This mid-1970s American TV movie, which sees a predictable Holmes vs Moriarty plot transposed to the Big Apple (presumably because the locations were cheaper), nevertheless provides an impressively all-star cast with John Huston as Moriarty and Charlotte Rampling as Irene Adler. At the heart of it is Roger Moore, at the height of his fame in between two of his actually decent Bond movies The Man With The Golden Gun and The Spy Who Loved Me. Debate is likely to rage on about whether Moore's smug, smarmy, eyebrow raised, pun-tastic take on Ian Fleming's hard edged assassin-spy was a decent version of 007 or not. Whether that exact same approach is at all appropriate for Conan Doyle's ultra-rational, unemotional detective is easier to tell. It's just plain odd. Moore seems to only have one mode of performance and, as a result, the entire Holmes movie appears to have been tailored to allow him to play Simon Templar or James Bond, just in a deerstalker and with some extraordinarily unconvincing stuck-on sideburns. The thing that really stands out, though, about Moore's performance is that he is somehow at the same time both trying too hard (over-performing, over-enunciating and a little hammy) and yet also phoning it in (almost unaware that Holmes might require a different approach to Bond). Even Moore mega-fan Alan Partridge would struggle to justify this as worth a watch.
