Last night, for some reason, I watched an old movie on TV that was quite possibly one of the worst movies I have ever seen in my life. I'm not sure why I kept watching, but it was one of those situations where you want to look away but you can't-- it was so hideous it was fascinating. The movie was called The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. The "plot" was a MacGuffin involving the kidnapping of one ex-prostitute Lola Devereux (played by Vanessa Redgrave) by an evil Ottoman Turk with a redhead fetish who wanted her for his harem. The main focus of the film, however, was on Sherlock Holmes (yes, that's right) being rid of his cocaine habit. This came complete with graphic visual representation of his withdrawal (snakes crawling through Dr. Watson's eyes, etc.). Who was his doctor, you ask? Freud. Sigmund Freud, who also at one point in the movie battles (in a heart-stopping tennis match) a nasty German bearing a strong resemblance to old Bismarck himself who impuned his Jewish heritage. Let's see, did I forget anything? Oh yes. Sir Laurence Olivier, fairly universally recognized as one of the top actors of all time, stooped to playing Moriarty, who, as it turned out, is the root of Holmes' cocaine problem. But that's as far as his role as nemesis goes-- it seems that Moriarty was simply Holmes' math tutor who slept with his mother (Holmes' mother, that is) and caused Mr. Holmes Sr. to kill his wife.

Yeah.