The Hound of the Baskervilles (20th Century-Fix,. 1939)

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

On January 4, I ran a Sherlock Holmes double bill for myself and my husband Charles, consisting of a YouTube video post of the very first Holmes film co-starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. John H. Watson, The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), and its semi-sequel, Murder at the Baskervilles, based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes story “Silver Blaze” and made in 1937 but not released in the U.S. until 1941. The 1939 Hound of the Baskervilles is actually almost certainly the best film ever made of Conan Doyle’s full-length Holmes novel (one of the four he wrote; the others were A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of Four and The Valley of Fear, though A Study in Scarlet and The Valley of Fear both contain long flashback sequences that comprise half of each book and in which Holmes does not appear), though not what it could have been with a more talented and imaginative director and a script by Ernest Pascal that made some rather prissy changes to the story. Directorially, the movie needed James Whale and got Sidney Lanfield, whose only connection with Gothic horror would come two decades later when he became one of the regular directors of the TV sitcom The Addams Family. In the scripting department, Pascal’s biggest change was probably forced on him by the Production Code Administration; in the novel John and Beryl Stapleton are husband and wife posing as brother and sister because [spoiler alert!] Stapleton is the principal villain of the piece and, as Conan Doyle has Holmes explain during the novel, “He realized she would be more useful to him in the character of a free woman.”

In the movie the Stapletons (Morton Lowry as John and Wendy Barrie, third-billed, as Beryl) are in fact brother and sister, and Sir Henry Baskerville (Richard Greene, top-billed, a British leading man 20th Century-Fox studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck was building as a backstop to Tyrone Power) falls rather innocently in love instead of being essentially thrown together as part of John Stapleton’s plot to kill him because he’s a long-lost Baskerville heir who wants to grab the fortune by eliminating the competition. Other prissy changes Pascal made included renaming the servant couple, called “Barrymore” in the novel, “Barryman” (did he or the “suits” at 20th Century-Fox think John or Lionel Barrymore were going to sue them?) and the complete mishandling of the scene in which Holmes covers up the hair and beard of a portrait of Hugo Baskerville, whose attempt to kidnap and rape a young woman neighbor supposedly started the whole “hound” business, and thereby reveals that Stapleton looks exactly like the portrait. “The face of Stapleton suddenly leaped out of the portrait,” Conan Doyle wrote – an effect easy enough to achieve with a simple double exposure. Instead Lanfield merely shoots an extreme close-up of the painting’s eyes and then cuts to a similar extreme close-up of Stapleton’s. (He also cast different actors to play the two parts, the criminally underused Ralph Forbes as Hugo in the flashback and Morton Lowry as Stapleton. The two characters should have been played by the same person.)

Where this movie scores is in the cast, the major-studio production values (this was the first Holmes film produced on a substantial budget since John Barrymore’s in 1922), the decision to keep the story in the Victorian era (the first time a Holmes film had been done in period; all previous movies with the character had been updated to contemporary settings), and the excellence of J. Peverell Marley’s cinematography, which helps make up for the flaws in the direction. Above all, it has Basil Rathbone, the ideal Sherlock Holmes. He looks like he’s just stepped out of one of Sidney Paget’s illustrations for the original publications of the Holmes stories in The Strand magazine, and his height, aquiline features and clear, ringing voice are just what I’d imagined when reading the Holmes stories. As I’ve said before, paraphrasing the opening of the Conan Doyle Holmes story “A Scandal in Bohemia,” to me Basil Rathbone will always be the Sherlock Holmes. My husband Charles, as much a Sherlock Holmes devotée as I, is somewhat less taken with Rathbone than I am; he’s suffered through the later Rathbone Holmes films for Universal, which were once again updated to then-modern times and had schlocky plots only incidentally derived from “the canon,” as Holmes buffs call the 56 stories and four novels Arthur Conan Doyle wrote about the character. Charles grew up on the Holmes TV series starring Jeremy Brett, which derived its plots straight from “the canon” (he was only the second actor, after silent star Eille Norwood, to play all the Holmes stories Arthur Conan Doyle wrote), whereas to me Brett was a quite capable Holmes but nowhere near Rathbone’s league.

In his 1972 book The Detective in Film the late William K. Everson expressed some of the same reservations about the 1939 The Hound of the Baskervilles that I had, particularly the decision of the studio and art directors Richard Day and Hans Peters to build the Dartmoor “exteriors” inside a studio soundstage. As Everson put it, “Cunning and handsome as the moor sets are in The Hound of the Baskervilles – and they are enhanced by some barely perceptive [sic – I suspect Everson meant ‘barely perceptible’] use of gauzes over the lens – one never once has the feeling of boundless space, of being cut off from all help.” Also, the fabled hound of the Baskervilles is just what it looks like – a vicious, half-starved large dog – without the “cunning preparation” of phosphorus the novel’s Stapleton had painted on its face to make the creature look like a monster from hell. As Conan Doyle himself wrote, “An ordinary schemer would have been content with a savage hound” – or, he might have added, “An ordinary director.” But then none of the films of The Hound of the Baskervilles I have seen have decorated the face of the title character the way Conan Doyle called for in his novel. Still, this The Hound of the Baskervilles is an estimable film and a worthy introduction to Rathbone’s acting in the role, by far the best portrayal of Sherlock Holmes ever captured on film.