A Giant Mess

They Might Be Giants (1971) – A retired judge believes that he is Sherlock Holmes.  When a relative, in pursuit of the judge’s estate, tries to have him committed a new Dr. Watson enters the story.  Together they face several mysteries they must try to resolve.

Directed by Anthony Harvey

Starring George C. Scott, Joanne Woodward, F. Murray Abraham

A cast anchored by three actors who would win Academy Awards in their careers.  A story and screenplay from a writer just coming off a huge success.  The director who had led that success.  An iconic character with a little bit of a twist.

Doesn’t that sound like the makings of a solid movie?  Maybe not great, but nothing to be ashamed of, right?  Instead, we get this enormous turd of a movie.  I can’t bring myself to blame the actors, the script is awful and the direction is not much better.  In interviews later in her career, Woodward would say that making this movie almost drove her to give up acting.  As both a movie fan and a Holmes fan, I can understand the impulse.

The story is simple enough.  A judge suffers a mental breakdown when his wife dies.  For the next year, he lives in the belief that he is the Great Detective, Sherlock Holmes.  Scott is passable as a man in the delusion of being Holmes.  Woodward plays the psychiatrist the family approaches to sign committal papers so they can get at the judge’s money.  What begins as a challenging case turns into a mutual attraction.  It may draw the doctor into the patient’s madness, or the patient back to the “real” world.  As the lush opening music indicates, this is supposed to be a romantic comedy.

And that’s really the problem.  It’s a lame romance (no spark between the leads), it’s a lame comedy (it made me smile twice, maybe), and it’s a lame Holmes story (don’t get me started).  And the bad script makes a resounding sucking sound as the movie circles the drain.

The astounding thing is that the screenplay comes from a play written by James Goldman.  The studio asked him to recreate the success of his previous play-to-movie effort, the incredible “The Lion in Winter”.  In the story of Christmas, 1183 at the court of King Henry II, Goldman drew characters of depth and nuance.  One of them is one of the great female characters of the stage or screen, Eleanor of Aquitaine (played by Katherine Hepburn to an Oscar-winning turn).  There’s no surprise that the studio asked if he had anything else he’d like to make.  This script is one he’d worked on several times, never quite getting it right.  I have to assume he had some deep emotional attachment to it, despite its tepid track record.  They even brought back the director from the previous success.

And produced a dumpster fire.

As noted above, Scott is okay.  Woodward seems lost as a mousy but defiant doctor who buries herself in her work.  It never comes together for her.  In his movie debut, F. Murray Abraham plays some inexplicable “Kojak” as a bad guy character that never makes any sense.  The cast plows through to the end, which is the final insult.  I don’t want to spoil the surprise of this train wreck of an ending, should you decide to torture yourself with this movie.  (Please don’t!).  I will say this.  NOTHING is resolved, and the movie…just…ends.

I don’t know what to tell you.  There is a certain rubber-necking-at-a-car-wreck aspect to it that keeps it just above the bottom rating here.  Yes, this is the source of the alternative rock band’s name.  It comes from a reference to Don Quixote in the movie.

You have been warned.