What we have here is essentially The Valley of Fear with a bit of Moriarty stuff and a heist tacked on the end. It's an odd approach but it could have worked. Thing is, though, this was filmed in West Berlin with a German cast, and dubbed back into English so we don't even get Lee's voice. We see him playing Holmes... but we don't really experience it. It's so frustrating.
Worse, all the dubbing is awful, with ridiculous trans-Atlantic accents; the first thing we hear is a bunch of very American-sounding kids. And then there's the setting, and especially the cars- this seems to be set in about 1914 when the novel was written, whereas in fact Holmes was pretty much active (barring the very specific circumstances of The Lion's Mane and His Last Bow) from the early 1880s until about 1903. The cars feel wrong and jarring.
Lee's physical performance is ok, from what I can see; Walters is, I'm afraid, the bumbling type of Watson. The plot is engaging enough, but the whole thing is shot very flat and often feels am-dram with much of the acting. But the dubbing, in the end, makes it impossible to take the film seriously. You thought Dick Van Dyke's cockney accent was bad? Wait until you see Holmes in disguise here...
A real shame.
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