The Hound Of The Baskervilles

Dogging The Law

The Hound Of
The Baskervilles
USA 1939 Directed by Sidney Lanfield
20th Century Fox Blu Ray Zone B

Well the time is upon me. I finally get caught up on a rewatch of the classic (and best) series of Sherlock Holmes films on a lovely set of Blu Ray transfers from, judging from this first one in the series, some pretty good prints. Rather than get the expensive, five disc US version I plumped for the Italian/German 7 disc release (since nobody has seen fit to make these available on Blu Ray in the country where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the original stories, lived... as yet, for some unfathomable reason). Both sets have all 14 films with the only real difference, from what I can make out since this Italian edition can be easily set for English language, with or without English subtitles in its menus, seems to be that the Italian set is £30 cheaper than the US set and that’s not including any import fees.

And what a film this is. The Hound Of The Baskervilles is the first of the original run featuring Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, who were so popular as Holmes and Dr. Watson that they also played them for a number of years on the radio too. This was the first of two Sherlock Holmes films made and released by 20th Century Fox in 1939, the same year that Basil Rathbone and some of the cast of this one shot Son Of Frankenstein for Universal, which I believe was filmed just before this one (and which you can find reviewed by me here). I won’t go over the plot here again because so many people know it (or if they don’t, they don’t want it spoiled) but it takes a few liberties with Conan Doyles original novel (I think I’m right in remembering this was the longest Holmes story he wrote, novel length, as a kind of flashback story in between killing him off in the stories and then, later, snatching him back from death for more money spinning tales).  

Joining the winning team of Rathbone and Bruce (easily my personal favourite Holmes and Watson) was Richard Greene (future TV Robin Hood, star of Sword Of Sherwood Forest, reviewed here and who got top billing above Rathbone), Lionel Atwill, John Carradine, Wendy Barrie (who was in a fair few films in The Saint and The Falcon series) and, of course, Mary Gordon as Holmes’ housekeeper Mrs. Hudson, who would stay with the series along with the two male stars when it made the transition, after the first two films. The transition being that, after the two Fox films, which were both set in Victorian times like Conan Doyle’s original stories were, there was a gap of three years before Universal hired the three actors for a continuation of the series, this time contemporising them so that Holmes' adventures were updated for a 1940s wartime setting.

This one is pretty great and it’s wonderful looking back on these fantastic performers and character actors playing in a well oiled mechanism of a film. The direction and camerawork both look great for the roughly 4:3 aspect ratio of the time and, as evidenced by these quite good Blu Ray transfers (so far), all filmed in a very crisp black and white. There’s also a nice sequence near the start, where Atwill’s character is reading from a manuscript to fill in Holmes on the legend of the film’s titular Hound. The flashback is presented as a live action sequences of events but, it’s depicted as a little vignette superimposed into the centre of the manuscript, with the edges of the pages and the text, some overlapping, at the edge of the action. So, yeah, a nice touch.

Rathbone is absolutely amazing as Holmes, not quite emotionless and certainly he injects the required air of authority into the character for sure. And then there’s Watson, as played by Nigel Bruce. This guy is fantastic but I notice he’s not quite as bumbly and stupid as I remembered him to be in these. Maybe that comes later with the transition to the Universal scripts but here, he certainly does take the initiative and seems much smarter than he perhaps ended up as, later in the run. Although he certainly doesn’t penetrate Holmes disguise as the old peddler, hawking his wares around the vicinity of the Grimpen Mire. But you know what? That’s okay because, one of the things I remember very clearly and, it’s certainly the case here, is that unless you are seriously looking for it, the audience isn’t going to easily penetrate Rathbone’s disguises in these films. I remember being fooled quite a lot as a kid when I first watched these (at 5.40pm in the evening, week days on BBC2 in the early to mid 1970s, if memory serves) and looking at them now, if I didn’t half remember them, I would certainly be fooled again. Rathbone is hard to spot as he makes his voice gravelly and stoops behind a fake beard and moustache. It’s great make up and works much better than a lot of the stuff you see actors trying in modern movies, it has to be said.

The sets are fantastic too... especially the outdoor sets which try very hard... and succeed... at looking very much like the Moors on which half the action takes place. You can still tell it’s a big studio set but, certainly, it’s much more lavish and believable than, say, the sets used to stand in as exterior locations that Universal were using for their horror movies at the time. These really work and there are certainly no tell tale creases in the sky as people go about their business.

And, yeah, just a treat of a movie. I won’t say much else about it because you should discover these for yourself, if you don’t already know them but, certainly, The Hound Of The Baskervilles is the first in a classic run of much loved and popular films which should be on every film enthusiast’s radar. Definitely one to check out if you’ve not seen it.

The Hound Of The Baskervilles

Boneward Hound

The Hound Of
The Baskervilles
UK 1959 Directed by Terence Fisher
Hammer/Arrow Blu Ray Zone B

An overly comic book like ‘horror font’ is writ largely against James Bernard’s typical Hammer Horror sounding score, announcing the start of the famous studio’s production of what is probably Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous Sherlock Holmes story, The Hound Of The Baskervilles.

The film stars three stalwarts of Hammer films for this version of the classic... Peter Cushing as Sherlock Holmes, André Morell as Dr. Watson and Christopher Lee as Henry Baskerville, the young heir to the Baskerville fortune who is now living under the shadow of the family curse of the hound, after the recent death of the previous owner of Baskerville Manor. Cushing would, of course, play Holmes a few more times after this production in unrelated films and a TV show (as would Christopher Lee at least once) and Lee and Cushing are a great Hammer double act after they’d faced off as adversaries (of a sort) in the studio's first Frankenstein and Dracula movies (they would do it again four months later in the Hammer production of The Mummy). Morrell, however (one of the great TV incarnations of Professor Quatermass) did not apparently get on well with Lee and tended to avoid him on set.

The film starts with a ludicrous and almost unwatchably bad retelling of the Baskerville legend before finally bringing us up to present day... well, present day Victorian period... for the rest of the story, which is much better and far more entertaining than the first ten minutes or so of the movie. Now, it’s been a very long time since I read The Hound Of The Baskervilles (at least two decades) and, even with all the many movie adaptations of this particular story in the Holmes canon (this is the first to be shot in colour), I really couldn’t remember that much about the original tale. Even so, although it tends to hint the main plot points pretty well, as far as I can dimly recall a smattering of the events of the original, it seems to add its own deviations and explorations, presumably to pad the running time to feature length.

For instance, there’s a wonderful moment early on in the film where Baskerville survives an assassination attempt, thanks to Holmes, after someone has put a tarantula in one of his boots. I honestly don’t recall this scene being in the original... but it’s an entertaining moment, nonetheless.

The film rambles along agreeably at its own pace with top notch performances by all and sundry including a very naturalistic and relaxed performance by Lee, which sees him more subdued to the plot rather than his presence dominating the scenes he’s in... which is interesting. There are also fine turns by Marla Landi as the, possible, love interest for Lee’s character and Miles Malleson... well, just doing what he usually does and having his doddery old, likeably confused, Miles Malleson moments.

Regrettably, although Cushing does a fine Holmes and plays him in a most energetic, almost manic manner, he doesn’t don a fiendishly clever disguise with which to fool both the other characters and the audience as, say, Basil Rathbone might have done in his Holmes adventures. I’m convinced Cushing could have pulled off one of those master disguises in this though, if given half a chance. Also, it’s nice to see André Morell not, like many of his predecessors in the role, portraying Watson as some kind of a buffoon but as someone who Holmes has chosen to have as his companion in crime solving because he actually brings something to the party. Much as I love old Nigel Bruce’s decidedly foolish, comic relief version of Watson opposite Rathbone (and I still champion Bruce as the best), it’s nice to see the character being treated with a little more respect here.

The direction is nice and there are some nice frame designs, with Fisher favouring some unusual angles from high above the action in several scenes. Also, he makes great use of emphasising the depth of the shots through the use of different planes enhanced by foreground objects. For example, the one riveting moment in the ‘legend prelude’ is where a lady is hiding behind an arch in some ruins. The actor looking for her is in the main parts of the left of shot with the arch and her up close in the foreground right of the frame. Similarly, when the director pushes the depth again in a forest scene, the branches and leaves of a tree in the foreground of a shot mingle in with all the trees in the background to make a foreground centre space which you didn’t realise was farther away than the leaves on the tree on the right until a character walks behind them.

One very odd choice in two parts of the movie on the same set, out on the moors by a ruin, is to have the light coming from behind some structures shining a bright, almost fluorescent green like suddenly Mario Bava had somehow turned up on the set that day to perform the same task. It looks fantastic, of course, but there seems to be no natural way that lightning scheme could have come into play in the natural setting and it looks a bit ‘at odds’ with the rest of the shots in the movie.

I don’t have much more to say by way of this review other than to add that some of Bernard’s score to Dracula (aka Horror Of Dracula, reviewed here) is also apparently tracked into the movie too. If you’re a fan of any of the actors in this one, especially those in their capacity as Hammer veterans (although they weren’t quite that yet at this stage of their career), then this version of The Hound Of The Baskervilles is definitely one to add to your watch list. Three years later, Fisher would re-team with Lee for his own portrayal of Holmes in the West German/French/Italian krimi movie Sherlock Holmes And The Deadly Necklace (aka Sherlock Holmes und das Halsband des Todes) which I will be reviewing soon for this blog very soon.

Sherlock: The Hounds of Baskerville

Coffee Grown Hound?

Sherlock: Hound of the Baskervilles

Airdate: January 8th 2012. UK. BBC1

Warning: Spoilers will stalk you

through the textual mires of this review.

Okay then... every series of a TV show has to have one episode which is a bit weaker than the rest, just as every show has an episode that is absolutely astonishing. Well, last week’s opening salvo for (mini) Series 2 of BBC’s Sherlock was probably the “absolutely astonishing” episode and I can only hope that The Hounds of Baskerville (based on classic Sherlock Holmes story The Hound of the Baskervilles) was the weak link in this current series.

Why? Well, firstly, because it just was all too obvious in its make up... far more obvious than I would have expected this normally clever series to be and secondly, the editing and visual style of this one wasn’t a patch on last weeks episode, nor indeed a patch on any of the previous episodes so far... which is odd since it was the same director as last week’s utterly enthralling instalment.

Perhaps I’m being a little unkind though. Mark Gatiss wrote this one and you can just tell he was having a good time with it and I’ve grown to acquire a certain amount of respect for the man. I saw his excellent, if highly personalised, A History Of Horror a year or so ago and it was actually pretty good. You can just tell that he would be the obvious choice to pen an adaptation of what is probably the mock-spookiest of the Sherlock Holmes stories (or at least the most spookily famous) and he certainly didn’t let the side down in terms of the atmosphere of this particular episode.

I think my main disappointment, in terms of the writing, lies solely in the fact that it tipped its hat very early on as to the exact nature of the solution of this case. Holmes takes the case only after Henry Knight has repeated a sentence and this is highlighted quite blatantly and almost embarrassingly... from that point on you know that the final solution lies in the fact that Henry Knight has been “brainwashed and pre-programmed” somehow (how could it not be with that kind of sign posting)... so the pleasure inherent in this kind of episode is ultimately in how entertaining the process of solving the riddle becomes for the main protagonists because, let’s face it, we’re already half way there on the answer ourselves.

And it is quite entertaining, to be fair to the people involved. The relationship between Holmes and Watson is pushed in a way that shows up Holmes’ weaknesses as opposed to his strengths in a much more heavy handed, or perhaps I should say “direct” way than we are used to... but there’s always a danger that if you tear down your idol too much then your audience will lose interest in him and it’s a bit of a tightrope act getting the balance on that one right (the Robert Downey Jr/Guy Ritchie film franchise currently spooling out in cinemas is playing the same dangerous game with its central character but is doing much less better at it than this excellent TV incarnation of the title role). Still... this episode managed to do this in an amusing manner without tipping the relationship over the edge and injecting a little tension into the proceedings too... so the writing was actually quite skillful in this area (as were the excellent performances I’ve greedily come to expect from Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman).

The “out-of-its time” horror element was, perhaps, just what was needed for this episode to work but there were times, it has to be said, when I thought I’d slipped into an old 70s episode of the classic TV series The Omega Factor rather than watching something made fresh-for-the-box... not that I didn’t enjoy The Omega Factor of course... I loved it and wish somebody would remake it past the point it got cancelled. I just found it odd how close this episode came to that perhaps?

I guess what I really missed in this week's story was the clever and witty editing style that was present in the last episode in abundance. The way the syntax of the shot and its transition was both supporting and in turn controlled by the on-screen action. Contrarily, this was a more langerous and elegantly paced episode, I felt, rather than the cleverly constructed headlong rush of a visual and aural assault on the senses... but no matter. I guess this was the style that was deemed appropriate to this episode and, to be fair, if you’re going for a horror atmosphere then slow and ponderous is what you need to be doing... it’s not a teen slasher flick, after all.

All in all, I guess you can say I was taken by surprise at being a little underwhelmed and under-challenged by the episode in a way but, it has to be pointed out that it certainly wasn’t lazy writing. The little mistake from Holmes when it turned out that the sugar in the coffee was not, indeed, the source of the drug-induced hallucinations induced in some of the characters was certainly a welcome respite for the audience who were expecting just that. Although, pyrotechnically I was a little annoyed that a landmine going off (a device which is mostly intended to cripple and not kill) turned out to be a lot more violently explosive than one would suspect from such a booby trap. More like an over-the-top 70s TV car explosion than the real thing I suspect.

Nevertheless, I have to stress that, although I was personally disappointed with this one, I was only let down by it in terms of a comparison with other episodes of the two series so far... when you compare this episode to the majority of the rubbish which is being written for television, then this interpretation of the classic pulp tale is still head and shoulders above mostly everything else which is showing up on TV at the moment. As far as I’m concerned, Sherlock is one of the few programmes of recent years that could truly be considered “essential viewing” and this weeks episode did nothing to discourage me from that statement. The Hounds of Baskerville is definitely worth a look.