 For filmmakers, Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel The Hound of the Baskervilles has merits that place it out of the ordinary in the Sherlock Holmes canon. The story is already familiar to many people in outline even if they have never read the book, thanks to earlier films and other adaptations. It is a full length novel rather than a short story and so can afford to dwell on the development of character, atmosphere, and location. The action is bookended by the familiar Holmesian London settings of the Baker Street lodgings, Hotels, messenger offices, and Hansom cabs, but the extended central section describing the unfolding and solving of the mystery happens on a gaunt, autumnal, granite strewn, Dartmoor — a place haunted by ancient curses and inhabited by people who may never be quite what they seem to be. The great convict prison at Princetown looms in the distance and at the heart of the Moor is a treacherous swamp, the Great Grimpen Mire, where to place a foot or a hoof wrong is to risk being pulled gulping helplessly into the slimy depths. Sherlock Holmes himself is absent for a large part of the investigation, or so Dr Watson believes while he acts as investigator, security advisor, and houseguest to Sir Henry Baskerville, the new master of Baskerville Hall, an ancestral mansion that stands at the very edge of the bleak Moor. Watson endeavours to unpick the sinister threat to the life of his host, young Sir Henry, whose uncle Sir Charles Baskerville has recently died in circumstances about which spectral, hound-related, suspicions have arisen. We eventually learn that Holmes has been busy conducting his own parallel investigation, partly from Baker Street and partly while staying incognito in a local Devon town or bivouacking on the Moor itself. Watson and he are reunited for the terrifying dénouement where the demonic Hound is finally seen in material form and destroyed. So for a significant chunk of the novel, Watson is in the foreground both in his usual role as narrator and as the lone (he thinks) investigator. This may raise a problem for screen adaptation. If Holmes is not seen to be ferreting around for clues with his magnifying glass and craftily questioning suspects, how is it a Sherlock Holmes story? If his undercover activities are portrayed explicitly, parts of the puzzle are revealed and elements of plot tension are lost. Some adaptations seem to have simply thrown all the elements of the story up in the air and strung them together however they landed, or made major and invariably ill-advised changes to character and plot.  IT'S A STICK UP — Dr Watson ponders the identity of Dr Mortimer: clockwise from top left: Nigel Bruce with Basil Rathbone as Holmes; Donald Churchill with Ian Richardson; Vitali Solomin with Vasili Livanov; Edward Hardwicke For many viewers the quintessential screen Holmes is Basil Rathbone, who had a stab at The Hound in 1939 (dir. Sidney Lanfield). The problem with the Rathbone films for a modern audience (or even a discerning audience at the time) is that although Rathbone’s own appearance and characterisation are superb he is saddled with a preposterous friend and partner in the person of Nigel Bruce’s bumbling nincompoop of a Watson, who is mostly of limited assistance beyond brandishing a revolver and isn’t funny either. Unfortunately the long shadow of this reductive caricature persisted through a number of Bruce’s mid-century successors in the role. Through the 1950s and 60s, however, a more informed and nuanced reading of the characters and stories had emerged, and by the 1980s two great television embodiments of Holmes had appeared. In Britain, the Granada TV series conceived by the imaginative and tenacious producer Michael Cox with Jeremy Brett as Holmes was launched, while in the Soviet Union the prestigious Lenfilm studio created their series starring Vasili Livanov, directed and largely written by Igor Maslennikov. Livanov came from an artistic family and had worked prolifically as a theatre and film actor. He was also a successful director and voice actor in animated film, so had an astute awareness of the value of framing, movement, and the timing of dialogue. Granada and Jeremy Brett had two excellent Watsons — David Burke in the early series and later Edward Hardwicke. Lenfilm and Livanov had the reliable and prepossessing classically trained actor Vitali Solomin as Watson. Both these series took on The Hound of the Baskervilles and gave it memorable feature length treatments that in their essentials were true to Doyle’s text. In spite of, and maybe also partly because of, being the creator of the great rational detective, Conan Doyle was fascinated by the supernatural, famously championing the authenticity of the Cottingley Fairy photographs in 1921 and defending the claims of spiritualism. The first two chapters of The Hound toy with the idea that there may be a supernatural rather than a criminal event at the heart of the mystery, and a residual whiff of the ancient and the uncanny pervades the book right through to the final slaying of the Hound. Granada’s writer Trevor Bowen and actor Jeremy Brett do not neglect to explore the resonances of this otherworldly trace during the opening scenes of their Hound film, although these echoes of a gothic undercurrent unfortunately become muted or absent as the film progresses. Having been briefed about the case in the opening scene by Dr Mortimer (the Dartmoor doctor whose very name signifies death) Holmes spends a day closeted in the Baker Street apartment, thinking about the case and smoking his pipe. As a result, the room, when Watson returns after a day at his club, contains a dense fog to rival any that might be found in a London back alley or a Dartmoor culvert, a metaphorical pointer to the ontological mystery that shrouds the legend of the demonic hound. Holmes has a large map of Dartmoor pinned up on an easel. He points out to Watson the position of Baskerville Hall and various dwellings and topographical features that he needs to familiarise himself with. "And all the rest..." Holmes concludes, "is waste." Jeremy Brett brilliantly draws out the final word and lets it die on the air, conjuring in that single sound the misty granite expanses of the desolate primeval Moor. The two men briefly ponder the possibility of a supernatural explanation and then move on, but without explicitly dismissing it. The Granada TV Hound has Edward Hardwicke as Watson and a strong supporting cast including James Faulkner as the villain Stapleton, and Ronald Pickup and Rosemary McHale as John and Eliza Barrymore, the laconic butler and nocturnally weeping housekeeper of Baskerville Hall.  THE BUTLER DIDN'T DO IT — left to right: Rosemary McHale; Ronald Pickup; Svetlana Kryuchkova; Aleksandr Adabashyan. The novel’s plot plays with the notion that the Barrymores may be implicated in the dark threat that imperils their master. But Watson uncovers the truth that their troubles involve a more private grief. The escaped convict Seldon, whose presence on the Moor is disturbing the locality just as much as sightings of the dreadful Hound, is the younger brother of Eliza Barrymore and was incarcerated years before for the brutal slaying of a family in London. Dr Watson and Sir Henry Baskerville are moved by Eliza Barrymore’s tears and by John Barrymore’s persuasive entreaties that the child-like Seldon is no longer dangerous and anyway will soon be out of the country. The Baronet and Watson reluctantly agree not to inform the police of Seldon’s whereabouts. This is a somewhat unconvincing turnabout by Watson and the Baronet in the novel, but Bowen’s script brilliantly adds a clinching argument not found in Doyle — "They done surgery on ‘im, Sir, to tame ‘im" pleads Pickup’s gentle and dutiful John Barrymore, and when later we briefly see Seldon after his death he indeed has a scar encircling his brow. Granada shot their Moor locations not on Dartmoor but in the uplands of Yorkshire, a quick hop by 4x4 from their permanent studios in Manchester. This is a near enough substitution to satisfy most viewers, although the true Dartmoor’s angular ruggedness is absent. More troubling is the seasonal shift evidenced by one shot revealing a garden full of daffodils in bloom. The Hound is a quintessentially autumnal story in mood, the main action playing out on Dartmoor in October and the Baker Street “retrospective” taking place on a foggy night before a roaring fire at the end of November. Gloom and foreboding are the tale’s characteristic hues and the location landscapes in Granada’s film are mostly too verdantly bland. Happily, the interiors and exteriors of Baskerville Hall are atmospherically realised, including one striking flashback shot of Dr Mortimer’s trap careering along a flame lit driveway to the Hall on the night of old Sir Charles’ death with Mr Barrymore cantering ahead. Despite such occasional evocative flashes, the direction does mainly deliver routine by-the-book continuity editing and is short on imaginative or exhilarating moments, and writer Trevor Bowen has expressed disappointment with how his vision was translated to the screen by Granada and staff director Brian Mills. Likewise Jeremy Brett, already suffering the early stages of the physical and mental ill health that would destroy him, was not satisfied with the film and remarked ruefully that he would have liked to have had another shot at The Hound. He was particularly scathing about the unfortunate dog that portrayed the Hound. Apparently the key question of how the final appearance of the Hound would be achieved, instead of being discussed and settled at the starting point of pre-production work, was decided piecemeal during the shoot. Conan Doyle describes a cross between a mastiff and a bloodhound but bigger than either, the size of a small lioness, and Paget’s illustration shows a huge heavily built animal. What we see all too clearly in Granada’s film is visibly a svelte Great Dane. True, Danes are the tallest real dog available but they are not proportionally wide and a somewhat smaller but more heavily built dog ingeniously shot and edited, or a good animatronic, would have served better. Although there is a fairly convincing optical effect to simulate the daubing of phosphorus on the hound, its final appearance and demise is shot in a rather pedestrian sequence that fails to get anywhere near the horror of the novel’s description of the event: "Not such a hound as mortal eyes have ever seen… Never in the delirious dream of a disordered brain could anything more savage, more appalling, more hellish, be conceived than that dark form and savage face..." Possibly the problem for film adaptors of The Hound is that the monstrosity that hurtles out of the fog is indeed, both on the page and in Conan Doyle’s imagination, an authentically supernatural terror that only becomes a dog daubed with phosphorus once it has been dispatched by being riddled with revolver bullets. As Watson/Doyle writes: "…that cry of pain from the hound had blown all our fears to the winds. If he was vulnerable he was mortal" explicitly signifying that until that very moment there was still doubt about the matter. What are largely absent from Granada TV’s film are sufficient prickles of gothic menace to suggest the chilling possibility that The Hound of the Baskervilles is simultaneously a yarn about a cunning criminal enterprise and a historical ghost story. First-hand accounts suggest that by 1988 Granada TV were at a stage with the Jeremy Brett Holmes dramas where the money-men felt obliged to keep the series trundling along on its reputation while the company penny pinched wherever they could. In the novel, Inspector Lestrade, longstanding target for Holmes’ intermittent sarcasm, arrives by train from London bearing an unsigned warrant to add the weight of the law to Holmes’ thwarting of the villainous Jack Stapleton. Granada’s regular Lestrade was unavailable so the peculiar contrivance was adopted of having the local doctor, Dr Mortimer, join Holmes and Watson’s arrest party, rather than employing another actor for a day or two to portray an alternative London police Inspector. The presence of a legal authority figure is important to the tension and weight of the scene, and the substitution of Dr Mortimer for Lestrade makes it look like a gentlemen’s adventure and not a legally sanctioned armed stake out. An economy that arguably serves the Granada film well is the decision not to dramatize and show the 17th century origin of the demonic Hound legend, as recounted on the antique scroll in the possession of Dr Mortimer. While it seems intuitive to assume that film is a medium ideally placed to visualise this chilling episode (and most adaptions have done so) this can disrupt the focus on Holmes and Watson’s reception of the case and the viewers’ orientation, and unless done superbly may dilute the impact of the legend and reduce it to a Merrie England tally-ho romp. It is, after all, a brutal story of privilege, kidnap, and intended rape ending in murder. Lenfilm do very successfully include flashbacks to the origin legend — this works well because Maslennikov shoots and edits the sequence as an accelerated nightmare rather than a picturesque costume drama caper such as we see in Hammer’s 1959 Hound of the Beskervilles (dir. Terence Fisher). Granada’s Hound falls short of achieving the spinetingling frissons of gothic darkness and dread that ran through their own earlier and far more accomplished feature-length Sign of Four (dir. Peter Hammond). Nevertheless it is a version that insofar as it succeeds does so by substantially placing its trust in Conan Doyle’s telling of the story and rendering of the characters. Jeremy Brett is on lively and sometimes sparkling, if not absolutely top, form. Edward Hardwicke, as ever, consolidates the Granada series restoration of Watson’s decency, intelligence, and humanitarian kindness. Non-Russian newcomers to Lenfilm’s Sherlock Holmes films, and particularly those expecting a conventional and realistic Holmesian universe, may initially find themselves slightly startled on encountering the Baltic character of Baker Street and other exteriors, albeit they are dressed with painstaking attention to detail using authentic red post boxes and immaculately correct English language signage, and peopled by authentically costumed extras such as Victorian London bobbies, red-coat soldiers, and scruffy urchins.  BEASTLY PROSPEKT. Lenfilm's Grimpen hamlet, an abundance of mud, slush, and red post boxes. Vasili Livanov is now widely recognised as one of the greatest interpreters of Sherlock Holmes and he and Vitali Solomin were both born to play their roles. Livanov has less angular features than Brett and plays Holmes as more centred and less mercurial, although certainly a man of action as well as intellect. As Watson, Solomin is instantly a convincing and sympathetic incarnation of the young ex-colonial Doctor. The series also gives Mrs Hudson —Rina Zelyonaya— a more active role than is often customary and more depth of character, amusingly indicating that she has understood the basics of Holmes’s deductive methods long before Watson’s arrival as a novice. Mrs Hudson appears neither in the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles or the Granada film, although we might expect her to show Dr Mortimer and his spaniel in and out of the house in the early Baker Street chapters. In Lenfilm’s version she is not only visibly on household duty, she is the member of the Baker Street menage who can swiftly locate the correct atlas page on which to find the large scale map of Dartmoor. Inspector Lestrade, played with moustachioed panache by the diminutive actor Borislav Brondukov, a master of gesture and physical comedy, features as irrepressible foil to Livanov’s Holmes throughout the Lenfilm series, including The Hound. Granada made a conscious production decision at the outset of their series to elide Holmes and Watson’s first introduction and early friendship and to eliminate Watson’s later marriage from the saga. Lenfilm chose to do the exact opposite and to present a measured account of the development of the Holmes/Watson partnership as scaffolding on which to arrange their chosen cases from the canon. Just as in the Conan Doyle stories, we see Watson meeting Holmes for the first time and moving into 221b Baker Street and we follow the two men’s partnership through Watson’s marriage to Miss Morston and eventually to the Sussex bee-keeping retirement of Holmes and the eve of the First World War. Lenfilm’s Hound of the Baskervilles, like Granada’s, largely stays close to the narrative outline of the novel. Beyond Holmes and Watson, the male characters in the Soviet film are played more broadly and somewhat closer to caricature. In particular young Sir Henry Baskerville (who as in the novel has just arrived from Canada) appears as a blunt if naïve frontiersman, complete with a drinking habit, cowhide riding chaps and an enormous fur coat, as if transplanted from a Jack London adventure or Chaplin’s Gold Rush. At one point, frustrated by Beryl Stapleton’s failure to reciprocate his courtship, he takes to horseback and rides across the Moor wildly firing off his revolver in a bout, presumably, of Freudian displacement symbolism. Nevertheless, he is also lampooned as a big baby and in a comic coda is seen being comforted and nursed in bed by the secondary characters like a spoiled little boy. The Barrymore couple, Dr Mortimer, and the meddlesome old crank Mr Frankland are all used to both sinister and comedic effect, Dr Mortimer appearing to be something of a curtain twitcher. The Grimpen village postmaster, a complacent besuited bureaucrat, affords an opportunity for some wry Russian satire as he twirls the handle of his mechanical pencil sharpener and inspects the results with more diligence and interest than he condescends to award actual post office business. There are also small sardonic nods at western culture — Dr Mortimer’s ill-fated little dog (unnamed in the novel) is called Snoopy and in the Baskerville Hall scenes there is a running joke about the dietary virtues of porridge. As in the novel (but not, as we have seen, in Granada’s film) Inspector Lestrade arrives from London for the denouement. But unlike the novel, in which he falls to the ground in terror upon seeing the Hound leaving Holmes and Watson to attend to attacking the beast, Lestrade is here the fearless professional policeman whose firepower quickly dispatches the animal after Homes and Watson have both missed their aim and the monstrous creature is already at Sir Henry’s throat. The Hound here is considerably more effectively conceived and photographed than Granada’s. It wears a skull-like demonic mask of blinding white and moves purposefully towards our point-of-view position with what seems to be a supernatural pace and gait. The Moor in Lenfilm’s Hound of the Baskervilles has little in its appearance that resembles the actual scenery of Dartmoor. Having neither the means nor the inclination to produce a simulacra of Devonshire, the Russian filmmakers place the story in an environment that, compared to the rolling Yorkshire of Granada’s film, is a bleakly sinister world that resonates powerfully with Holmes observation that “…the setting is a worthy one. If the devil did decide to have a hand in the affairs of men.”  THE GREAT GRIMPEN MIRE — Tarkovskian hellscape Everything seems to be either wet or barren. Rutted muddy roads splosh with rain and melting slush, fetid meres are fringed with gaunt and stunted conifers. Where there is not stagnant water there are bleak gullies of jagged grey stone, like quarries long abandoned as being unworkable. Unkempt fields and gardens mark the boundaries of dilapidated mansions. The deadly Grimpen Mire itself is just the most noxious and treacherous bog in a panorama of swamps — a grey and smoky Tarkovskian hellscape where the rotting remains of troglodyte industrial huts protrude from the bottomless ooze. The freedom of the Russian filmmakers to wholly reimagine Dartmoor from the atmospheric bare bones of Conan Doyle’s thriller, rather than attempting to reference the actual locations, provides a fantastic and dramatically striking look that make this a memorably successful Hound film.  BERYL IN A LOT OF PERIL — left: Fiona Gillies and Jeremy Brett; right: Irina Kupchenko and Vasili Livanov Of the significant female characters in The Hound of the Baskervilles, Beryl Stapleton is the one most often developed or transformed by film adaptors. Imbued with undercurrents of exoticism and intrigue, she is bound to the psychopathic and sadistic Stapleton while retaining moral boundaries that compel her to resist or subvert his murderous schemes. On the night of the attempt on Sir Henry’s life at the end of the book, Stapleton has whipped and gagged her and tied her to a pillar in the attic thereby supplying, for a film adaptor so inclined, an opportunity to inject a frisson of sadomasochism to add to the whiff of incest already hanging over Beryl’s shifting narrative status as sister and wife to Stapleton. Something of this psychological complexity may be intended during the rescue scene in Granada’s film when, in a briefly lingering close up of Holmes tenderly and uncharacteristically cradling Beryl’s battered head after her release, Jeremy Brett may be expressing a hint of ambiguity in the sexually ascetic detective’s expression, or it may just be perplexity at the eternal wickedness of his fellow men. In the equivalent scene in the Soviet film, Livanov's Holmes similarly supports the traumatised and injured Beryl but, as in the novel, swiftly and professionally administers that universal nineteenth century restorative, the brandy flask.  Sidney Paget's illustration of Laura Lyons confronted by Holmes and Watson Key to the plot mechanism of The Hound of the Baskervilles but not featuring prominently in the narrative is the intriguing character of Mrs Laura Lyons. The adult daughter of the cantankerous eccentric Mr Frankland, Laura married an artist called Lyons some years prior to the events of the novel and soon separated acrimoniously from him. Disowned by her father, she obtained charitable help from old Sir Charles Baskerville and others to set up as a typist (a modest but viable home-based occupation in the 1890s). Having been duped by Mr Stapleton into playing a small and unwitting role in luring Sir Charles Baskerville to his death, Laura’s name enters Dr Watson’s investigative trajectory. He learns from Dr Mortimer that Laura married the artist Lyons without seeking Frankland’s consent and that Lyons in time deserted her, although in Dr Mortimer’s view "the fault may not have been entirely" on the husband's side. Watson, then, already understands Laura to be "of equivocal reputation" before setting off to visit her at her home in the small town of Coombe Tracey. Stapleton had entrapped Laura by assuring her that he will marry her if she can obtain a divorce from Lyons, although as we later discover Stapleton is already married to Beryl whom he is currently passing off as his sister. Watson is not yet aware of the latter fact, but he does have evidence that Laura played a role in ensuring that Sir Charles was enticed into leaving the safety of Baskerville Hall on the night of his death, and is it about this that he now wishes to confront her. Dr Watson, never at a loss to voice appreciation of a desirable women when he encounters one, describes Laura Lyons like this: "The first impression... was one of extreme beauty. Her eyes and hair were of the same rich hazel colour, and her cheeks, though considerably freckled, were flushed with the exquisite bloom of the brunette, the dainty pink which lurks at the heart of the sulphur rose." Having thus not held back, he checks himself and decides to temper his enthusiasm with some secondary reservations, remarking that her face held: "some coarseness of expression... hardness, perhaps of eye... looseness of lip" which marred the perfect beauty of "a very handsome woman". Substantially holding her own in the face of Watson’s polite but tenacious interrogation, Laura sends him on his way with his investigation only slightly advanced. We meet her once more when Holmes and Watson visit her together, just hours prior to the melodramatic denouement on the Moor. This time Holmes, in a hurry and doubtless immune to the dainty pink which lurks at the heart of the sulphur rose, carries out a robust and pitiless interrogation during which he discloses the depth and cruelty of Stapleton’s abuse of Laura’s emotional and financial vulnerability.  FEMME FATALE: Alla Demidova On screen, the character of Laura Lyons should offer productive opportunities in script and casting to inject a seam of smouldering redheaded rebelliousness and equivocation. After all, this woman was brought up by Frankland, a colourful and inventive father figure if an unreliable one, and she herself made a headstrong and socially defiant decision to elope with an artist. Some adaptations have endeavoured to open out the Lyons strand of the story. A 1983 film (dir. Douglas Hickox) with Ian Richardson as a sardonic Holmes and Donald Churchill as a Watson still trapped hopelessly in the blithering nincompoop tradition, makes substantial changes to the core narrative, almost every one of them detrimental to the pacing of the unravelling of the mystery. In that version, Laura Lyons (Connie Booth) is still living with her husband, characterised as a violent drunken brute but with a heart of gold — so enabling a lamely written and rather monotonous turn by an interminably bellowing Brian Blessed, eclipsing any feminist recalibration of Laura’s situation that may have been intended. More absurdly, the script has Laura’s fatal assignation with Sir Charles be part of a developing romantic liaison instead of a petition for the elderly Baronet to finance her divorce from Lyons. Half a decade of identity politics later, the Granada/Jeremy Brett version opts for a straightforward Laura Lyons as serial victim of patriarchy approach. The two visits by the detectives are truncated into a single one with Holmes leading the questioning. Laura’s strained face evidences her “unhappy history” — neglect and rejection by her father, a brutal marriage to Mr Lyons, abusive manipulation by Stapleton, and now an aggressive interrogation by Holmes. Although sympathetically and intelligently played by Elizabeth Spender, there is nothing here approaching the erotic charge of Watson’s first description of Laura in the novel. The scripting, costume, and design and set dressing of the cottage leave the character as little more than a functionary of the detective mystery, although the scene is sympathetically amplified by a dialogue-free interlude in which Laura leaves the room to recover from shock by bathing her face. By contrast, Lenfilm’s Hound of the Baskervilles team have clearly understood that if there is a femme fatale in the story she is Laura Lyons and not Beryl Stapleton, and that this woman is an avant-garde adventurer whose history has been associated with artists and with an unconventional and rebellious lifestyle. In this version, before Watson makes his first visit to Laura he has endured a tirade of invective from Mr Frankland, who is momentarily under the misapprehension that Watson is trying to locate his daughter because he wishes to verify at first hand her promiscuous reputation. Having extricated himself from this outburst Watson arrives at Laura’s home in Coombe Tracey, is shown in by a neat maid (as in the novel), and finds himself in an elegant salon with distinctly oriental influences in both the décor and its occupant’s relaxed costume. Played with nonchalant charm by the acclaimed theatre and film actress Alla Demidova, this Laura Lyons may easily be believed to be as much adventurer as victim. She sizes up Watson with an experienced eye and when his questions move into uncomfortable territory she coolly produces an elegant long stem pipe and plays for time by filling and lighting it. For the second visit to Laura at the climax of the story Lenfilm dispense with Watson’s presence (on the credible pretext that he instead goes to meet Inspector Lestrade from the train) so that the scene involves Holmes and Laura Lyons alone. This makes cinematic sense since Watson’s role in this scene in the novel is purely that of observer. The absence of a character already familiar to Laura puts her at a disadvantage when she is now suddenly confronted by the formidable Sherlock Holmes and heightens the sense of dramatic resolution. During Holmes crucial revelation concerning Stapleton’s marital status and murderous motives, both Holmes and the viewer see only the back of Demidova’s head and not her face, allowing for the intriguing possibility that Laura is artfully preparing herself to exhibit an appropriate reaction rather than suppressing an involuntary one. Is she more shocked and upset by the prospect of losing the money than by the treachery of the man? In casting Demidova and in the direction and mise en scene of the two Laura Lyons scenes, and by amplifying Old Frankland’s estimation of his daughter’s scandalous character, the Lenfilm team have foregrounded a layer of exotic mystery that is hinted at en passant in Conan Doyle’s novel but not developed there.  The Soviet Lenfilm and British Granada films of The Hound of the Baskervilles both have the intrinsic merit of sticking broadly to the trajectory of the story as told in Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel while also starring the greatest incarnations of Sherlock Holmes of the second half of the 20th century. Jeremy Brett is now so universally associated with Holmes that his distinguished theatre and screen career in other roles can tend to be neglected, a process that started during his lifetime and may have exacerbated his lifelong health conditions. Vasili Livanov’s status as a definitive screen Holmes is recognised internationally, including in Britain where he was awarded an honorary MBE. A few weeks after the conclusion of the adventure on Dartmoor, Conan Doyle sets a “Retrospection” chapter in which Holmes and Watson sit in front of a roaring fire at 221b Baker Street and reflect on the case. Ostensibly an attempt to tie up the loose ends, instead it mostly succeeds in highlighting the absurdities of the plot and shining a light on Sherlock Holmes preposterously risky strategy for protecting the life of his client. But then, maybe The Hound of the Baskervilles isn’t so much about whether you can believe in an absurd and labyrinthine criminal enterprise to steal an inheritance but about whether you might believe in a smouldering hell hound when you have ventured alone onto desolate moorland in "those dark hours when the powers of evil are exalted”. Bibliograpy: Cox, Michael. 2011. A Study in Celluloid: A Producer's Account of Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan. 1902. The Hound of the Baskervilles, Another Adventure of Sherlock Holmes Stuart Davies, David. 2012 (revised electronic edn.) Bending the Willow, Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes Online resources re Lenfilm and Livanov: http://russia-ic.com/people/general/l/168 https://www.arthur-conan-doyle.com/index.php/Vasily_Livanov https://www2.bfi.org.uk/news/sightsound/studio-lenfilm-under-siege https://youtu.be/ZiqF4dEVkzw # all accessed 04/03/2021 Also of interest: Bayard, Pierre (transl. Mandell, Charlotte). 2008. Sherlock Holmes Was Wrong, Reopening the Case of The Hound of the Baskervilles. In this provocative and sometimes hilarious book Bayard, a psychoanalyst and professor of literature, uses philosophical theories of fictional worlds and applies Sherlock Holmes own deductive methods to exonerate both Mr Stapleton and his dog and to identify the true murderer  IT'S A TRAP — on the way to the final ambush. (Left: Lenfilm. Right Granada)
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