Heavenly Hound

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES

Directed by SIDNEY LANFIELD

Screenplay by ERNEST PASCAL

There are, of course, gaffers who insist that the one true Sherlock Holmes was William Gillette, who made a career early in this century playing the detective in a drama he devised from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories. There are also striplings who claim, in their innocence, that Peter Cushing's impersonation of the Great Gumshoe in the 1960s was quite acceptable. But anyone who was around in the 1940s knows that the detective's only authorized dramatic representative was Basil Rathbone.* With his incisive features and voice, Rathbone was one of the few actors of his time who actually appeared capable of complex deductive reasoning. As for Nigel Brace's Dr. Watson, he was every bit the equal of Rathbone's Holmes. No one in the history of movies ever did more eloquent slow takes as he struggled to absorb and analyze the new insights and information his partner in criminology constantly threw at him.

Though they quickly fell on evil days --a series of B pictures in which the dynamic duo were ripped out of their natural Edwardian environment and improbably set to chasing Nazi spies during World War II--they never abandoned the expert standards they set in this, the first of their pairings, now re-released along with the great Buster Keaton silent Sherlock Jr. and an oddly touching interview with Conan Doyle.

Delicious Tremors. On the whole, Hound is a quite respectable adaptation of the most evocative of the four full-length Holmes novels. To be sure, the villainous Stapleton, who sets loose the title hound in order to rid himself of the two men who stand between him and the Baskerville fortune, was somewhat softened for celluloid. A romantic interest was added so that Richard Greene, as the last direct heir to the estate, has something to do besides express amazement and gratitude at Holmes' power. It must also be admitted that the movie is more pokily paced in reality than it has been in memory, less spooky and terrifying than it seemed when one was seven or eight and the immortal line, "Mr. Holmes, they were the tracks of a gigantic hound," sent the most delicious tremors shuddering down the corridors of a child's nervous system.

Still, Stapleton's damnable dog, trained to kill, roams menacingly over the picturesque moors and prehistoric ruins that the art department enthusiastically ran up on the Fox back lot. Moreover, Director Sidney Lanfield was careful to keep his fog machines rolling, never permitting the sun to rise on this peculiar corner of the British Empire. The result, for viewers of a certain age anyway, is a sort of double-edged nostalgia: not merely for two beloved characterizations but for a whole vanished style of moviemaking, in which menacing shadows lay over every scene and divinely dumb people blandly insisted that the peculiar howl they heard must have been the wind or the call of an exotic bird.

Hound is not a great movie, not even a terribly good one. But its reissue is nevertheless one of the happier results of the current revival of interest in Holmes and the period that produced him--the last great fictional man of reason.

* In 1939, when the actor first undertook the role, Holmes was 85 years old, living in quiet retirement on the Sussex Downs, where he kept bees. He did not die until 1957 when he was 103. Thus it is certainly possible--though there is no documentation on the point--that the aged sleuth had casting approval when 20th Century-Fox gave the part to Rathbone, who played it in 14 films and on innumerable radio programs.

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