Year of the Month
Cozily Gothic comfort viewing, with one of the silver screen's best versions of Sherlock Holmes.
Terence Fisher’s The Hound of the Baskervilles is like a crackling fire on a cold winter’s day: a pleasure that’s all the cozier because it’s obviously a human creation.
The film has its faults—there’s some built-in classism, and more pressingly, the female lead appears to have been written and directed under the misconception that women are baffling, alien creatures—but its hominess and affectionate craftmanship win out over what should be real problems. I think it’s pretty good; I know I enjoy watching it.
Part of its appeal is the production company. This is a Hammer film, and it feels like one. Hammer was best-known for its horror, and The Hound of the Baskervilles is the eeriest Holmes story: Fisher rarely pushes his adaptation further than “spooky” and “a bit tense,” but with Hammer’s reputation to back him, he leans into the tale’s Gothic overtones.
There’s a campfire story quality to the opener, which sees David Oxley’s brash, vile Sir Hugo Baskerville guffawing and smirking his way through an evil dinner party, complete with a spot of servant torture: the man objected to Sir Hugo imprisoning his daughter for future assault, and how dare he question his betters? This is one of the scenes where the movie finds a perfect balance between camp—just enough for pleasure—and realism—just enough to connect. Sir Hugo is so instantly, showily villainous—he’s introduced hurling his servant through a stained-glass window out into a moat—that at first the presentation of his awfulness feels playful; he’s a menacing shadow puppet cast on the wall. But both Oxley and the script are good at finding key moments to press his portrayal further. The truth of Sir Hugo goes beyond bluster and loutishness. It’s the snarl on his face as he holds a struggling man above a lit fire; it’s the cold fury he displays when the “bitch” upstairs gets away.
The last is a party-ender, even for his dissipated and dissolute peers who were happy to applaud torture and rape. When Sir Hugo sets the hounds on the escaped girl, effectively signing her death warrant, even these guys have to object. It’s somehow not fun anymore—not for them and not for us. There’s a bubbling-up of the possibility of real danger.
But only for a moment, because The Hound of the Baskervilles wants to produce an occasional shudder, not a lasting, bone-deep chill. It swiftly moves on to more karmic Gothic delights, as Sir Hugo meets his own ghastly (and ghostly) fate out on in the ruins on the moor. We’re back on safe ground again, back to the satisfaction of well-deployed conventions.
The movie will pull off this same move more than once, allowing in an emotion or idea beyond the borders of the familiar—enough for effect—and then settling back into something more standard. I can see how this could annoy some viewers—after all, I’m effectively saying that the film sometimes gets more ambitious and honest and then shrugs it off—but this strategy makes The Hound of the Baskervilles comfort viewing for me. It’s hard for me to relax into a film that refuses to acknowledge the rockier or more painful sides of life, but if it’s immersed in those ideas, it’s not usually all that comforting. This strikes the right note: comfort viewing that acknowledges, at least a little, that there’s a reason to want comfort.
The film’s enjoyment of its own artificiality—its sets, its theatricality, its familiar character types—helps contain and contextualize. It’s a reminder that fiction, maybe especially in the form of a detective story, has been helping a lot of people deal with the discomforts and evils of the real world for a very long time.
Which brings me to the movie’s most beloved bit of artificiality: Sherlock Holmes. There’s an embedded sense that part of the fun of any Holmes adaptation is judging how well this one does it, and in particular how well it does Holmes and Watson. I have nothing but warm approval for Peter Cushing and André Morell in their respective roles. Cushing captures Holmes’s brilliance and impatience, even giving him an entertaining bitchy streak, but he doesn’t neglect his sense of compassion and occasional warmth. (A lesser adaptation with a lesser actor wouldn’t include the moment where Holmes spares some regret for a murderer who drowns in the mire, let alone the one where the idea of bringing the full force of the law down on the criminal’s grieving family is raised and brusquely dismissed.)
Morell is likewise a good Watson, too well-written and well-performed to fall into the dullard trap. He’s not as sharp as Sherlock Holmes, but then, who is? He’s a bit more ordinary and a bit more garrulous, and he’ll accept an oddity without pressing to find out what’s behind it—but he recognizes the oddity, enough to identify it when Holmes asks what sticks out as a problem, and he’s responsible, reliable, and good to have around. There are maybe better Holmes pieces for the Holmes and Watson relationship specifically—in The Hound of the Baskervilles, both book and movie, they spend quite a bit of time apart—but this is about as good as it gets in terms of individual portrayals, and their friendship has the affectionate, lived-in quality it needs.
If Cushing and Morrell are two of the best pleasure of The Hound of the Baskervilles in its “let me tell you a story” mode, Christopher Lee—urbane and ambiguously likable—is the best in its “forget for a second that you’re watching a movie” mode. Lee could, as any look at his filmography shows, get along splendidly with Hammer’s enthusiastic theatricality, but here, as the arrogant but imperiled heir to the Baskerville fortune, he avoids both the style’s excess and its reliability. He isn’t comfort viewing, because he never seems comfortable. There’s a mercurial, live-wire quality to his performance, as though danger exists alongside the aristocratic contempt he’s introduced with; he has his good points, but there always seems to be the risk of the other side winning out. It’s like Lee’s acting in a parallel movie about whether or not a man who’s lived a steelier and perhaps deadlier life can ever take on, let alone be happy with, the role of an English country squire.1 He’s unpredictable, and not only because audiences can be guaranteed to be less familiar with him. He provides some frisson to make this stand out as something other than “well-executed” and “just what I wanted.”
It really is well-executed, though, and I know I’ll watch it again and again for that as well as for Lee. Cushing’s performance is everything I want from a cinematic Holmes. The cinematography has some memorable details, like the shot of a lonely light out on the moors. The gothic flourishes, like the Grimpen mire or the foggy nighttime opening, are delightful, as pleasantly creepy as bits of Halloween décor. And it all ends where it should, with Holmes and Watson around the table, and Holmes offering Watson a muffin, the episode and its upset at an end and the cozy domesticity reestablished. There will be other adventures, the end seems to say, but for now, wasn’t that a good story?
The Hound of the Baskervilles is streaming on Tubi.
About the writer
Lauren James
Lauren James is a writer who wears many different hats (and pen names). She lives in Connecticut with her wife and two cats.
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Adds to my list as a fan of various and sundry Sherlocks.
I think you’ll like it! I’m sorry for Cushing’s sake (and for mine, as a fan) that this didn’t lead to a whole Hammer series of Sherlock Holmes adaptations: he was so enthusiastic about the role that it had to have been a huge disappoint. He got to play Holmes again eventually, but only more towards the end of his life, IIRC.
What did we watch?
Blackmail – A woman, frustrated with her Scotland Yard boyfriend’s inattention, has a date with an artist. The artist tries to rape her, and she kills him, and then tries to hide her guilt. Only first her boyfriend and then a neer do well find out, and the latter tries to blackmail her. An early Hitchcock film that shows sparks of what is to come here and there, but that struggles to stay engaging. Though this is in part because it was initially a silent movie – the first eight minutes don’t have a single spoken word – and Hitch was asked to remake things to use the new technology. So even if it’s not a great movie, it’s a landmark, not just Hitch’s first talkie but regarded as the UK’s first fully talkie.
Slow Horses, “From Upshott with Love” – River and Jackson make progress separately and together on connecting the dots about possible Soviet sleepers, with Jackson making a deal with his bete noir in MI5 to get River an actual mission profile. Meanwhile, the sad sack of the Horses, Min Harper, is left in a cliffhanger facing a Russian gun. Things continue to flow well and the story plays nicely off Jackson’s memories of the Cold War (even if suggestions of the UK staying neutral in dealing with present day Russia aged badly and overnight).
Frasier, “Taps at the Montana” – Niles moves back into his apartment, only to face the possibility of being kicked out by a stodgy tenants board (do rentals have such boards?). So Niles throws a party to make nice. Clearly, Niles learned nothing from his failure to even organize a party the previous episode. Mild farce, including the deaths of Niles’s pet bird and the worst of the old fogeys, ensues. Mid-level episode meant mainly to restore the status quo for Niles.
Andor S1E4 – Introduces lots of new players to the mix, perhaps too many, but the plot is moving along, especially the crime Cassian will be part of, finding out that Luthen has a cover identity as an unctuous gallery owner, and where the Rebellion is getting their money from. Some nice nuances too here, including Cyril having an apparently loving mother and how Major Partagaz acknowledges security officer Dedra is facing a higher job standard due to sexism, but she also needs to learn to deal with it. Andor so far feels like a study in how bureaucratic and informal leftist orgs handle leadership – Partagaz is blunt yet knows how to praise and manage his officers, meanwhile Luthen is blunt and more ruthless. This is the way we’re doing it, keep moving.
Justified, Season Two, Episode Twelve, “Reckoning”
“Raylan, I can’t let you hurt a prisoner.” / “I’m sorry. Won’t happen again.”
Raylan ends up on probationary coolness this episode. He locks his grief into the task of finding Dickie; at first I wondered if he wasn’t genuinely being cold, but then he starts to break when interrogating Jed (and of course, he starts beating the shit out of Arlo until catching himself). But otherwise, he’s locked fully onto finding Dickie, something that steadies his hand. What I’ve learned about being goal-oriented the past couple of years is that, more than anything else, it calms your emotions, particularly if you’re more invested in the action you’re doing than any specific outcome (I understand that’s called intrinsic motivation over extrinsic). We normally see Raylan deep in that in the episodic plots; here, he finally finds it again.
The question becomes – is his end-goal to kill Dickie (which would fuck himself over deeply), or is it to catch him? That wavers over the episode until we finally get there and find it was the former, until he realises a) how little Helen would approve of what he’s doing and b) how much of a betrayal of himself it would be. I noticed how much of the character motivations this episode (and indeed most of this plot) were about wanting to be a kind of person. Dickie, Mags, Arlo; these people all have the American Dream in the back of their heads, in a fashion. They want domain, they want power, they want to be the Head Motherfucker In Charge. I thought about how despairing it must be, to be American, and have that over your head at all times.
Raylan points to a different kind of person to be – domain over the self. His usual coolness comes, appropriately, from being coolheaded – in control of himself, letting go of control over others, and acting on reason in pursuit of a specific and quantifiable goal rather than anger. His control over other people is a byproduct over self-control. Mags, Dickie, and Arlo justify what they do based upon the fact that bad things happened to them once; Raylan justifies what he does because it gets him what he wants and has the least amount of collateral damage.
(It’s also notable that Angie gave Raylan the money to get the fuck out of Dodge. That’s an essential element to the story. Poverty is a cycle.)
Biggest Laugh: No Art and it wasn’t really a funny episode.
Top Ownage: Raylan brings himself back from killing Dickie, but doesn’t resist hitting him. Also, beating the shit out of Arlo.
Great little beat when Arlo says (I think sincerely) that he was happy with Helen. And yes, it kind of owns if you win even a bit of that dream, if you haven’t woken up a bit – – I have espoused to my fellow millennials that we constantly complain* about not getting houses and that yeah, we didn’t get mortgages, but we could be liberated from the hamster wheel the tiniest bit compared to the boomer parents.
*no, fuck it, we whine, this is the one thing millennials do that their critics grasp but misinterpret – it’s not like we weren’t “cheated” out of greater economic capital but we often appear incredibly passive about it.
“Not a day went by we weren’t tearing strips off each other. But that was our dance.”
The PBS Baskervilles haunted me as a kid in part because the drowning is shown in full – one of many texts that convinced me bogs and quicksand would be a huge problem in life.
Oh, yeah. Quicksand, anacondas, and sharks are all movie-induced fears I had from an early age despite living in the American Midwest.
I lived in New Hampshire so Jaws did strike me in the heart a bit! (Plus going to Martha’s Vineyard once.)