br>by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 9 p.m. yesterday my husband Charles and I watched a quite charming 1971 movie called They Might Be Giants, written by James Goldman based on a previous play of his, and directed by Anthony Harvey the oddball British director who got his ticket into the big time from Katharine Hepburn. She’d seen a crudely produced black-and-white fion of Amirir Baraka’s play Dutchman from 1966 and decided he would be the right director for The Lion in Winter, her big-budget spectacle based on the British King Henry II (Peter O’Toole) and his wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine (Katharine Hepburn). They Might Be Giants was his third film, and it was an odd tale about a famous attorney and judge named Justin Playfair (George C. Scott), who once he lost his wife a year before the main action developed a classic paranoid delusion and thought he was Sherlock Holmes. The villains of the piece are his brother Blevins (Lester Rawlins) who wants to get Justin committed to a mental institution so he can get his hands on Justin’s fortune; and a hit man named “Mr. Brown” (James Tolkan), to whom Blevins owes a substantial sum of money. Assured that Blevins will inherit Justin’s money if he dies, Brown determines to kill him without waiting for Blevins to institutionalize him first. Justin ends up at a clinic run by Dr. Strauss (Ron Weyand), who has grown a full beard probably because Sigmund Freud had one (this film was made during the tail end of the Freudian era in American psychiatry and a lot of therapists grew Freud-style beards in the hope it would give them gravitas).
Fortunately for Justin, he falls into the hands of a psychiatrist named Dr. Mildred Watson (Joanne Woodward, whose husband Paul Newman co-produced the film with John Foreman and Jennings Lang, the agent Joan Bennett’s husband Walter Wanger once shot at in the mistaken belief that Bennett and Lang were having an affair). Naturally Justin is over the moon at finding a real-life Dr. Watson to join him as Holmes’ assistant and chronicler, and the two of them go on a rambunctious trip through New York City and meet all sorts of offbeat characters. Among them is a library clerk named Peabody (Jack Gilford, third-billed); an eccentric couple named Mr. and Mrs. Bagg (Worthington Miner and Frances Fuller), who once ran a college for tree-trimmers but closed it and have just concentrated on doing their own designs; Peggy (Therese Merritt), an African-American telephone operator who quits her job because she’s frustrated by the insane bureaucracy of the phone company (that part of this movie rings true today!); and such other character-actor greats as Al Lewis (Grandpa on The Munsters), Rue McClanahan and F. Murray Abraham, who made his screen debut in this film. They Might Be Giants is very much “of its time” in deliberately blurring the line between sanity and insanity and presenting the supposedly “insane” ss morally purer and more decent than the “sane.” I suspect it was influenced by the theories of psychologist R. D. Laing, who argued that “sanity” and “insanity” were just social constructs and that one wasn’t necessarily better than the other.
It’s a really charming movie, though the last time I saw it nearly 50 years ago when it first aired on network TV I found myself wishing they’d just cast George C. Scott as Sherlock Holmes (he played the part, even though it’s not the “real” Holmes and he reveals this when he picks up his violin and plays terribly, the opposite of the “real” Holmes as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle described him, with power and authority and he would have been welcome during the long interregnum between the departure of Basil Rathbone and the arrival of Jeremy Brett). It also has a surprisingly disappointing and inconclusive ending; Justin as “Holmes” and Dr. Watson march off in search of “Professor Moriarty,” whom Justin has trailed through a series of clues that in modern-day parlance seem more like the demented ravings of QAnon and its followers, and they’re just about to confront him when the film abruptly ends. I was hoping for an ending in which Holmes would find Blevins and the mysterious “Mr. Brown,” assume Brown was Moriarty, bring him to justice and turn him over to the New York police, but no-o-o-o-o, James Goldman wasn’t interested in a good-defeats-evil ending. Still, They Might Be Giants is a truly charming film (though Joanne Woodward said she so hated the experience of making it that she seriously considered retiring from acting – she never specified what about the experience she hadn’t liked but said it had nothing to do with George C. Scott, whom Woodward described as “a gentleman” – which was hardly the experience of some of Scott’s co-stars in other films), and its title, inspired by a situation from Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, itself led a 1980’s alternative rock band to use “They Might Be Giants” as their name.
