“They Might Be Giants” is the 1971 movie adaptation of the
1961 stage play by James Goldman (brother of William Goldman of “The Princess
Bride” fame).
In
it, retired judge Justin Playfair (George C. Scott), after the death of his
beloved wife, retreats into the delusion that he is Sherlock Holmes, in an
attempt to find the logic behind a world where such things happen. He soon pins
all evil he comes across onto the nebulous Moriarty and goes on a Quixotic quest
to find this malicious influence in the world and put an end to it. His
brother, who is in desperate need of Playfair’s fortune (being in debt to
gangsters), logically attempts to have him committed to an asylum, and the
asylum appoints the fortuitously named Dr. Mildred Watson (Joanne Woodward) to
examine him.
“Holmes”
accepts her as the natural companion on his quest, and Dr. Watson is soon
confounded by his actions. It seems his one delusion has given him much clearer
insight into the problems of those around him, especially those who suffer from
the ‘delusions’ of honor and romanticism and art. As she follows him on his mad
quest for Moriarty she marvels at the help and encouragement he gives to the
marginalized eccentrics they encounter. As they are impelled along from one
‘clue’ to another, they become less doctor and patient and more two people who
understand one another with growing clarity, even leading to a romance.
However,
by the end of their search all the forces of conformity are on their tail, from
the asylum to the police to the gangsters.
Holmes and Watson, having deciphered the final ‘clue’, go to face down Moriarty
together. The ending is ambivalent: have they really tracked down the source of
all evil, or has Dr. Watson descended into illusion with her patient?
This
film, though written as a play in the Sixties, is highly redolent of the
Seventies; one might almost say it is a transition between the ‘Romantic’
Sixties and the ‘Rancid’ Seventies. The
cast will certainly be familiar to those living through the Seventies: Jack
Gilford, Rue McClanahan, Al Lewis, Oliver Clark (the name might not seem
familiar, but see him and you will recognize him from dozens of TV shows), and
even a young F. Murray Abraham appear. The inhumanity of ‘modern living’ is
stressed, and garbage, urban decay, and inflation ooze from the modern
wasteland that Holmes and Watson navigate.
I
first saw “They Might Be Giants” in the early or middle Eighties, I think. I
was at the time trying to formulate my ‘Fantastic’ world view with my own
variety of clues followed from books and movies that struck my heart just so.
If there was a united theme, it was that all things had a secret or shadow side
for which merely practical thinking could not account. In literature I had G. K. Chesterton
(Manalive), Thomas Berger (Arthur Rex), Robert Nye (Falstaff) and others. In
movies there was Cyrano de Bergerac, Heartbreak House, Dr. Detroit, You Can’t
Take It with You, The Madwoman of Chaillot, and dips and dabs from a hundred
films and shows. “When the world has gone insane, sanity will seem like
madness.”
I
suppose the outlook I was developing would be more technically the Romantic
point of view (not in the smoochie sense of the word, but in the adventurous
sense). It seems to me now that it was in danger of becoming a terribly Gnostic
ideal, it that it can be seen to declare that you are not what you appear to be
but are something completely different. I think it is truer to say that you are
what you appear to be (say a fat, clumsy old man) but that you are more
than meets the eye. And the Romantic Ideal cannot stand on its own. “Reason and
Imagination are the two wings of the brain; lacking either one the mind only
goes hopping along and cannot fly.”
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