This classic Sherlock Holmes film from Hollywood’s annus mirabilis 1939 is remarkable for two reasons: it is the first to feature Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Watson, and it is perhaps the film most faithful to a Conan Doyle original. Fox’s attention to recreating the novel’s tale of a family curse and a mythic creature on the moors extended to casting British actors in the lead roles and hiring a British screenwriter. Director Sidney Lanfield (best known for comedies) sustains the film’s taut atmosphere with his sparing use of music and a top-notch cast of character actors including John Carradine and Lionel Atwill. The film was successful enough to generate a follow-up later the same year; these two films in turn gave birth to the Rathbone/Bruce series for Universal in the 1940s.

Beginning in the mid-1950s, Britain’s Hammer Films released a string of horror films prized for their brooding atmosphere. Accordingly, Hammer’s Holmes adaptation is based on the most Gothic of Conan Doyle’s writings. Terence Fisher is recognized as the most striking of the directors to work for Hammer; here he makes the most of the story’s supernatural aspects and the film’s setting on England’s atmospheric moors. Besides being the first Holmes movie shot in color, The Hound of the Baskervilles also features a fine Holmes in Peter Cushing, who had already starred in a handful of Hammer films as the nemesis of various supernatural villains played by Christopher Lee. Here Lee appears in a sympathetic role, as Sir Henry Baskerville, who turns to Holmes for help fighting a family curse.