If ever there was a Sherlock Holmes horror tale penned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, it was his The Hound Of The Baskervilles.   With a murderous spectral hound, mysterious deaths, and the haunted, deadly mire as a backdrop, there is material for several horror flicks.  And filmmakers have not been shy in bringing the Hound to the silver screen.  But two of those films truly stand out, films that capture the horror and the thrills of the epic battle between...

By DON MANKOWSKI

He wasn’t tiptoeing…he was running. Running for his life. Running in panic until he burst his heart.
                         --Sherlock Holmes (Peter Cushing)

 The British firm of Hammer Studios had only just reinvented (or so it seemed) the horror film with The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), Horror Of Dracula (1958), and The Revenge Of Frankenstein (1958), repackaging the Universal classics not only with modern touches of sex and violence, but with good performances and thoughtful productions. Their next project would involve the Arthur Conan Doyle classic, The Hound Of the Baskervilles.

"Footprints?"
"Footprints."
"A man’s or a woman’s?"
Dr. Mortimer looked strangely at us for an instant, and his voice sank almost to a whisper as he answered:
"Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!"
                                              --Dr. John H. Watson

[Warning: Though this film is 44 years old and its source novel all of 102, I will pause to warn of spoilers. Okay, that’s off my conscience.]

The film’s plot is reasonably faithful to the original, taking only a few more liberties than did the 1939 version that we discussed last time, though changing a few of the characters. This version opens with a reading of the Legend of the Hound, and a flashback to the times (circa 1740) of the corrupt Sir Hugo at Baskerville Hall in Devonshire. Hugo is described as "a wild, profane and godless man, an evil man in truth" and possesses "an ugly and cruel humor." Well, nobody’s perfect!

We will see Baskerville throw a man through a glass window into a moat, fish him out and roast him over a fire, for the crime of criticizing his betters. He has the man’s daughter held captive for eventual assault by a roomful of his cronies, and flies off in a rage when he finds that the poor girl has escaped and run away, declaring "May the hounds of hell take me if I can’t hunt her down!" He pursues her on horseback and murders her on an ancient altar out on the moor, only to hear a heart-chilling howl, and turn to look terror in the face. We may surmise that his last sight in this world was not a pleasant one. (In a nice touch, his own lesser hunting dogs scatter at the Sound of The Hound.)

A dissolve shows us that it has been one Dr. Mortimer reading aloud the legend, in a certain apartment on Baker Street in London. "And what, may I ask, do you think of that, Mister Holmes?"

Sherlock Holmes snaps to attention – to complete a chess move that he’s been puzzling over, and only then returns his attention to Dr Mortimer, his response one of skepticism, and fairly dripping with indifference. (Is this fellow exasperating, or what? Stay tuned!) Sir Charles Baskerville, the guest explains, has been recently found dead. The cause appears to be heart failure, but Mortimer has seen the mysterious tracks of the big beast. Holmes downplays the curse, but once Mortimer has departed, confesses his concerns to Watson. It’s a two-pipe problem, so Holmes goes off to smoke and to contemplate.

Mortimer’s concern is for the safety of the young heir to the estate, Sir Henry Baskerville, who is just arriving from Johannesburg. When meeting Henry, Holmes and Watson learn of some odd mischief involving stolen boots, and are dismayed to find that someone has planted a tarantula in the heir’s remaining piece of footwear. Henry is also heir to Sir Charles’ weak heart, and must be careful: he’s ostensibly the last of his line, and it’s clear that someone wants him dead. Still, he remains determined to assume his post at Baskerville Hall. "I am not a man to overestimate danger," warns Holmes, "but I must insist upon one thing: under no circumstances are you to venture out onto the moor alone at night."

("Do not go out onto the moor alone at night." That always seemed a reasonable request, with three separate qualifications for unacceptable behavior involving location, time and accompaniment. He can dance a lonely jig up and down the moor to his heart’s content—so long as it’s in the daylight. He can stay out all night by his lonesome—so long as it’s in town. He can visit the moor at midnight—so long as he takes along a bodyguard. But no, Sir Henry feels this is needlessly restrictive and grouses about it. He does a lot of grousing.)

As Holmes can’t go, Watson accompanies Sir Henry to the estate, where Baskerville neighbor Stapleton is encountered. Stapleton survives by trapping game; he can’t use a rifle because of a deformed hand, as he shows Watson. He seems sycophantically friendly towards Sir Henry, while brutal towards his half-Spanish daughter, Cecile. Sir Henry is quite attracted to the hot-blooded, barelegged damsel. Throughout, it is made clear that any outsider who carelessly strays from the beaten path on the moor will be mercilessly sucked into the bog.

Holmes surfaces. It turns out that he’s been in Devon all along, observing and collecting data. He pays a call on Bishop Frankland in town, to establish that one of the man’s rare entomological specimens has escaped or been stolen: a tarantula. At the Hall, he notes that a portrait of the infamous Sir Hugo is missing from the wall where it had hung for decades. After that, it’s research in old maps seeking an abandoned tin mine under the property.

An excursion to the old mine, in the company of Stapleton and Mortimer, seems to provide Holmes with useful information that he isn’t sharing. Holmes allows Henry to keep an appointment with Cecile, despite knowledge that his man is in deadly danger. The detective, having baited his trap, explains to Watson the reason for the theft of the old Baskerville portrait: it showed Sir Hugo’s hand to have webbed fingers. "Stapleton!" gasps Watson. "Yes! Stapleton, illegitimate descendant of Sir Hugo, next in line to the Baskerville fortune." The two head out after the imperiled heir.

Sir Henry is enjoying a romantic encounter with Cecile. Having led him to the exact spot where Hugo and Charles met their fate, the girl abruptly denounces his family for their treatment of hers. She admits to having lured Sir Charles there in similar fashion, there to meet The Hound.

And sure enough, the beast is there for the appointment, and a frightening sight it is. The Hound attacks Sir Henry, as Holmes and Watson hurry to his defense.

Stapleton lunges to deflect Watson’s pistol, and the doctor is compelled to shoot that man as he draws a knife. Meanwhile, Holmes’ gunfire has mortally wounded the Hound, causing the cursed canine to chow down on his cruel master’s throat, ironically on the sacrificial altar stone. Cecile runs off carelessly, and is swiftly claimed by the mire.

Henry, now truly the last of the Baskervilles, is shaken, but alive. Holmes (a believer in "closure") insists that he view the dead Hound. It is indeed not supernatural, rather a big, mean dog with a mask added to make it more horrifying. The beast was kept down in the abandoned mine, starved for weeks, and then given Henry’s scent from the stolen boot.

Days later and back at Baker Street, Holmes receives delivery of a souvenir reclaimed from hiding at Stapleton’s farm: the missing portrait of Sir Hugo. Holmes explains to Watson the clue that The Hound really was a hound: the missing boot put him "on the scent." Indeed, according to Holmes it was "Elementary, my dear Watson."

The immortal line, but it’s an example of what Holmesian experts refer to as a "non-canonical" quotation. Conan Doyle’s Holmes never spoke those words in exactly that form!

Although the first Sherlock Holmes story to be photographed in color, Hammer’s Hound was at least the seventh film adaptation of this particular tale.

James Bernard, Hammer’s top composer, provided a clamoring musical score, very similar to his Horror of Dracula strains of the previous year. Photographer Jack Asher and art director Bernard Robinson worked their usual magic with a limited budget.

The screenplay was by Peter Bryan, who later scripted the excellent Brides Of Dracula. The novel provides some minor mystery surrounding the escaped convict Selden, who turns out to be Mrs. Barrymore’s brother, and who is dog-eared in place of Sir Henry while wearing the baronet’s hand-me-downs. Curiously, Holmes does not examine the body, though he covers it. Bryan uses this incident to set up a surprise, but it serves to make the Great Detective look rather foolish.

Bryan omitted the scene wherein Holmes makes predictions about Dr. Mortimer via examination of his walking stick; he substitutes some deductions based upon the man’s newspaper. The touch of the malformed hand of Hugo and Stapleton is a good one, a genetic trait being better evidence than a family resemblance. He also adds some byplay in the abandoned mine, wherein Holmes is thought buried, leading us to believe that Stapleton and Mortimer might be plotting together against the detective. Mortimer fills the red herring role.

Of course, Hammer entrusted the direction to their ace, Terence Fisher, who helmed almost all of their earlier horror efforts. (Examples? Why all the other titles that I mentioned above!) Fisher likes to paint the struggle of Good and Evil in bright primary colors, and his Hound is no exception. "My lord, I must insist," demands Holmes of Bishop Frankland. "Would it help you if I tell you that I am fighting Evil, fighting it as surely as you do?" It’s not surprising that the film adds some hints of demonology, with Selden’s body mutilated in a sacrificial rite with an ancient knife.

Peter Cushing’s is a very short-fused Sherlock Holmes. Whereas the ‘39 Hound acknowledged Holmes’ drug addiction only in its final line, Cushing’s detective suggests its effects constantly. Reportedly, the actor carefully researched his character with regard to his costuming, his pipes, his other props, and his vices. Cushing has that Shakespearean background we’ve come to expect in our Sherlocks: note his fine scene with Laurence Olivier in the last act of Hamlet (1948).

This Holmes is unshakably methodical and serious. One gets the impression that he’d swiftly lose patience with occasional flash of humanity in the Rathbone Holmes. He’s also quite manipulative: "I had to deflate the man’s pomposity to find one significant clue." And later, "You know my methods. Couldn’t you see I was being purposely rude?" Watch how Holmes takes charge of the Baskerville house (while thinking Henry dead), giving orders to Barrymore as if he owns the bloody place!

Regrettably, Cushing hasn’t quite the stature that we’ve come to expect of Sherlock Holmes. Lee towers over him; indeed nearly everyone in the cast is taller than Peter, and there’s no attempt to mitigate this. Still, it’s a minor quibble.

(And a most unfair one. For a man in Holmes’ profession, to be much taller than average would be a definite drawback. It would limit his disguises, and reduce his ability to observe events without himself being noticed. I would suggest that perhaps the canonical Holmes is of average height, and exaggerates his stature through posture, clothing and grooming, not to mention his commanding manner. This would enable him to effectively lose height for disguise purposes. Curiously, this film does not show us Holmes in disguise.)

Widely acknowledged as a master of stage "business," Cushing constantly fiddles with props (and uses his own hands and fingers to good effect) to keep scenes tense and complicated. Watch as he lights his long cherrywood pipe using tongs and an ember from the fireplace. It’s a feat that would have many a lesser actor mired in retakes, if not self-ignited. It all suits rather well the character of Holmes, who often described his own mind as a racing engine needing constant fuel to keep from destroying itself. Note also Holmes’ leg injury that hampers him late in the film. Cushing frequently simulates physical misfortune to humanize his characters.

Cushing would again be cast as Holmes in a 16-week BBC television series adapting the Conan Doyle stories, and featured was a rather good two-part adaptation of The Hound in 1968. He returned to the role for The Masks Of Death in 1984.

Although largely relegated to the background, André Morell gives us a solid, dependable Watson. He’s especially good when he slides into the role of the absent Holmes in his interrogation of Barrymore. Hammer wisely resisted the temptation to cast someone like Michael Ripper or Lionel Jeffries as Watson, thus breaking the mold rather than continuing the Nigel Brice buffoonery.

Christopher Lee plays Henry Baskerville, a rare leading-man role for the actor who was to become an iconic villain. There’s a sour and sinister touch to his undeniable nobility. Lee would later play Holmes in an odd English-German 1962 production directed by Terence Fisher (Sherlock Holmes und das Halsband des Todes), and much later enact an aging Sherlock in a pair of international television mini-series in 1990 and 1991. He was also cast as an unusually thin version of brother Mycroft Holmes in the Billy Wilder classic The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes (1970). While certainly the most famous Count Dracula of the past half-century, another generation knows him from his roles in the Star Wars and Lord Of The Rings series.

The character named Frankland in the novel turns up here as an amiable and dotty Anglican Bishop. Hammer mainstay Miles Malleson contributes some nice comic relief, from his first appearance on a big-wheeled bicycle to his breaking a window with a balky busybody telescope, and pausing for tasteless jokes and venomous insects in between.

Acquitting themselves well are Francis De Wolff as Mortimer, Ewen Solon as Stapleton, and David Oxley as the late, unlamented Sir Hugo. Marla Landi looks nice as Cecile Stapleton. (Again, the film drops the idea of Stapleton’s wife posing as his sister. Stapleton’s mother was a Spanish woman in Conan Doyle’s story, so a half-Spanish daughter is a reasonable addition.)

The film’s Hound has been criticized. The huge critter wears a mask that gives it an enhanced brow and bigger ears, making for a more frightening silhouette. I thought the mask effective, and the dog pretty scary. To put it delicately: this is one son of a bitch I’d rather not tangle with.

Screenwriter Bryan dispenses with the cab stalking of Sir Henry, and makes his point with a deadly creature planted for him. As the baronet idly handles the solitary boot, a large, hairy spider crawls out onto his arm. Holmes commands Henry to wait, frozen, until the arachnid reaches a point on his shoulder where it can be swept off swiftly.

Tarantulas used to be regarded as highly dangerous if not instantly lethal, but that was the result of bad press. For the past thirty years or more, people have been keeping them as pets, so this scene has not aged comfortably. Please note, however that Holmes will later tell us that the bite is not usually fatal, except when the victim already suffers from heart problems, which suggests that Sir Henry’s distant assailants knew their quarry. (Four years later, Dr. No had James Bond similarly threatened by the clichéd deadly tarantula, but without any coronary justification. Thus Terence Fisher’s treatment had been wiser than Terence Young’s.)

It seems to me that if Holmes is really concerned about giving young Henry a heart attack, he’d have found a more covert and less melodramatic way to knock the spider away. ("My, how careless this bit of breakfast kipper on your collar, Sir Henry…no, on this side, here let me…" Whack!) Still, the tarantula sequence (scored to violin strings) provides a "Hammer" moment early on, and muddles the reason for the boot theft just a bit.

Hammer did not enjoy, shall we say, howling success when it unleashed its Hound. It was too mild for fans of Hammer Horror, and too wild for Holmes purists. But the years have been kind to it.

The story remains a popular subject for adaptation, with at least nine different versions over the past 40 years. All of these take some liberties with the story while at the same time contending for the crown as most true to the original vision.

The next Hound in wide circulation was a Universal television production, a pilot for a series that failed to materialize, small wonder. The film, aired on ABC in 1972 with Stewart Granger as Holmes, reeked of cheapness. It featured, no lie, William Shatner as Stapleton, who of course chewed more scenery than did the dog.

I believe that the last version of the story to debut in theaters was Paul Morrissey’s 1978 film, a remarkably unfunny comedy that wastes a fine supporting cast. Since then, there have been television efforts starring in turn Tom Baker, Ian Richardson, Jeremy Brett, Matt Frewer and Richard Roxburgh. The 1983 Richardson version is probably the pick of the litter, though each has its interesting features.

Hammer’s Hound was released on DVD in 2002, in a nice package that includes reminiscences by Christopher Lee, and his dramatic reading of some passages from the novel. I’m sure that fans of Sherlock and fans of good old-fashioned movies await a similar treatment for the Fox version. (Indeed, all of the Rathbones need a proper release.)

It’s time for the Dog Show. Let’s compare the Fox Hound of 1939 to the Hammer Hound of 1959 and see how they match up.

Music: James Bernard is better than nothing; indeed, nothing is better than good Bernard! This score’s a retread, however, and perhaps a bit too noisy. Still, edge to Hammer by default.

Sets and photography: Excellent color work versus superlative black-and-white. Fox spent a bit more, so a slight edge to them.

The story: Both versions necessarily condense the storyline. Ernest Pascal’s script (Fox) is probably truer to the original than Hammer’s, but the latter’s changes serve to liven things up. I didn’t miss the séance, nor the obligatory happy romantic resolution. If comic relief is needed, I prefer it that it not be entrusted to Watson. Edge to Hammer here.

Direction: Routine work by the legendary Fisher against Sidney Lanfield’s best effort. Too close to call.

Supporting players: Lionel Atwill’s Mortimer over de Wolff’s, but not by too much. John Carradine by a mile over the other fellow in the Barrymore role. Morton Lowery and Ewen Solon are equally enigmatic Stapletons. Oxley is a far nastier Hugo

I prefer the exotic Cecile (Landi) over the bland Beryl (Wendy Barrie), and the funny Frankland (Malleson) over the more canonical crazy one at Fox. It should go without saying that Christopher Lee outshines (or rather, outglowers) the lightweight Richard Greene in the Baskerville sweepstakes. The very minor players in the Fox vehicle are more memorable. This category is a draw.

It all comes down to Holmes and Watson. The ‘39 version had Nigel Bruce at his best, but André Morell (1909-1978) evokes the Watson of the Conan Doyle stories so very well that I have to favor Morell. Had his role been a bit larger, he would be an even easier choice.

Peter Cushing (1913-1994) was one of the finest actors ever to grace the horror-mystery stage. He’s probably the greatest Professor Van Helsing and the best Dr. Frankenstein, and his fussy, meticulous Holmes is a joy to watch. Still, there’s no police like Holmes, and there’s no Holmes like Basil Rathbone, who got there first, and who truly brought to life a literary character as had no one before him. Sorry, but I must go with The Bazz.

Hound ‘39 by a whisker.

(Don Mankowski is a graduate of St. Xavier College and the University of South Carolina, in fields that have nothing to do with his present job as a rocket scientist. He amuses himself by writing his vita in the third person (oops, he did it again). Check out his work on-line here.)  

Thanks, Don!  We know it was a tough call, but we agree with your choice of the "best" Hound, even if it was an awfully close race.  Anyone who has the pleasure of screening both these cinematic Holmes gems can do their own judging.  That's what the Great Detective would have called a two-pipe problem.

Article copyright © Don Mankowski

Return To Archives