Clearly a prestige production, (you only have to look at the credits, both in front of and behind the camera), yet this Sherlock Holmes movie wasn't really a success. Perhaps Holmes was out of favor by the mid-seventies or perhaps the frivolous tone put people off, (it's certainly not in the same class as Billy Wilder's "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes"), and yet it's a difficult film to dislike even if the ridiculous plot is something Robert Downey's Holmes might have found himself caught up in.
Firstly there's the cast. Nicol Williamson is Holmes, Robert Duvall with a plummy English accent is Watson, Laurence Olivier is Moriarty and Alan Arkin is Sigmund Freud, attempting to cure Holmes of his cocaine addiction, (hence the title). Then there's Vanessa Redgrave, Samantha Eggar, Joel Grey, Jeremy Kemp and Charles Gray while Nicholas Meyer's screenplay from his own novel certainly errs on the smart side and therein lies the problem; this is a spoof that is just too clever for its own good.
Herbert Ross both produced and directed the picture and he gives it that bland touch of class he often brought to his movies while Ken Adam's Production Design and Oswald Morris' Cnematography ensures it's always easy on the eye - there's even a Stephen Sondheim song on the soundtrack. Of course, what audience it was aimed at is something of a mystery; perhaps one even beyond the powers of the great detective himself.
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