The Hound of the Baskervilles - 1959

 I'm currently reading a huge collection of every Sherlock Holmes book ever written by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  There are 54 short 10-20 page individual adventures, as well as four longer but still relatively short 100ish page stories.  The Hound of the Baskervilles is the third Sherlock Holmes longer book style adventure, and I just finished it before watching this movie.

In the Sherlock adventures, it's all about deduction, right?  Sherlock arrives on the scene, and with a uncanny alertness, he notices small details which for him paint a specific picture from which he can deduce certain facts, i.e. the man was short because of the distance between his footsteps.

The Hound of the Baskervilles is probably my least favorite of the books so far, let's start off with that.  It's about 100 pages, and maybe 30 pages in Holmes separates from Watson, sending him on to investigate the details of the case.  We always follow Watson in these adventures, so we are privy to his own private investigations, and the letters and conference he has with others while Holmes is away.  Then, in the last 20ish pages or so, Holmes finally returns.

This is duplicated in the movie, and it is really apparent that it is only done because of Holmes' hitherto flawless ability to solve things, and of course to solve things rather quickly.  It would never be a 100 page story if it followed the other writings format, Holmes would just deduce this and that and know the killer before there was any real mystery or horror.

This is of course a mixed blessing, as the atmosphere is built on for a while and we're allowed the liberty of seeing the mystery grow without knowing what happened.  However, it also gets a little plodding and repetitive, with literally a few multiple page-long letters about this or that, which are incredibly tedious to read.  

Luckily those are taken out in the movie, and instead replaced with a long mining shaft scene where Holmes is trapped and presumed dead after killing the Hound.  Peter Cushing is Holmes, Christopher Lee is Henry Baskervilles, and Watson is there too, and this Hammer production looks pretty awesome.

Overall, not much of a movie review, but it's decent, I'd say probably better than the book, and the atmosphere is good.  It's hard to say precisely what happened, and the book is more clear, but it's a fine Holmes-ian adventure of the finest sort.