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Film Reviews
Reviews of films

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959)

I’ve had the Hammer version of Hound on DVD for a while now but never got round to watching it despite my aim of seeing as many Hound adaptations as possible. It may be the most adapted novel in the English language – certainly nothing else springs to mind – and the adaptations have varied from animation to outright parody, from Radio 4 to Hammer Horror. There is even one starring Max Headroom that was made for an American cable channel. The first of the "big" adaptations was 1939’s version starring Basil Rathbone. Twenty years later came Hammer’s stab at the legend – their first colour film – and ten years later still, Peter Cushing would reprise the role for BBC television. The DVD annoyingly presents the film in 4:3 but letterboxed so there are black bars all around the picture if watching on a widescreen TV. Bah. Luckily I was able to blow it up to 14:9 and keep the ratio intact while filling (most of) the screen. The picture quality didn't suffer much which is nice. But MGM still lose a point for not simply releasing it in 16:9 (or whatever its native ratio is) in the first place. A 4:3 presentation would’ve been one thing but letterboxed 4:3 is so VHS.

Being a Hammer film it tends to focus on the sensational, horrific parts of the story ahead of the charming character spots. So my barometer of a Hound adaptation – the walking stick scene in which Holmes and Watson try to deduce Dr Mortimer’s character from the walking stick he left behind at Baker Street – is missing entirely. The first portion of the film is a graphic re-enactment of the legend of Sir Hugo Baskerville’s determination to have his way with a young lady even if it meant giving his soul to the devil and chasing her across the Moor. Here we see him catch her at an ancient ruin and sacrificing her on the altar using a fancy knife and one of those Hammer shots of blood trickling away. This is recounted to Holmes by the already ensconced Dr Mortimer – a much older and angrier man than in the novel – but his motives for hiring Mr Holmes are largely obscured. He should be concerned because Sir Henry Baskerville is about to take up residence in the Hall following the death of his uncle but this doesn’t really come across. Dr Mortimer has this ancient legend, he wants Sherlock Holmes to come down to the Moor. That’s it really.

Mortimer isn’t the only character to be changed. Most of them are tweaked, altered or shaved in some way. Stapleton goes from being a young and personable naturalist to a bitter, impoverished farmer. Miss Stapleton goes from his nervous sister to his Spanish daughter. Frankland goes from being an old busy body who sues everyone to a bishop who collects insects. Sir Henry is no longer an American who has come back to Britain to take up his family seat – he’s now just Christopher Lee playing Christopher Lee with a heart condition. And Barrymore goes from being a man with a beard to a man without a beard (which is fair enough as they drop the beard subplot entirely so why cover John Le Mesurier’s face if you don’t have to?) Only Holmes, Watson and Seldon the murderer escape without any major revisions and Seldon is never actually seen alive in the story so there wasn’t much they could do to him.

Hammer obviously felt there wasn’t enough action in the book so they added scenes where Sir Henry is attacked by a tarantula in his hotel bedroom, Watson almost drowns in the Great Grimpen Mire when he strays from the straight and narrow, and Holmes is almost crushed to death when the mine shaft he’s exploring collapses. Oh and they added a subplot about a mine shaft too. They also took the death of the convict Seldon and added ritualistic overtones to it. Of course they did – it’s Hammer.

I would say the main change between the film and the book is that the book is about three nice chaps – Sir Henry, Dr Mortimer and Stapleton – of whom one is secretly a nasty piece of work exploiting a family legend for his own ends. In the film this is reversed – they are all to a greater or lesser degree unpleasant. Lee plays Sir Henry as sinister, Francis De Wolfe plays Mortimer as angry and Stapleton is bitter and hostile towards those who left him to starve on a worthless plot of farmland. So even though so much has been changed, it isn’t until the final reel that we go from three suspects to one. In that respect it still works as a story and indeed it could be said that so much was slightly different that the audience – who surely knew the story – would be able to suspend disbelief because they *might* have a different murderer.

To be entirely honest, so much was centred on the ceremonial dagger used both in the Sir Hugo flashback and in the mutilation of Seldon that I actually wondered whether they were going to have a dog in it at all. We were ten minutes from the end and the big surprise happened. Instead of being a weak and feeble pawn as she is in the novel, Miss Stapleton (inexplicably Spanish in the film) is revealed to be in on the plan to kill Sir Henry. She lures him to the altar and whips out the knife. I genuinely did think they were going to have the knife be the real killer and the dog as just a legend to take attention away from how the murders were really committed. But – thankfully – no. There was in fact a real dog. A big, scrawny beast with a mask on to make it more frightening. It leapt onto Sir Henry and began savaging him before Holmes and Watson shot the hell out of it with their service revolvers. It then had just enough strength left to savage Stapleton and scare his daughter into running to her death in the Great Grimpen Mire.

I would say it is a decent enough film – not overly faithful to the story but not offensively wide of the mark either. Hammer knew what they wanted from a movie and added a bit of blood and a deadly spider to pep up a tale that is mostly Watson writing to Holmes and people inviting other people round for dinner. The nuts and bolts of Holmes’ investigation is truncated – it basically comes down to their being webbing in the Baskerville line so find the man with webbed fingers and you find your killer – but they still give Cushing plenty to do. He’s on screen more than Holmes would normally be given the way the novel keeps him away from the action for about half its length. It isn’t a particularly enjoyable film to watch because – as mentioned above – no one in it is nice. Everyone is angry or bitter except Holmes and Watson so there is no humour, no warmth and no fun. It’s a Hammer horror featuring Sherlock Holmes rather than a Sherlock Holmes film produced by Hammer. As someone who prefers Holmes to Hammer I found it a bit cold but still watchable.