Murder at the Baskervilles

This is the second Arthur Wontner-Sherlock Holmes movie I saw on a two-sided dollar DVD (The first was The Sign of Four). Silver Blaze has Holmes and Watson (Ian Fleming, no not THAT one!) visiting the Baskerville house to spend a little holiday there. The title character is a horse that a bookie doesn't want to win since he'll lose his shirt if that horse finishes first. Holmes' nemesis Prof. Moriarty (Lyn Harding), for a certain amount, will make sure that won't happen. A bit talky for my tastes until the end when Watson gets...Well, I'll just leave it to anyone who reads this to seek this movie out. The print I saw was a little better looking than The Sign of Four though it still could have used some improvements. Well worth seeing for any Holmes fans or even those who love '30s British pictures.

SILVER BLAZE was quite inappropriately retitled "MURDER AT THE BASKERVILLES" when it was released in the US in 1941. though it has nothing much to do with this great Sherlock Holmes story--other than adding the Henry Baskerville character for no apparent reason. Instead, the film is roughly Conan Doyle's "The Silver Blaze"--but with many changes--most notably the addition of Moriarty and Col. Sebastian Moran. Oddly, these characters (especially Moriarty) were included in many Holmes films even though in the books he was only a minor character (the same could be said of Inspector Lestrade). In reality, Moriarty appeared in just a few stories and was ultimately killed in a fight with Holmes mid-way through the series. Unfortunately, the addition of Moriarty didn't do much to bring excitement to the film and this master criminal seemed inexplicably involved in a very petty case that seems beneath his genius.

I really don't want to describe the plot--others have done so and IMDb has a summary. Instead, it's important to talk about the overall effort. The film was made by a "poverty row" studio (Astor Films) and sure bears the earmarks of such a cheap film. Many of the outdoor scenes are clearly sets--and not very good ones. The acting is okay, but combined with a rather dull script and music, it just seems to have no life. Now I am not necessarily blaming those who played Holmes and Watson. Holmes was much closer to the books than the flamboyant character played by Basil Rathbone and Ian Fleming managed to play a decent Watson--not a total idiot like he was in many films (though not in the books). While their performances were decent, they cannot hold a candle to the Granada Television series of the 1980s--the Jeremy Brett series was just perfect and the scripts stayed extremely close to the brilliant original stories.

So overall, this is a very watchable but jumbled film plot-wise. The acting is okay--not great but not bad, however the whole thing lacks energy. Worth seeing if you are a Holmes fan, but otherwise you'll probably find the whole thing a bit dull.

Twenty years after solving the famous 'Hound of the Baskervilles' case, Sherlock Holmes is invited to return to Baskerville Hall to take a holiday. At Watson's urging he accepts and the pair head to the West Country. They haven't been long when a stable boy working for a local race horse owner is found murdered and the prize horse, Silver Blaze, is missing. Following tracks onto the moor the horse's trainer is found dead... presumed murdered. Holmes soon begins to suspect that his arch nemesis Professor Moriarty is behind the events.

While this is far from the best Sherlock Holmes mystery it is still rather fun. Certain aspects of the story are fairly easy to figure out, such as who actually stole the horse, but others are less obvious. Arthur Wonter does a solid job as Holmes and Ian Fleming is a decent Watson. Lyn Harding isn't bad Professor Moriarty although the case does seem a little trivial for such a master criminal. Given the fact that it is over eighty years old it isn't surprising that it shows its age somewhat; but that shouldn't put anybody off. It might not be a must see but if you are a fan of inter-war cinema it passes seventy minutes nicely enough.

Murder at the Baskervilles (1937)

** (out of 4)

Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Wontner) and Dr. Watson (Ian Fleming) investigate a kidnapped horse and the murder of its trainer. Wontner appeared as Holmes in six films, although two are now lost and this one here was the last in the series. I can't say I was really impressed with that much here, although there's one very good sequence when a car is following Holmes and tries to kill him. There's some nice tension in this scene but tension is missing throughout the rest of the film, which moves at a snail's pace. It takes twenty-six minutes for the actual mystery to start and all of the introductions leading up to it are rather bland and boring. The supporting cast doesn't help matters as they add very little to the movie. Wontner on the other hand is quite good as Holmes and he certainly makes me interested in the other films in the series.

Dedicated Sherlockians on both sides of the Atlantic used to regard Arthur Wontner as the definitive Holmes. Partly this was reaction against the Basil Rathbone films, with their serial-style WWII plots and the portrait of Watson as a lovably bumbling idiot; Rathbone was admired but the films were blasphemy. By comparison, Wontner's Holmes was visually the absolute picture of the Sidney Paget illustrations that accompanied the original stories in The Strand, and at least some of the six films (not all of which survive) were faithful adaptations of notable Holmes stories not otherwise filmed.

Then... along came Jeremy Brett (also the picture of the Paget illustrations), and it had to be admitted that the Wontner films were so cheaply made that they really had nothing going for them besides Wontner, and lacked the polish and entertainment value of even the Universal Bs in the Rathbone series. Next to Brett, also, Wontner's Holmes is if anything too genial; he lacks the suffer-no-fools snappishness that is an essential part of Holmes' character. (That's especially odd considering that that's exactly the sort of character Wontner plays in his best-known role outside this series, as an acerbic ambassador in The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp.) Silver Blaze (a short story padded out much like the Brett series episodes would be) is probably the best of the bunch, and remains watchable but, now, a minor chapter in the saga of Holmes on film next to better movies starring Holmeses such as Basil Rathbone, Robert Stephens, Christopher Plummer, Ian Richardson and, best of all, Jeremy Brett.