They used to show this on TV when I was a kid. I never understood it. George C. Scott as a judge whose wife died a year earlier. Since then, he believed he was Sherlock Holmes. He has no memory of anything that happened more than a year ago. There's no sense that his wife's death was especially tragic or that he was distraught over it, but that may just be because he has no memory of it.
Other characters include a mental patient who won't speak because he wants to be Rudoph Valentino in a silent movie. Jack Gilford imagines himself as The Scarlet Pimpernel. I guess the idea was that debilitating mental illness was a harmless escape from reality.
Nothing in it was funny.
Joanne Woodward as psychiatrist Dr. Watson.
With Rue McClanahan just a year before Maude. Al Lewis five years after The Munsters.
Part of the problem might have been that Sherlock Holmes was a detective. He sets nothing in motion. All he does is follow clues left by other people and there's nothing for him to investigate, although his brother is trying to get rid of him in order to take control of his fortune, but the judge is oblivious to it.
Joanne Woodward committed a number of what must have been ethical violations, like when she invites George C. Scott over for dinner.
Free on Movieland.Tv.
A better movie along vaguely similar lines might be Gumshoe with Albert Finney as a neurotic who likes acting like a hardboiled detective. He also has a conflict with his brother. And it turns out there was an actual crime to be solved. Free on a channel called Momentu, for $3.99 elsewhere.
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