The Hound of the Baskervilles (Sidney Lanfield, 1939)

Though it's his biggest hit, The Hound of the Baskervilles is an outlier in director Sidney Lanfield's career. Lanfield, a jazz musician and vaudeville star turned gag writer turned filmmaker, mostly directed light comedies (many of them starring Bob Hope) and ended his career with TV sitcoms (McHale's Navy and The Addams Family were his most frequent employers). Baskervilles, though not without dry humor and sight gags, is a dark, atmospheric Gothic murder mystery with horror elements, and Lanfield proves himself surprisingly adept at handling the tone.

The first of fourteen (!) Sherlock Holmes adaptations to star the duo of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce as Holmes and Watson, respectively, and the first Sherlock Holmes movie to retain Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Victorian setting (the previous Holmes movies updated the action to the present day), Baskervilles kicks things off with a bang with an eerie run through the foggy moors from an old Gothic mansion, the howl of a hound, a mysterious death, and a strange man hiding in the shadows who rifles through the dead man's pockets.

Though the Yorkshire moors here are just studio sets in Hollywood, they look spectacular, and set decorator Thomas Little and art directors Richard Day and Hans Peters deserve a lot of credit for the film's success. I'll spare you a lengthy list of Little's credits, but if you're a movie fanatic, you should check out his imdb page. The guy assisted in giving a lot of great films their visual presence and character, especially in a great run from the late '40s to the early '50s.

If you've read the Doyle novella or seen one of the many other film and television adaptations, you know the basics of the story. Several small changes and one major change have been made to the source material, but Lanfield retains the bulk of the story and captures its spirit. Rathbone and Bruce have great chemistry as Holmes and Watson, and Bruce is good at supplying the curmudgeonly exasperation, boyish excitement, and comedic facial expressions necessary to deflate any self-importance in the material with a delicate enough touch to avoid hamming it up. Rathbone is great at riding the line between smugness and likability. Holmes needs to be pleased with himself and a bit condescending to Watson, but he also needs to be a guy you want to spend the running time of a movie with, too. No wonder these guys clicked with audiences.

The supporting cast also supplies a lot of flavor. John Carradine and Eily Malyon play the Barrymans (changed from "Barrymore" in the novella to avoid the appearance of poking fun at the Barrymore acting family), the caretakers of the Baskerville estate. Carradine and Malyon are excellent at playing suspicious characters, and Malyon has one of the best menacing stares in the game. The always reliable Lionel Atwill plays a village doctor who "dabbles in the occult" with his wife, a medium (Beryl Mercer, in one of her last roles). Morton Lowry is suitably oily and unctuous as the oily and unctuous John Stapleton. The impressively mutton-chopped Barlowe Borland is an elderly man who is constantly suing his neighbors for minor infractions of the law, and Nigel de Brulier gets to act weird and look even weirder as the mysterious man hiding in the moors. The only real snoozes in the cast are the standard-issue milquetoast young couple (a surprising staple of '30s cinema), in this case Richard Greene as Sir Henry Baskerville and Wendy Barrie as Beryl Stapleton, the half-sister of the oily and unctuous John, though Greene does get a couple of decent moments where a little personality comes through.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is the classic Hollywood equivalent of comfort food. Every location and its set decorations are a visual pleasure: the stones and landscapes of the moor, the sprawling Gothic mansion, the London apartment of Holmes, the city streets with hansom cabs, a comfortable train car. The narrative with its interconnected mysteries and Lansfield's visual realization of it are satisfying and expertly delivered, and the cast gives it personality and life. For what has turned out to be a week filled with difficult and disappointing news for my wife and me, this movie helped us relax and forget ourselves for a few hours, and that's a great thing.

In the 2020s, a time when studio executives have very little interest in, knowledge of, or affinity for the medium of film, when completed movies' releases are permanently canceled and the movies themselves deleted in order for their parent companies to receive tax write-offs, when shareholders are more important than the people who make the movies and the audiences who watch them, when craftsmanship and artistry are pushed aside in favor of dimly lit computer-generated slop, watching something from Hollywood's golden years is bittersweet but refreshing.

I'm not a nostalgic person, and I don't fantasize about some mythical past when things were supposedly better, but I have a lot of aesthetic problems with a lot of 21st century filmmaking, especially mainstream Hollywood filmmaking. When people who run studios (and even some of the people who make movies) think of movies as just another piece of branded content that only has value if it increases profits for shareholders, we get the shit we've got now. When studios are run by people who love and value movies, we get movies like The Hound of the Baskervilles that look like they were made by human beings. To be clear, the old studio heads were profit-obsessed business jerks, too, who frequently butted in on creative decisions and exploited their workers, but they also loved movies, wanted to make good movies, and sometimes even trusted and respected the people who made those movies, and you can see it on screen. Now we live in a world where the profit and exploitation remain, but the good stuff has been discarded. Worst of both worlds.

I'm dangerously close to driving this post into the ditch, so I'll conclude by saying that The Hound of the Baskervilles is recommended to anyone who loves classic Hollywood, Gothic mysteries, character actors, Sherlock Holmes stories, and foggy moors. I thoroughly enjoyed it.