They Might Be Giants is the oddest, gentlest, and in some ways most revealing film George C. Scott made in the 1970s. Directed by Anthony Harvey from James Goldman’s adaptation of his own 1961 play, it stars Scott as Justin Playfair, a distinguished retired judge who, after the death of his wife, has come to believe that he is Sherlock Holmes. He lives in a kind of elegant, self-created Baker Street, surrounded by books, pipes, and deductions, and he spends his days hunting for his great nemesis, Professor Moriarty, whom he blames for the evils of modern New York. His brother Blevins, played by Lester Rawlins, wants him committed to a mental institution, partly out of concern and partly to get his hands on Justin’s fortune. Into this standoff comes Dr. Mildred Watson, a psychiatrist played by Joanne Woodward, who is assigned to assess Justin and decide whether he is sane enough to remain free.
The premise sounds like a comedy, and the film is often very funny, but Goldman and Harvey treat it as something more serious: a meditation on sanity, imagination, and the ways in which a rational world can drive a sensitive person mad. Justin is not presented as a fool. He is learned, witty, and often startlingly perceptive. He notices things other people miss. He speaks in long, eloquent sentences about justice, about the city, about the difference between seeing and merely looking. Scott plays him with a lightness that is rare in his filmography. Where Patton bellowed and Dr. Bock raged, Justin Playfair reasons, jokes, and charms. His madness, if it is madness at all, is articulate and humane. The film asks a question that runs through much of Scott’s best work: what if the man who refuses to accept the world as it is, is the only one seeing it clearly?
Joanne Woodward’s Dr. Watson is the film’s other centre. At first she approaches Justin as a case to be solved, a patient to be categorised and, if necessary, confined. As she spends time with him, she begins to play along, first professionally and then genuinely, taking on the role of Watson to his Holmes. Woodward plays this transformation with great subtlety. She does not fall in love with Justin in a conventional romantic sense, although affection grows between them. She falls in love with his way of seeing, with the idea that imagination might be a form of resistance rather than a symptom. Their scenes together, wandering through New York, visiting a grocery store that Justin insists is a front for Moriarty, or sitting in a park discussing the nature of evil, have a warmth and a melancholy that lift the film above its quirky premise.
Harvey, who had directed The Lion in Winter from another Goldman script, shoots New York as a place of both menace and magic. The city in 1971 was dirty, broke, and dangerous, and the film does not hide that. Justin’s pursuit of Moriarty takes him through supermarkets, pharmacies, and office buildings that seem to hum with conspiracy. Yet Harvey also finds beauty in the city: sunlight on brownstones, the bustle of a street market, the quiet of a library. John Barry’s score, gentle and slightly wistful, reinforces the mood. The film looks like a fairy tale set in a real city, which is exactly what Justin’s mind is: a story imposed on a world that does not want stories anymore.
The title comes from Don Quixote. Justin explains that Quixote was mad to believe that windmills were giants, but that it is another matter entirely to wonder whether they might be giants. The distinction is the film’s thesis. Quixote imposed a fantasy on reality and was punished for it. Justin, by contrast, uses fantasy to pay attention to reality, to notice the small corruptions and cruelties that sane people have learned to ignore. Scott delivers the speech about giants with a quiet, almost conspiratorial delight, and it is one of the most memorable moments in his career. He makes idealism sound not naive but brave, a choice made in full knowledge of the cost.
They Might Be Giants was not a commercial success on its release, and it remains less well known than Scott’s bigger hits. That is a pity, because it shows a side of him that his war films and thrillers rarely allowed: tenderness, humour, and a willingness to be vulnerable. Justin Playfair is not an authority figure imposing his will on the world. He is a man who has lost the person he loved most and who has rebuilt a world in which justice is still possible, even if only in his own mind. Scott plays him without condescension and without sentimentality. He never winks at the audience, never suggests that Justin is merely a joke. He asks us to take the character seriously, and in doing so, he asks us to consider whether sanity is really the same thing as surrender.
For Past Tunes readers, the film is a wonderful discovery. It captures the early 1970s in a way that few other films do: sceptical, searching, and open to the idea that the old certainties have failed. It also pairs two great actors, Scott and Woodward, in a relationship built on conversation rather than plot. If you know Scott only as Patton, They Might Be Giants will surprise you. It reveals an actor who could be quiet as well as loud, funny as well as furious, and who understood that the most radical act of all might be to keep believing in giants.
It is also worth noting how unusual this film was for its studio moment. Universal in 1971 was not in the habit of funding gentle fantasies about a retired judge who thinks he is Sherlock Holmes, and the film’s modest box office meant it slipped quickly from cinemas into cult reputation. That afterlife suits it. Like Justin himself, the film has survived by being remembered fondly by the people who noticed it, passed from viewer to viewer, rather than by shouting for attention.