Director – Richard Oswald, Screenplay – Herbert Juttke & George C. Klaren, Based on the Novel The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) by Arthur Conan Doyle, Producers – G. Knauer & H. Schiller, Photography (b&w) – Frederik Fuglsang. Production Company – Richard Oswald Film/Erda-Film GmbH.
Cast
Carlyle Blackwell (Sherlock Holmes), George Seroff (Dr John Watson), Livio Pavanelli (Sir Henry Baskerville), Fritz Rasp (Stapleton), Betty Bird (Beryl Stapleton), Jaro Fürth (Dr Mortimer), Carla Batheel (Laura Lyons), Vaily Arnheim (Barrymore), Alma Taylor (Mrs Barrymore)
Plot
Following the death of Sir Charles Baskerville on the Baskerville estate in Dartmoor, Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson receive a visit from Dr Mortimer. Mortimer asks Holmes’s help in protecting the latest heir Sir Henry from the hereditary Baskerville curse – a giant ghostly hound that haunts the moors. Holmes sends Dr Watson to the Baskerville estate in his place. There Watson soon becomes witness to a web of murderous skulduggery and apparent ghostly hauntings.
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902) was the third of Arthur Conan Doyle’s four Sherlock Holmes novels. It was serialised in The Strand magazine and was the first Holmes story after a nine year gap where Doyle had killed Holmes off in The Final Problem (1893) and then changed his mind. It is usually regarded as the best of the Holmes novels and has undergone multiple film adaptations (see below for these).
The Hound of the Baskervilles was incredibly popular in Germany during the era of the Silent Movie. The first of these was The Hound of the Baskervilles (1914) from Vitascope, which was written by this film’s director Richard Oswald and is a faithful adaptation of the book starring Alwin Neuss as Holmes. The success led to a sequel The Lonely House (1914), which elaborated out the villain Stapleton’s story. Producer Josef Greenbaum left to set up his own company Greenbaum Film and hired Oswald to direct two further sequels, The Scary Room (1914) and The Legend of the Hound (1915), which elaborate out Stapleton’s story and goes back in time to tell the history of the Baskervilles. Meanwhile, the original company Vitascope released their own competing Chapter 3 with The Dark Castle (1915). Various legal wanglings ensued. Greenbaum then went on to make two other chapters Dr MacDonald’s Sanatorium (1920) and The House Without Windows (1920). All of these other versions are lost. Richard Oswald then returned to remake the original Conan Doyle novel here but the film was reportedly a financial flop, due to its being made silent at a time when cinema had just switched over to sound.
Richard Oswald (1880-1963) was a prolific director in German silent cinema, although being Jewish he was forced to flee Germany a few years later during the Nazi era. During this time, he made a number of classic works including adaptations of genre classics such as A Night of Horror (1916), Tales of Hoffman (1916), The Picture of Dorian Grey (1917), Alraune (1930) and the sound film The Living End (1932), plus adaptations of Around the World in Eighty Days (1919) and Peer Gynt (1919). He was also the father of Gerd Oswald (1919- 89), who became a regular tv director on shows like The Outer Limits (1963-5) and Star Trek (1966-9), among many others, plus one SF film Agent for H.A.R.M. (1966).
(l to r) Dr Watson (Livio Pavanelli) and Sherlock Holmes (Carlyle Blackwell)
The 1929 version of The Hound of the Baskervilles was considered a lost film, although a print apparently survived in an archive in Warsaw. It was restored, along with the use of some material from a French archive, and premiered at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival in 2018. It is however an incomplete print – Reels 2 and 3 out of a total are eight are missing. The lost material has been pieced together following the shooting script and uses stills to tell the story.
The restoration, even in its incomplete form, demonstrates just what an incredible film the 1929 version is. The black-and-white gives it an extraordinary mood and atmosphere. There is an amazing opening at Baskerville Hall in the lead-up to Sir Charles’s death – the main room of the hall is filled with giant embossed heraldic sculptings over the fireplace, a wall of life-sized statues (where someone is peering out through the eyeholes) and not just one set of antlers but a whole curved arch of them mounted above the doorway.
The Hound of the Baskervilles was made during the great era of German Expressionism, which emerged following the success of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1919). Other German films borrowed from Caligari and its giant stylised sets and lighting schemes filled with exaggerated shadows. The Hound of the Baskervilles is not quite one of those films but it definitely has the influence of German Expressionism in terms of the visual determination to awe with colossal sets. Elsewhere there are great shots of a figure climbing the stairs carrying a candle seen entirely in exaggerated silhouette like something out of Nosferatu (1922).
The German Expressionist influenced sets for Baskerville Hall with giant embossed heraldic sculpture and arches of mounted antlers
The film is surprisingly faithful to the Arthur Conan Doyle story, following it on almost every aspect. A couple of minor points might be that here is that Stapleton is played by Fritz Rasp as so bespectacled and creepily weird that he signals villain almost with a neon light from the outset rather than as a surprise reveal at the end of the story. It is only at the very end of the film that Oswald deviates from Conan Doyle with the addition of a scene where Laura Lyons (a minor character in the book, so much that most films ignore including her) is imprisoned by Stapleton and there is dramatic tension as Holmes becomes trapped in a flooding tunnel.
Other versions of the book tend to simply tell the story, some elaborating out on that more than others, but most following the essence of the overall plot. By contrast, Richard Oswald, while retaining great faith to the book, strips it down to a series of scenes, which he then proceeds to pump up for a maximum of suspense, tension and atmosphere. Holmes’s deductions and the twists are all there but something like Watson’s discovery of Holmes on the moors is built up into a scene of atmospheric tension as a mystery figure is seen entering the cave. The atmosphere is something aided immeasurably by the score that has been added to the dvd restoration.
One of the more amusing things is watching the film in 2024 as opposed to 1929. Sherlock Holmes has become so identified with the Victorian Gaslight Milieu that it now seems almost second nature to any adaptation of the story. You tend to forget that 1929 would have only been 27 years after the publication of Doyle’s book. For someone in 2024, that would be the equivalent of looking back to a work like Contact (1997) or Men in Black (1997). The surprise is also seeing modern elements we don’t normally associate with Sherlock Holmes – Dr Mortimer turns up in a car, while Sir Henry uses a telephone. Holmes gets his familiar deerstalker but we also see him outfitted in a leather trench coat.
Other adaptations of The Hound of the Baskervilles include:- a lost silent French version The Hound of the Baskervilles (1914); the first American version, the silent The Hound of the Baskervilles (1920) with Ellie Norwood; a lost British sound version The Hound of the Baskervilles (1931), written by thriller writer Edgar Wallace; another German version The Hound of the Baskervilles (1936); The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), the first of the series of Sherlock Holmes films featuring Basil Rathbone; the celebrated Hammer version The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959) with Peter Cushing as Holmes and Christopher Lee as Sir Henry; a two-part adaptation as part of the tv series Sherlock Holmes (1964-8) also starring Peter Cushing; a tv adaptation The Hound of the Baskervilles (1972) with Farley Granger as Holmes; the unfunny comedic version The Hound of the Baskervilles (1978) with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore respectively as Holmes and Watson; a six-part BBC mini-series adaptation The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982) with Tom Baker as Holmes; The Hound of the Baskervilles (1983) with Ian Richardson; a routine Canadian-made tv movie The Hound of the Baskervilles (2000) with Matt Frewer miscast as Holmes; and an excellent British tv version The Hound of the Baskervilles (2002) with Richard Roxburgh as Holmes. The story was also given an interesting modernisation in the BBC’s Sherlock (2010– ) tv series, which set it around a bacteriological research facility, and in the Hounded (2016) episode of Elementary where it is set around the murder of a financier by a ghostly hound.
