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Many centuries ago, Sir Hugo Baskerville (Artur Malkowsky) killed his
wife (Anna Waag) ... and was in turn killed by a big dog immediately
afterwards - and thus the legend of the Hound of the Baskervilles
was born.
Back in the now, Sir Charles Baskerville (Friedrich Kayssler) receives
the visit of a distant cousin, Beryl (Alice Brandt), whom he invites to
stay overnight. Later this night though, he is lured out to the moors,
attacked by a dog, and killed by fright.
At the reading of the will, Beryl expects to be the sole heir of the
Baskerville estate ... but to everybody's surprise, Sir Charles also had a
closer cousin, Henry (Peter Voss), who is going to inherit pretty much
everything, even though he has been out of the country for decades.
When Henry arrives in England, Doctor Mortimer (Ernst Rotmund), a
friend of the Baskerville family, tries to hire master detective Sherlock
Holmes (Bruno Güttner) to act as Henry's bodyguard, but Holmes turns down
the job and instead sends his associate Doctor Watson (Fritz Odemar) along
as Henry's watchdog.
At the Baskerville estate, Watson is confronted with a whole array of
suspects, including the Baskervilles' sinister butler Barrymore (Fritz
Rasp), a convict hiding out in the moors (Paul Rehkopf), who will
eventually turn out to be Mrs Barrymore's (Lilly Schönborn) brother,
Beryl, who is suspected to be a golddigger, eccentric butterfly collector
Stapleton (Erich Ponto), who seems to know the moors like tha back of his
hands, and even Doctor Mortimer himself, who has an awfully large dog. And
then there is that stranger who seems to be living in the moors ... and
who - which will surprise noone who has read the story - eventually turns
out to be Sherlock Holmes himself.
Eventually the convict is bitten to death by a dog, because he wore Sir
Henry's laid off suit - which brings Holmes onto the right track, and soon
he has found out that Stapleton is actually a distant cousin of the
Baskervilles and Beryl's brother who is hell-bent on inheriting the
estate, even if that means having to kill every Baskerville alive.Beryl
was actually his accomplice, but she has since fallen in love with Sir
Henry for real and tries everything to keep him out of her brother's reach
... which forces Stapleton to kidnap her and use her to lure Sir Henry out
onto the moors - and then he has him attacked by his big dog. But luckily,
Holmes and Watson are nearby to shoot the dog, then go after Stapleton ...
who escapes in a coach. But somehow his coach strays off the track and
right into the moors, and in his coach, Stapleton sinks to his premature
grave.
The ending has Sir Henry and Beryl announding their wedding ...
A rather weak adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles, in
which Sherlock Holmes seems to be little more than a supporting character,
not appearing in the first half hour at all only to then disappearing from
the film for another half hour after a few short scenes. Instead the
romance of Sir Henry and Beryl gets center stage and the murder mystery is
taking back seat and is destroyed by way too much dialogue saying way too
little, with the solution being pulled out of the hat rather than the
result of clever detective work. The moor-sets are scarcely used and no
attempts at creating a properly creepy atmosphere are made.
A disappointment.
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