Tag: Basil Rathbone

The Basil Rathbone Hound of the Baskervilles

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, TV & Movies, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I grew up with Jeremy Brett as the quintessential Sherlock Holmes and I still think that he is—especially his early portrayals of Holmes. In my youth, though, I met people who held that Basil Rathbone was the quintessential Holmes. Eventually this intrigued me enough to look into it.

Basil Rathbone played Holmes fourteen times, though (from what I’ve read) only the first two were big(ish) budget movies which attempted to the faithful to the Conan Doyle stories. The first, and by some accounts, the greatest, of the Basil Rathbone Holmes movies was The Hound of the Baskervilles. So I bought a copy and watched it.

I can definitely see the attraction to Basil Rathbone’s portrayal of Holmes. It doesn’t have Jeremy Brett’s energy and intensity, but he probably looks the part a little more than Jeremy Brett did and he does portray Holmes’ intelligence and confidence as well as Brett did.

The movie itself was curious. There were a few parts which were more faithful to the original story than in the Jeremy Brett version, but for the most part it was considerably less faithful. I think that the unfaithful parts were primarily about making the movie shorter—it had a running time of only an hour and twenty minutes. (The Jeremy Brett version was a full twenty five minutes longer.)

The section with the escaped convict was shortened; we heard nothing about the escaped convict before we saw him and he was discovered almost immediately, as was the connection between Barryman and the convict. In the novel, this formed a considerable part of the initial mystery which Watson investigated. They also omitted Watson’s investigations of the figure who turned out to be Holmes; they had Holmes show up as a peddler trying to sell odds and ends and then leave a note for Watson to come to his hut. Oh, and they also omitted Laura Lyons and completely left out the question of the murder of Sir Charles Baskerville. (I think that this omission is why they added Stapleton trying to shoot Sir Henry with a revolver in London; it gave Holmes a reason to go to Baskerville Hall that wasn’t investigating Sir Charles’ death.)

Also curious was the choice to turns Stapleton’s “sister” into his actual sister. And they had her marry Sir Henry Baskerville. It’s tempting to think that this was meant to make the story more exciting by introducing an uncomplicated romance into the story, but I think that it may have been more about trying to shorten the story. By making turning the relationship into an uncomplicated romance they needed to spend considerably less time on it.

By contrast, I think that the change from exposing Sir Henry to danger from fog to exposing Sir Henry to danger from a broken carriage wheel (and Holmes and Watson arriving late) was really just about saving money. In 1939, it would have been expensive to create a convincing amount of fog. Not impossible, of course; dry ice was commercially manufactured in the US starting in 1925 and putting dry ice into water is a decent way of producing a fair amount of fog. (There are others, and I couldn’t easily find the history of them to know when they were first produced.)

I suspect that cost savings is also why they didn’t get a particularly large dog nor did they put any kind of glowing material on him. (I actually wonder whether they put glowing material on the dog in the Jeremy Brett version; the effect looks a bit weird and it’s possible that it was applied in post-production.)

I’m at a loss to explain why, after Sir Henry Baskerville was mauled by the hound and Holmes and Watson shot the hound, they then had Holmes get imprisoned in the hound’s cave, Stapleton go to Sir Henry and tell Watson Holmes wanted him, then Stapleton try to poison Sir Henry only for Holmes to show up and knock the glass out of Sir Henry’s hand. The speech that Dr. Mortimer gave about how Sherlock Holmes is the greatest Englishman and every man, woman, and child in England sleeps better knowing that Sherlock Holmes is watching over them—that’s not quite the speech, but it’s of that ilk. Anyway, The reason for that speech also escapes me.

For all that, it’s an enjoyable movie.

The timing of it is interesting to consider. It came out in March of 1939, which places it shortly before the start of World War 2 and almost two years before America would enter the war. The Great Depression was in many ways over (at least by economic metrics) though people did not think of the hard times as having past. It had been thirty-seven years since The Hound of the Baskervilles had been published and twelve years since the final Holmes short story was published (The Adventure of Schoscombe Old Place). This, too, may have had an influence on all of the changes. When a thing is sufficiently new, people are more inclined to variation for the sake of it; if you want the original it’s reasonably fresh itself. When enough time passes, faithfulness to the original becomes more valued.

I don’t want to overstate that; true fans of a work will always look for faithfulness in movie adaptations and when things come out of copyright there are always very loose adaptations because that’s easier than writing original stories. For all that, though, I think that there is something to what I said, and the timing of the Basil Rathbone version had some influence on how much of it was changed.

That said, it is interesting to note that—according to Wikipedia—this was the first Holmes film to be set in Victorian times, rather than to be made contemporaneous.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the grand conclusion that I feel like I should have at this point. It’s an interesting film; mostly at this point for historical reasons. I can’t imagine preferring this to the Jeremy Brett version. On the other hand, it probably did help to increase Sherlock Holmes’ popularity; it’s possible for movies to help readership of a book among people who never saw the film. I certainly recommend it if you’re interested in the history of film, detective fiction, or both.

The Woman in Green

On By Christopher LansdownIn Mystery, TV & Movies3 Comments

I recently watched the Basil Rathbone / Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movie, The Woman in Green. Released on the 27th of July, 1945, it was the eleventh Sherlock Holmes film in the series starring Rathbone and Bruce.

Interestingly, there were fourteen films in the series and they were released between 1939 and 1946. Though it wasn’t on a perfectly regular schedule, that’s an average of one movie per 6.85 months. It’s also curious that this ran from very slightly before World War II to very slightly after it—it’s curious in particular because the second world war is generally taken as the end of the golden age of detective fiction. With it, tastes changed.

In fact, the Wikipedia article on the series says something about this—the first two films were made by 20th Century Fox while the remaining twelve were made by Universal Studios, and part of the explanation given for why Fox lost interest was:

their decision to withdraw from further productions was also because the Second World War meant that “foreign agents and spies were much more typical and topical than the antiquated criminal activities of Moriarty and the like”.

Anyway, it was very interesting seeing the series I’d heard about before, with Basil Rathbone being the definitive Sherlock Holmes until Jeremy Brett came along. Supposedly there are those who still prefer Rathbone, but for my money Jeremy Brett perfectly captured the Holmes of the stories. Or at least in the first two series; Brett’s declining health did negatively affect the later Holmes films.

But even with Jeremy Brett being the better Sherlock Holmes, Basil Rathbone had a larger impact, and in that sense was definitive. This is especially true of references in other works, including parodies and spoofs; people who have never seen Basil Rathbone’s portrayal of Sherlock Holmes have seen imitations of it. It’s probably also a large contributor to the phrase “Elementary, my dear Watson” being well known (since it never appears in the original stories).

The Basil Rathbone / Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies are especially curious, as the definitive Sherlock Holmes, because they’re not at all faithful to the original Conan Doyle stories. They sometimes borrow plot elements from the original stories, but are mostly just original creations.

Also very interesting is that after the first two, they were updated to modern times—modern at the time they were made, that is. People drove around in cars, rather than horse-drawn cabs, and made frequent use of the telephone. This has a curious effect since the mid-1940s is a time which is now a historical setting for us. Instead of being in the distant past of the Victorian times, it’s in the distant past of the 1940s; it still feels quite old. In fat, 1945 is 55 years away from 1890 but 73 years away from March of 2019, in which year I’m writing this post. The updated setting is still closer, culturally and technologically, to the original stories than it is to the modern day.

As to the specifics, I think that Basil Rathbone does a good job as Holmes. I do dislike the bufoonish character that Watson was turned into, though Nigel Bruce did play that character well.

The story is a curious one. Since readers will have had at least 73 years to have seen the movie, I will not withhold spoilers. And there isn’t much of a point to it; figuring out what’s going on takes up only about the first third of the story.

There is a series of murders of young women going on in London, with nothing to connect the women except that in each case the right forefinger is surgically removed after death. The police can make nothing of it and call Sherlock Holmes in to investigate. As Inspector Gregson is talking with Sherlock Holmes over a drink in a particular bar, they see Sir George Ferrick with a young lady. He leaves with the young lady, goes to her (remarkably luxurious and spacious) apartment, they talk over music and wine, and then Sir George wakes up in a cheap boarding house right next to the scene of one of the murders. He goes back to the apartment of the young woman and asks what happened last night. She tells him that he seemed offended and left in a distracted mood. Then a man enters the apartment and talks with Ferrick. He claims to have seem Ferrick murder the young woman and returns something which he claims Ferrick dropped when putting the severed finger into his pocket. He blackmails Ferrick.

Then a young woman who turns out to be the daughter of Sir George comes to Sherlock Holmes and tells him the story of her seeing her father bury something in the garden and how she dug it up and it turned out to be a woman’s finger, and she’s worried, and won’t he come to help. He does, but it’s too late—Sir George was murdered in his library, clutching a packet of matches from the establishment where Holmes saw him with the young woman.

Holmes deduces that the murders are set-ups to blackmail men who are somehow made to believe that they committed the murders, and that professor Moriarty is behind it.

This is about halfway through the movie, the rest of the movie is about how Holmes catches professor Moriarty.

Catching professor Moriarty involves a visit from the professor at Sherlock Holmes’s apartment, an attempt on Sherlock Holmes’s life by a hypnotized sniper from the empty building opposite, a visit to the Mesmer club, meeting the young woman who lured Sir George into the trap and hypnotized him, pretending to let her hypnotize him, and then the police rushing in to save the day, followed by Moriarty’s off-screen demise while trying to escape.

The main mystery of the story is an interesting device. The question which occupies a good ten minutes of the film—I still find it a little odd that the mystery is only half the movie, if that—is what could possibly connect these seemingly random murders. And the answer is a curious one: what connects them is nothing about the victim, but rather about the marks—the people who are being set up to be blackmailed for the crimes. It’s a clever and a workable mystery, though its solution depends almost entirely on Sherlock Holmes happening to have witnessed the titular woman in green seducing Sir George Ferrick. It does at least happen prior to the knowledge doing Holmes any good, but it’s still pure happenstance, which makes it not very satisfying.

Ultimately, the movie is not really about the mystery nearly so much as it is about showing off Basil Rathbone playing Sherlock Holmes. Which works for a movie, since Basil Rathbone is very charismatic.

Ultimately, I wouldn’t recommend the movie except for historical purposes, but I will say that it is quite interesting for those purposes.