THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES: Blu-ray (UA 1959) Twilight Time
In the annals
of superior sleuthing, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's evergreen, Sherlock Holmes
easily ranks among the all-time greats. Holmes' brilliant powers of deduction
coupled with his loftier intellect and Doyle’s clever craftiness in concocting
mind-boggling crimes for his alter ego to meticulously solve proved wildly
popular bedtime reading around the gaslight at the turn of the 20th
century. Few today are familiar with the ‘real’ Sherlock Holmes; this ingenious
and complex Victorian figure, so described by the literary, Dr. John Watson as
‘a bohemian’, with a general disregard for humanity and rather indifferent for
playing by the rules ascribed to others; also, something of a chronic drug user
with a sincere and occasionally dangerous fetish for injectable cocaine and
morphine to stimulate his mind, calm his high-strung nerves between cases, but
mostly to settle his nagging melancholia. To satisfy Hollywood’s governing code
of screen censorship, most – if not all – of these idiosyncratic traits were
lost to the cinematic Holmes until Billy Wilder’s brilliant reinterpretation of
Doyle’s denizen of deduction, The
Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) hit theaters. Alas, that movie
proved too much – or perhaps, too little too late – to satisfy fans, the
picture sinking like a stone at the box office.
The most
celebrated Holmes – at least, at the movies – remains Basil Rathbone who,
together with Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson, are the pair to beat for any duo brave
– or perhaps, idiotic enough – to challenge their legacy. Oh, what Rathbone and
Bruce might have been if the series had remained at 2oth Century-Fox instead of
migrating over to Universal after only two movies, we will never know;
Universal’s cost-cutting and grotesque attempts to contemporize Holmes and
Watson for the war-torn forties, leading to more than a few artistic hiccups
along the way. Ironic, our Mr. Holmes
should have appeared in only 4 full-fledged novels during Conan Doyle’s
lifetime, his most readable adventures relegated to short stories – 56 all told
– and later reassembled and anthologized. Of the 4 novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles remains the most justly celebrated. Having
forsworn his most popular creation – killing Holmes off two years earlier – Doyle
was forced by his readership to resurrect the man for yet another thrilling
adventure; what to do with an already eulogized corpse cleverly resolved by
setting The Hound of the Baskervilles
several years prior to Holmes’ murder. As a retroactive tale in the franchise, The Hound of the Baskervilles is among
Doyle’s finest literary works and the one for which his legacy as an author
remains duly remembered. Indeed, as late as 2003, The Hound of the Baskervilles still ranked among the most beloved
stories ever written in the U.K. The third of Doyle’s crime novels, The Hound of the Baskervilles is an
intriguing tale of a diabolical crime with elements of the supernatural gothic
horror thrown in for good measure.
Yet, the novel
has since presented certain barriers for any film company endeavoring to craft
a successful adaptation; chiefly, because Holmes is absent from the action for
nearly all its middle act. It will likely seem sacrilege to some, but I
continue to prefer the 2oth Century-Fox Rathbone/Bruce adaptation of ‘The
Hound’ to this, director, Terence Fisher’s 1959 frolic for Hammer
Films; not the least because, in aspiring to remain true to the Hammer ilk of
blood and guts horror schlock-ers from this particular vintage Peter Bryan’s
screenplay makes an evil temptress out of the demure Cecile Stapleton (Marla Landi)
who, both in the novel and the 1939 Fox classic, knows absolutely nothing of
her wicked father’s (Ewen Solon) desire to destroy the last surviving heir, Sir
Henry (Christopher Lee) of Baskerville Hall; a lonely and isolated bastion
nestled on the craggy moors. To be fair,
the ’39 version rechristens Stapleton as Cecile’s jealous brother. But the ’59
version interjects a faint whiff of incest into their ‘father/daughter’
relationship. The remake also suffers from hapless miscasting. Let us be fair
in assessing Christopher Lee as much too old, affected and glowering to be the inexperienced
romantic figure depicted in the novel. Even worse is Peter Cushing as a
la-di-da Holmes, postulating with smug superiority that belies even a shred of compassion.
For Cushing’s Holmes, all of life can be effectively distilled with exacting
precision to quantifiable variables that behave incontrovertibly as reoccurring
values in a mathematical equation. And indeed, according to Bryan’s screenplay,
this Holmes has a point.
The characters
in this version of The Hound of the
Baskervilles all behave within the realm of expectation; David Oxley,
worthy of his salacious murder on the moors as the original Baskerville heir, Sir
Hugo, driven by some regally pronounced madness coursing through his
aristocratic blood, to assume he can take advantage of a virginal servant girl
(Judi Moyens) just because she is a servant girl, but first, torturing her
weary father (David Birks) to death over an open flame. Next, we have the
greedily suspicious Doctor Richard Mortimer (Francis de Wolff), who bears some
sustained – if never fully explained – malice toward Sir Henry. For comic
relief, we get Miles Malleson (a Hammer main staple) herein playing the dotty/sherry-loving,
Bishop Frankland. These are among the least amusing of the cardboard cutouts. Fair
enough, Doyle’s figure of facts, Sherlock Holmes, always leaned towards the
efficient adding machine void of any charitable bones in his body. Even so, Conan
Doyle infrequently provides glimpses into Holmes' humanity – if not his
humility – throughout the 56 short stories; a quality that, again by direct
comparison to Basil Rathbone’s incarnation of Holmes, Peter Cushing’s
pontificator of jurisprudence sorely lacks. This movie comes right in the middle of Hammer Films
lucrative cycle in regurgitated Technicolor horror (choke!) ‘classics’, most co-starring
Cushing and Lee. It must have seemed kismet to recast them here, and have been
a refreshing change of pace for both actors to play against type as romantic
lead and hero respectively; particularly, Lee, who otherwise remained
blood-shot and fang-bearing, or bandaged from horn to hoof as Dracula and the
mummy.
Still, I am
not loving Cushing’s Holmes; a poser at best, perpetually condescending,
beady-eyed and sampling the foibles of life as a teetotaler might, merely by
sniffing the vintage in a snifter without actually taking a sip. More to the
point, Cushing’s diminutive and oddly angular frame next to Lee’s towering six
feet plus or even André Morell’s more beefy Doctor Watson, just looks as though
he is taking out a ‘short man’s grudge’ on life itself, making a grand – if
unconvincing – game of charade out of the character of Sherlock Holmes. It does
not make for very engaging cinema, although Morell and Cushing do share some of
the ole Rathbone/Bruce chemistry herein; with Morell far more the straight man;
his Watson, thoughtful and infinitely more intelligent without rubbing his
smarts in everybody’s face. I rather like Morell; the way he manages to
silently convey astute observations about the case, concurring or on occasion,
foreshadow Holmes’ powers of deduction; something Nigel Bruce’s Watson could
never attempt as the foppish and bumbling straggler-on. We can believe Morell
has a license to practice medicine; his own career aspirations put on hold in
service to the more marvelous Holmes, who could always use an extra pair of hands
to clean up the sloppier messes and perform an autopsy along the way. But back
to Cushing, for just a moment, who I would suggest is hopelessly miscast.
Cushing began with aspirations as a ‘serious actor’ and achieved considerable
critical success upon the stage. But as a film actor he frequently suffers from
the stage actors’ affliction, exorcising some highly pronounced mannerisms
punctuated with a theatrical aplomb. As
Holmes, Cushing is artificial at best instead of engaging; curt rather than courtly
or even keen. He does not relish his crime-solving but rather considers it a
tiresome bore; possibly a means to an end, simply paying for more cocaine and
tobacco to enjoy in his spare time. While Rathbone’s Holmes uses droll wit to
outfox the enemy, Cushing’s Holmes is almost curmudgeonly in his belligerence,
frowning upon everyone as a suspect with whom to be harshly dealt almost from
the moment he has first laid eyes on them.
My other bone
of contention with ‘this’ Hound of the Baskervilles is Hammer’s superficially
opulent, though in retrospect, slavishly absurd slant toward Gothic horror,
borrowing sets and costumes from other productions in a fairly empty attempt to
will a horror movie out of this traditionally Holmesian ‘whodunit’. Even their
poster art concentrates on the mythical ‘hound’ – a four-legged spectral mutt,
ostensibly hunting for fresh kill along the moors, though barely glimpsed in
the actual movie, except for its penultimate reveal as a Great Dane,
half-starved and given a mask by Stapleton; moments later, shot to death and
exposed as a hoax by Holmes after it has already mauled its keeper and narrowly
missed tearing out Sir Henry’s throat. Let us be fair in assessing the hound as
never the focus of Conan Doyle’s novel. It serves as a legend in both the book
and the 1939 Fox film. Ironic for a Holmes’ novel, neither is our man Sherlock
the center of attention; usurped for a time by an air of pervading doom;
Watson, the custodian of Sir Henry’s safety until Holmes, who has been
shadowing their every move from close by, can spring into action to expose the
plotters in the midst of their crime. A good deal of artistic liberties have
been taken with Conan Doyle’s prose to ensure all the pieces in this Hammer-ized
jigsaw puzzle fit – if not perfectly – than principally, deflecting audience’s
suspicions they are watching just another B-budgeted Hammer ‘horror’ movie
sheathed in the respectability of a Sherlock Holmes mystery/adventure.
To explain
Christopher Lee’s transparently British accent, Sir Henry no longer hails from
Canada, as in the novel, but Johannesburg. Inexplicably, Bryan’s screenplay
gives Sir Henry a heart condition from which he later suffers and is bedridden
after a bout of overexertion on the moors. The first attempt on Sir Henry’s
life in London is changed from a missed opportunity on the streets near 22B
Baker Street, narrowly foiled by Holmes and Watson while shadowing the intended
victim, to a pointless encounter with a tarantula in Sir Henry’s hotel room.
Aside: Christopher Lee was utterly terrified of the spider, and, while refusing
to have it crawl up his neck, he did agree to a wrangler planting it on his
shoulder sleeve, resulting in Lee turning quite green and clammy on the set,
nearly fainting from fright. Also added, presumably for ominous effect, is
Holmes’ speculation about a ritual sacrifice performed on the body of Selden
(Michael Mulcaster), a recent escapee from Dartmoor Prison whose corpse is
found mutilated near an abandoned mine. Incidentally, neither the mine nor the
sacrifice appears as part of Conan Doyle’s tale. In this remake, however, the
mine and its collapse with Holmes presumably still inside it, are pivotal misadventures,
diverting, while having absolutely nothing to do with the central plot. In retrospect, too many red herrings take up
as much time; the morphing, or mere excision of original plot developments
neither augmenting Conan Doyle’s practically perfect literary construction, nor
successfully taking its place, with too many missing pieces lost in
translation, and never to function as an alternative on its own cinematic
terms.
The 1939 Fox
film retains Cecile’s gullibility as per Stapleton’s motivations. Winningly,
the ’39 version makes Cecile, Stapleton’s stepsister, thus allowing for a
romance to blossom between Cecile and Sir Henry (affably played by Richard
Greene, later to find more lasting fame as TV’s Robin Hood). In the novel,
Cecile is Stapleton’s wife, woefully mistreated by her jealous husband and
later discovered by Holmes, Watson and Inspector Lestrade, badly beaten, bound
and gagged. In both the ’39 movie and the novel, Cecile neither despises Sir
Henry nor means him any harm. The Hammer Film badly bungles this character,
rechristened a venomous femme fatale, morbidly in cahoots with Stapleton and
deriving an almost psychotic pleasure to see Sir Henry’s innards splayed across
the moors. Fitting for an evil woman, though hardly in keeping with Doyle’s
designs, the vengeful Cecile is consumed in the murky slosh of Grimpen Mire. To
top it all off, there are two other contrivances; Rev. Frankland’s affinity for
spiders as a hobbyist entomologist (again, meant to throw audiences off the
track Stapleton is the real villain), and, two missing portraits, thus
concealing an ancestral genetic mutation – webbed hands - shared by all the
Baskerville men (though curiously, not Sir Henry). This affliction also plagues
Stapleton, thus, marking him the ‘illegitimate’ heir to Baskerville Hall and
its fortunes, also, the plotter of the crimes afoot.
Our story
begins several centuries earlier, with Sir Hugo Baskerville’s infamous cruelty
toward an enfeebled servant and that servant’s buxom daughter, whom Sir Hugo
intends to rape. Bludgeoning the girl’s father with a poker from the fireplace
after he has already held the man over its hot open flames, the girl escapes
her locked room and sprints into the night toward the remains of a dilapidated
church. Sir Hugo pursues the girl on horseback, with a pack of hunting beagles
that inexplicably vanish after being released from their kennels. No attempt
has been made in these early scenes to match the footage shot on sets at
Pinewood with the location work, shot day for night; Hugo cornering the girl in
the abbey courtyard, before ruthlessly plunging a dagger into her heaving
bosom. However, Hugo’s singular moment
of elation gets thwarted by the sudden appearance of a beast the audience never
sees; nor is it ever made entirely clear what becomes of Hugo after a few
hellish screams and some blood-thirsty animal grunts fade to black. Yet, from
this moment on, the legend of the ‘Hound from Hell’, rechristened the Hound of
the Baskervilles, takes hold as the accursed legacy dooming the family
bloodline. No Baskerville since has been immune to it.
We advance
several centuries to the ‘murder’ of Sir Charles Baskerville; an account given by
his best friend, Dr. Richard Mortimer to Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Holmes
is distinctly adversarial towards Mortimer, whom he disregards with
considerable disdain as over-exaggerating the facts while repeatedly doing more
than to hint a supernatural curse about to take the life of the latest
Baskerville heir, Sir Henry, newly arrived from South Africa. Holmes resists
the case until he has all but exhausted Mortimer’s patience with verbose glee.
But Holmes will attend Sir Henry in his hotel room. Alas, their ‘cute meet’
does not go as planned. Sir Henry mistakes Holmes and Watson as manager and
house detective, assigned to uncover what has become of a single leather boot missing
from his unpacked luggage. Learning of his mistake, Sir Henry is moderately
embarrassed but remains rather aloof and unwilling to accept Holmes and
Watson’s aid; disbelieving his life is in danger until, only moments later, a
tarantula crawls out from the other boot he is holding firmly in his hand.
Holmes narrowly manages to kill the creature with his cane. Given the severity
of the incident, Holmes feigns being unable to tear himself away from another
case at present, but sends Watson on ahead to accompany Sir Henry to
Baskerville Hall.
The coachman,
Perkins (Sam Kydd) implies danger is afoot on the moors. Selden, a convict from
Dartmoor Prison has just escaped and sure to attack any man he meets on this
lonely stretch of road. Unnerved, Dr. Mortimer elects to walk the rest of the
way into town while Perkins drives Sir Henry and Watson to the Baskerville
estate. They are met by the pixelated cleric, Frankland, and the estate’s
butler, Barrymore (John Le Mesurier) who has recently taken a wife (Helen
Goss). In providing the new heir with a tour of his lodgings, Barrymore
explains how a pair of paintings of Sir Hugo has since gone missing. Further
questioned by Watson, Barrymore regales the men with finding Sir Charles’ badly
mutilated body, discovered on a routine trip into town wedged between some
craggy rocks and underbrush. The next afternoon, while returning on foot from
his own trip to the post office, Watson encounters Stapleton, who narrowly
prevents him from stepping into a bear trap. Watson also meets Cecile. At
first, she pretends to be something of a mute, running away and causing Watson
to pursue her through the Grimpen Mire where he almost loses his life after
sinking into its murky goo. Narrowly saved by Stapleton, who orders Cecile to partake
in the rescue effort, Watson is taken back to Baskerville Hall to recuperate.
That evening he hears the sound of a woman crying and follows it to an attic
bedroom, along with Sir Henry, the two men discovering a lit candle glowing in
the window.
Watson is
almost certain someone inside the hall is signaling to someone else out there
on the moor. Sir Henry and Watson take
off into the night, finding a lit beacon on the hillside. They also discover a
man waiting there. He is scared off by their pistols. But before Watson can
pursue the stranger, Sir Henry suffers a minor heart attack and has to be taken
back to Baskerville Hall. Ordering Dr. Mortimer to remain at Sir Henry’s side
while he is away, Watson goes in search of a silhouetted figure he spies on the
horizon, discovering much to his amazement, it is Holmes, who now reveals he
has been in Grimpen Mire the whole time and quietly observed as someone from
the house signals to the stranger on the moors. To reveal the source, Holmes
asks Barrymore and his wife to join them in Sir Henry’s parlor; Holmes
addressing Barrymore’s wife by her assumed maiden name as Miss Selden, thereby
revealing to all she is, in fact, the sister of the Dartmoor escapee. Mrs.
Barrymore has been bringing her brother Sir Henry’s castoff clothes and food to
sustain him while he hides from the police.
The next afternoon, Holmes discovers one of Bishop Frankland’s
tarantulas has gone missing. Meanwhile,
Sir Henry pays a social call on the Stapletons, who have invited him to dinner.
Cecile confides in Sir Henry: her father brought her mother to England from
Spain, a move that prematurely deprived the woman of her zest for living and
thus, prematurely led to her death from a broken heart. Cecile further confides
she despises both her father and England and longs for the hour when she can
escape his tyrannical mismanagement of their lives to runaway to Spain. Sir
Henry is inexplicably smitten with this viperous young girl and a romance
blossoms – or so Henry believes – though it is thwarted by Stapleton’s sudden
appearance in the doorway.
Gathering
Watson, Dr. Mortimer and the Stapletons to explore an old mine nearby, Holmes
is quite certain they will find Selden hiding. But the search is cut short by a
cave-in. Seemingly, Holmes does not
survive. To everyone’s astonishment, and Watson’s great relief, Holmes has managed
to find an alternative exit. By now, Holmes has also solved the case. The
Stapletons are illegitimate descendants of Sir Hugo, next in line to inherit
the family fortune, but only if no legitimate heirs are left. Alas, Holmes is
too late to stop Cecile from luring Sir Henry to the abandoned abbey,
presumably with the promise of a great winter passion brewing for him. Only after
he has made his lustful intensions plain does Cecile reveal she has brought Sir
Henry there to die; Stapleton appearing from the shadows with the disguised
Great Dane ready to lunge and tear out his throat. The half-starved beast
attacks. But Watson draws his gun and wounds the animal. It turns on Stapleton,
mauling him to death. In the chaos, Cecile attempts an escape. She is thwarted
from getting very far, slipping into the thick and deadening slush of Grimpen
Mire; dragged down to her death as Holmes, Watson and Sir Henry look on.
Acknowledging the ordeal at an end, Holmes and Watson escort Sir Henry back to
Baskerville Hall. They have all seen the last of the hound from hell.
The Hound of the Baskervilles is rather
clumsily strung together and unprepossessing to a fault – the action
methodically paced, the exaggerated ‘scares’
neither shocking nor even mildly amusing, thus satisfying neither taste for a
clever whodunit or a traditionally gory Hammer horror movie. Again, it is the
overactive muddling of the source material that is primarily to blame. Even
setting aside Peter Cushing’s stern sleuth, the story might have endured if not
for the aforementioned liberties very liberally applied to imply something
else, different, or better afoot. While this is the first ‘color’ adaptation of
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s masterpiece, it is hardly the most comprehensive or
flattering. Rather than building arcs of suspense – or even cheaper thrills for
which most Hammer films are duly noted, and occasionally noteworthy – Peter
Bryan’s screenplay merely lunges head, then lumbers along with some momentarily
clever bits of business and fine pauses for Cushing’s Holmes to soliloquize as
he pieces the tattered remnants of this fractured adaptation together for Watson,
Sir Henry and the audience. But Bryan’s screenplay sinks under its clichéd
villainy; Ewen Solon and Marla Landi, a pair of predictable usurpers. Landi
practically foams at the mouth as she explains with gritted teeth, for the wooden-headed
Sir Henry, the plot to see him dead. Particularly for the time in which the
picture is set, Landi’s viper is all too proto-feministic in her blood-thirsty
desire to see all the Baskerville men murdered, and this, not even to avenge
Sir Hugo’s age-old wickedness. There is
not much else to add, except that Conan Doyle’s story has yet to be entirely
served up as celluloid perfection. As good as the 1939 Fox/Rathbone classic is,
it nevertheless is short on thrills too, especially in the shadow of Conan
Doyle’s novel, a real page-turner! In
1988’s Jeremy Brett /Granada TV incarnation of the elegant Mr. Holmes for the
small screen, the suspense of ‘The Hound’ equally proved elusive. Will
The Hound of the Baskervilles ever
find its way to a fittingly suspenseful big screen blockbuster? One may hope.
For certain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s super sleuth is unlikely to fade into
obscurity. In fact, in more recent times, the legacy of Sherlock Holmes has
been hotter than ever.
Were that one
could say the same about Twilight Time’s Blu-ray incarnation. Cribbing from the
same tired old elements archived by MGM under the UA banner, The Hound of the Baskervilles fairs
better than some of the other product we have seen come down the pipeline from this
alliance with TT. But the results are not so much superb as they marginally improve
on what was already available; MGM not lifting a finger to do either a new
image harvest in 4K or the necessary digital clean-up to give us a re-purposed Hound of the Baskervilles in pristine
1080p. While colors are generally bright and nicely saturated, there is really
no consistency or continuity to color balancing from shot to shot, making the
contrast between the sets and real outdoor locations even more obvious. Film
grain gets exaggerated in spots; then, all but disappears from other scenes;
its texture ranging from fairly indigenous to its source to looking slightly
digitized. Flesh tones can appear natural at times, but frequently lean toward
either copper/jaundice or ruddy orange complexions. It really is difficult to get excited about
any Blu-ray release today in which the utmost care has not been taken before
slapping tired old elements to disc for our consideration. Time and again, I
hear rumblings about MGM lacking sufficient funds to provide us with ‘restored’
and ‘remastered’ elements. Okay, I’ll bite. What is stopping MGM from engaging
outside intervention/participation from, say, the AFI, The Film Foundation, or
other charitable organizations dedicated to film preservation?
The 1.0 DTS
audio remains strident, with James Bernard’s music cues and dialogue equally as
thin and unprepossessing. TT gives us their usual ‘isolated score’ herein
plagued by the inclusion of sound effects. The goodies are two competing audio
commentaries; the first, from historians, David Del Valle and Steven Peros, and
the infinitely more astute observations made by historians, Paul Scrabo, Lee
Pfeiffer and Hank Reineke. We also get Christopher Lee reading excerpts of the
novel and a brief featurette with ‘mask creator’ Margaret Robinson reflecting
on the production, plus the original theatrical trailer. Bottom line: 1959’s The Hound of the Baskervilles is not
really up to snuff – either as a movie or Blu-ray transfer. The narrative holes
are more glaring upon repeat viewing, but even at the outset it is a real ‘tough sell’ to imagine Christopher Lee
as the objectified ‘male beauty’ of
this piece, or align our appetites with Lee’s Sir Henry, ogling the obviously
scheming, and frankly, not very seductive, Marla Landi. We get it. There are
not a lot of eligible maidens on the moors. But Landi’s Cecile so obviously
needs to be avoided like the plague – especially by Lee’s uber-intellectual. The
MGM elements used for this disc are in less than rough, but far from perfect,
shape. That is a pity. There is much Fox/MGM could have done to spruce up this
release. It’s not a washout. But realistically, it’s also 2016. We are living
in the era of UHD. Moreover, I see a good deal of ‘solid to great’ work consistently coming from the Warner Archive on
deep catalog classics. So if it can be
done (and clearly – it can) then, my argument
remains it should be done by other
studios as well. Time to expect more – a lot more – from our home viewing
experience, folks. Time enough, indeed!
FILM RATING (out of 5 – 5 being the best)
2.5
VIDEO/AUDIO
3
EXTRAS
3.5
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