by Courtney Hilden
Murder at the Baskervilles, or, as it’s also known as, Silver Blaze, is about the famed Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick Watson going to Sir Henry Basker’s estate in the countryside. Silver Blaze, a horse, has disappeared, and his trainer has been murdered, so of course Holmes and Watson are on the case, since even the investigator admits he’s “completely baffled.” Eventually, Holmes discovers the horse on a nearby farm, disguised with painted-on spots. Nothing in this film is particularly surprising, making it mostly a bore.
At the same time that the audience is following Holmes, they’re also following the lives of some of the other characters. We see the uninspired and not very menacing Professor Moriarty, the arch-nemesis of Holmes, plan various schemes involving the same horse. It turns out Jack, about to marry Diane Basker, the daughter of Sir Henry, has a large amount of debt from gambling on horse racing. Jack doesn’t want to go to his father-in-law-to-be because Sir Henry disapproves of gambling. There are even the pathetic police attempting to solve this case on their own, deferring to Holmes instead.
It’s hard not to compare this Holmes (played by Arthur Wontner) to other depictions, and unfortunately, he’s not nearly as engaging as other actors, but he does a serviceable job in the role. Wontner wears the infamous cap and smokes a pipe, and looks surprisingly like Basil Rathbone, who is the so famous for playing the role. Wontner is very stiff throughout this movie. When he smiles near the end, it lights up the screen, making you wish he was playing something that would allow him more emotions that just passive and annoyed. Moriarty is not nearly as terrifying here as he has been in other depictions. Instead, he just seems like an ordinary professor, the kind that wears corduroy pants covered in chalk and bubbles through badly organized lectures.
There’s some strange stuff going on in this film. For one thing, all the characters are wearing typical Edwardian clothing, despite Holmes being a late Victorian creation. At one point, one of the female characters actually says “What’s up?” which sounds incredibly modern. The scene where a gangster shoots at Holmes and the police is terrible, more so than most older movies, because the gun look and sounds like it is just shooting air. Because of the lighting, the scenery in the movie looks much more dramatic, like a Gothic cemetery, than it does like the English countryside. It’s actually beautiful, and is perhaps the nicest thing about an otherwise boring movie.
For a movie that clocks in around an hour, this is an incredible drag.
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