The Hound of the Baskervilles (1929)

Apart from the Wallace & Gromit film, I think this is my favourite first-time watch in the Century of Cinema project so far. This was one of the last big European silent film productions, and like an awful lot of silent cinema it then proceeded to vanish for decades, with a print only turning up as recently as 2008. The blu-ray also includes its even longer-lost 1914 predecessor, which the booklet essay (handily reproduced here) compares to a Louis Feuillade serial rather than Doyle; both were the work of Richard Oswald, who wrote the 1914 and directed this one. I gather the 1929 version is more faithful to the book—for one thing Watson is actually in it, which he apparently isn’t in the earlier film—though it clearly retains some Feuillade-ish elements in its latter stages. Still, if not exactly pure Doyle, it’s a terrific watch, and I’ll illustrate with a few shots:

There’s some really tremendous atmospherics throughout the film, and the camerawork is remarkably mobile even for a 1920s German film, so you get a great sense of the size of the Baskerville Hall interior among other things. It’s a compact story, unfortunately rendered a bit more compact by the loss of much of reels two and three from the only known print; some of this (plus bits of reel 5) has been filled in by footage from the 9.5mm copy that Pathe produced for home viewing (apparently, though the film never got an American release, it did good enough business in Europe to merit a “home video” release, but the rest had to be filled in with stills and title cards explaining the missing scenes (Watson arriving at Baskerville Hall, establishing the Barrymores and Stapletons). But it’s not really distracting, and the rest of the film is great. I think we can fairly describe this as a major rediscovery, and its reputation will hopefully grow.