers.
On IMDb the film holds 6.6 out of 10 from around 5,600 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6.2 from a much smaller 114 votes. A critics' rating of 6.4 from 18 reviews places it close to the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- The literary source material states that Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) had a daughter, as was the case in reality, but in the film he is depicted as the father of a son because Anna Freud (1895-1982) threatened the filmmakers with legal action if she was mentioned in the film. With her father's death, she lost the right to dictate how he was portrayed on screen.
- The film's title alludes to a medication that Sherlock Holmes abused. He injects himself with a substance consisting of 7% cocaine and 93% saline solution.
- Sigmund Freud extolled the use of cocaine and injected himself with the drug many times a day. Guided by the best of motives and intentions, he even introduced his close friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, a talented physiologist addicted to morphine due to a severe injury, to cocaine. Freud believed that cocaine would help his friend overcome his morphine addiction (this misconception was very widespread at the time), but cocaine did not help him at all, and his addiction to it quickly became a problem in itself, which could well have contributed to Fleischl-Marxow's early death.
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