Murder at the Baskervilles, a.k.a. Silver Blaze (Julius Hagen Productions, Twickenham Studios, 1937; U.S. release 1941 by Astor Pictures Corporation)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After watching The Hound of the Baskervilles on YouTube, my husband Charles and I shifted to the big-screen TV and DVD player for an item from the Criome Wave 50-film boxed set I had recently bought from Amazon.com, a nominal sequel to The Hound of the Baskervilles called Murder at the Baskervilles. This was the fifth and last film in which British character actor Arthur Wontner played Sherlock Holmes, and though William K. Everson esteemed him as “the best movie Holmes to that date [1930] – and, in fact, still one of the best” – he’s never particularly impressed me. Wontner made five films as Holmes between 1930 and 1937, four of them for Twickenham Studios (which went out of business shortly after making the last one, though the physical plant remained in use as a free-lance studio and the Beatles infamously started the film Let It Be there in 1969) and one, The Sign of Four (1932), for Associated Talking Pictures, another British company. All but one of the Wontner Holmes films exist, and I’ve seen them all and found The Sign of Four by far the best; it had a first-rate director,m Graham Cutts (he’d made several major films in the early 1920’s with a young Alfred Hitchcock as his assistant) and a good enough budget that they could afford to stage important action scenes even though Wontner, who was just too old for the part (he was 45 when he made his first Holmes film and 52 when he made this one), needed a stunt double. Wontner was quite fine in Sherlock Holmes’ more cerebral moments, but whent he stories also required Holmes to be a man of action, Wontner was too old and slow for that aspect of the character.

Murder at the Baskervilles was originally releasedin Britain in 1937 as Silver Blaze, also the title of the Conan Doyle short story on which it was at least sort-of based, but since screenwriters H. Fowler Mear and Arthur Macrae introduced several other characters from the canon – including Sir Henry Baskerville (Lawrence Grossmith), Professor Moriarty (Lynb Harding) – here called “Robert” even though Conan Doyle gave him the first name “James” – and his assistant, Colonel Sebastian Moran (Arthur Goullet), the U.S. distributor, Astor Pictures, retitled it Murder at the Baskervilles for its 1941 American release to try to pass it off as a sequel to the 1939 The Hound of the Baskervilles Charles and I had just watched. The writers grafted both Moriarty and Moran to the plot of “Silver Blaze” the story by having Moriarty engaged by bookmaker Miles Stanford (Gilbert Davis), who’s taken a lot of bets against Silver Blaze and will be financially ruined if the horse wins the upcoming big race. In exchange for 10,000 pounds, Moriarty and Moran (who never appeared together in a single Conan Doyle Holmes story, even though Moran was described as Moriarty’s assistant and second-in-command) agree to keep Silver Blaze from running at all. They do this by secretly buying the debts of Silver Blaze’s trainer, Straker (Martin Walker) – called “John” in the story but “James” in the film – and forcing him to sabotage his own horse.

In order to do this, Straker has to drug his own stable boy, Bert Prince (Ralph Truman), with powdered opium, and while the stable boy survives in the story he dies in the film. Straker is also found dead on the moor, where he had led the horse to do the secret operation that would lame him. He died from having his skull bashed in, and it turns out that Silver Blaze himself killed the no-good Straker in self-defense, then ran off and was picked up by Silas Brown (D. J. Williams), trainer of the second favorite in the race, who used hair dye to cover up the tell-tale silver streak on his head that gave Silber Blaze his name and hidden in his stable until Holmes figured out the whole thing. All this is in the original story, but after Holmes forces Brown to deliver Silver Blaze to the racetrack, the plots diverge. In the story Silver Blaze wins the race; in the film he loses, thanks to Col. Moran using his compressed-air pistol to shoot Silver Blaze’s jockey in mid-race. And where, you ask, does Sir Henry Baskerville fit into this story? It takes place 20 years after The Hound of the Baskervilles, and Sir Henry has got married (though we’re not told to whom) and had a teenage daughter, Diana (the personable Judy Gunn). Diana’s boyfriend, Jack Trevor (Austin Macrae, also one of the film’s writers), has mortgaged himself to the hilt to bet against Silver Blaze, so the assault on Silver Blaze’s jockey facilitates a happy ending for him in that his horse wins and pays off his bets.

But that still leaves Moriarty at large, along with Moran, and he gets his comeuppance when he kidnaps Dr. Watson (British character actor Ian Fleming, not the same Ian Fleming who created James Bond) and threatens to drop him down an 80-foot elevator shaft that is no longer used. Only Sherlock Holmes figures it out and gets the elevator repaired in time to save Watson from this rather horrible fate and bring a delegation from the official London Police Department to arrest Moriarty. (This is one of the few times in Holmesiana in which Moriarty is taken alive and arrested instead of being killed off.) Like the rest of the Twickenham Holmes films featuring Wontner, Murder at the Baskervilles is dull – and seeing it right after The Hound of the Baskervilles probably only made it seem worse than it is. The director is Thomas Bentley, and though he stages the actual race effectively enough with the expected mixture of stock footage and new shooting, the tiny budgets of British filmmakers (aside from Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Stevenson, two highly talented filmmakers who were able to use their talents to make great films on low budgets) hamstring this film and prevent it from being all that exciting. I also don’t like Lyn Harding’s reading of Moriarty; he’s too much of a boor to make the character work, and I still think the best Moriartys were the ones in Rathbone’s Holmes films, George Zucco in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (made at 20th Century-Fox in 1939 right after The Hound of the Baskervilles, and to my mind an even better film) and Lionel Atwill in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon.