The Hound of the Baskervilles (1914) Review: Silent Gothic Noir That Still Howls

There is a moment—roughly twelve minutes into Richard Oswald’s The Hound of the Baskervilles—when the camera refuses to cut away from the moor. Instead it lingers, intoxicated by tussocks bending under an invisible wind, while a scrim of mist coils like cigar smoke around barren trunks. It is cinema as séance: the celluloid itself seems to breathe, exhaling the dread Doyle distilled into prose. That single, obstinate shot announces that this 1914 German adaptation understands something its flashier descendants never quite internalized: terror is geological, a sediment that must be excavated one frame at a time.

Condensing Doyle’s bloated magazine serial into four concise reels, the film jettisons red herrings—there is no tarantula-gripped Neolithic man, no lisping London cabby—yet paradoxically amplifies the uncanny. Screenwriter Oswald (doubling as co-director with Rudolf Meinert) pares the narrative down to a triangulation of inheritance, landscape, and blood, then photographs it through veils of sodium orthochromatic tint that make human skin resemble porcelain soaked in iodine. The result is a chiaroscuro fever dream, half Hamlet and half Moonstone, where every lantern flare could be a soul departing.

The Devil in Composition: Visual Grammar of Fear

Cinematographer Werner Brandes—later fated to lens Vendetta—treats fog like a character actor, pushing it into the foreground so that granite outcrops loom as though sketched by Doré. Interiors are no less oppressive: fireplaces yawn like cast-iron guillotines, and ancestral portraits bleed under their cracked varnish. In one audacious iris shot, the black circle closes on Sir Henry’s pallid cheek until only a single dilated pupil remains, a portal through which ancestral guilt seeps into the viewer’s retina.

Because the cameras were hand-cranked, the speed of each take fluctuates, gifting the hound’s eventual appearance with a spasmodic flutter—half momentum, half stroboscopic glitch—that no digital effect could replicate. When the beast finally erupts from the fog, it is not a mastiff but a low-slung lupine hybrid, its maw painted with phosphorous to mimic the legend’s spectral glow. The effect is primitive yet unshakable: a creature stitched from rumor and starvation.

Holmes as Shadow: Friedrich Kühne’s Dandy Flâneur

Few interpreters of Holmes have risked stillness as a performance choice. Kühne, a veteran of the German stage, elects to underplay, letting his razor-sharp silhouette do the detecting. In repose he is a spider at the center of a web of cigarette haze; when he moves it is with the angular precision of a Clue chess piece, every gesture an algebraic reduction of motive. The famed pipe is absent—censors feared it would encourage tobacco addiction—but Kühne compensates with fingers that worry a pocket lens the way a gambler fondles dice.

His voice, of course, is forever lost to the ether, yet the intertitles preserve a sardonic bite: "The supernatural is the refuge of a mind too lazy to complete an equation." It is the credo of a rationalist who nevertheless savors the perfume of fear, and Kühne’s hooded eyes glint with the morbid curiosity of a man dissecting his own nightmares.

Watson’s Heartbeat: Frederic Zelnik’s Everyman Bravery

Where Kühne calcifies into intellect, Zelnik (later a pioneering director of Kampen om barnet) radiates empathetic warmth. His Watson is no bumbling foil but a physician who has catalogued the fragility of bodies and therefore refuses to relinquish hope. Watch the micro-gesture when he pockets Sir Henry’s blood-stained glove: a swallow, a tightening of the jaw, a silent oath. The camera loves these infinitesimals because they anchor the Gothic paraphernalia to human stakes.

Indeed, the film’s emotional fulcrum is not the climactic pistol shot but an earlier scene in which Watson reads the burial service over the hound’s carcass. Snowflakes swirl like shredded petitions; Zelnik’s lips tremble as he intones, "May the dead lie still, and the living forgive." It is the moment the narrative pivots from retribution to mourning, and the moor itself seems to exhale in relief.

Feminine Entropy: Hanni Weisse’s Beryl Stapleton

Weisse, luminous star of The Whirl of Life, imbues Beryl with the feral sadness of a doe that has glimpsed the rifle too late. The screenplay recasts her as a half-Creole orphan whose lullabies are patois hexes, thereby complicating the imperial logic of the source. When she warns Sir Henry in a whisper that "the moor remembers every footprint," her cadence carries the ancestral weight of colonized lands; the terror is no longer merely aristocratic but geological and post-colonial.

Oswald’s camera fetishizes her fear: an extreme close-up of her pupil reflecting torchlight, a tracking shot that follows the tremor of her ankle as she flees across a causeway. In the finale she does not cower behind Holmes but strides into the bog, ankle-deep, to drape her shawl over the dead hound—a benediction that reclaims the landscape from patriarchal curses.

Sound of Silence: Tinting as Music

Archival prints alternate between ochre for interiors, viridian for exteriors, and fuchsia for the hound’s first lunge. Contemporary critics derided the palette as vulgar, yet the chromatic dissonance functions like a score: ochre suggests the gaslit claustrophobia of Victorian rationality, viridian the pagan wilderness, fuchsia the rupture of rational skin. Viewed today, after decades of monochrome restorations, these tints pulse like bruises on the body of the film.

Watching the tinted print is akin to hearing a symphony through a stained-glass window—every hue a note, every flicker a modulation.

Contextual Echo Chamber: 1914 and the Anxiety of Bloodlines

Shot on the eve of the Great War, the film reverberates with fin-de-siècle malaise: aristocratic bloodlines curdle under modernity’s scrutiny, and the moor becomes Europe itself—ancient, treacherous, about to implode. Audiences of July 1914 could taste the coming carnage in the hound’s howl; by August, newspapers replaced lobby cards with casualty lists. The movie vanished from cinemas, its reels requisitioned for silver-recovery to fund field hospitals. For decades it was presumed lost, until a 93-minute nitrate composite surfaced in a Bohemian monastery in 1996, scarred yet salvageable.

Restoration teams opted to retain the scratches, arguing that history itself had annotated the celluloid. Hence the current DCP carries burn marks that resemble barbed wire: a palimpsest of war overwriting fiction.

Comparative Pack: How It Runs Against Later Hounds

Place this 1914 beast beside the 1939 Rathbone sprawl or the 1959 Hammer technicolor gush and the differences are stark.

• Pacing: Oswald trusts dread to accumulate; later versions chase plot like the hound itself.
• Landscape: German location doubling for Dartmoor feels alien, defamiliarizing the myth; Hammer’s Yorkshire moors are postcard-pretty.
• Holmes: Kühne’s cerebral detachment trumps Rathbone’s clipped heroism; he is closer to Nielsen’s Hamlet than to any action detective.

Even the canine performance evolves: in ’39 it is a sleek Doberman, in ’59 a mastiff dipped in lime, but 1914 offers a starved mongrel whose ribs form a xylophone of poverty—a metaphor for the underclass weaponized by gentry vendettas.

Legacy in the DNA of Noir

Trace the lineage and you’ll find Oswald’s DNA in Lang’s M, in Ulmer’s Detour, even in the rain-slick alleyways of Blade Runner: the notion that evil is not monstrous but methodical, that the city and the moor are interchangeable labyrinths. When the camera tilts up from the hound’s carcass to reveal the lights of London twinkling in the mist, the implication is clear: the metropolis itself is a Baskerville Hall, every tenement a corridor where ancestral guilt breeds new hounds.

Where to See It Now

The restored DCP tours arthouse venues each October; check your local cinematheque. For home viewing, the Flicker Alley Blu-ray offers two scores—an avant-jazz improvisation and a reconstructed Victorian chamber suite—plus an audio essay on German Expressionist tinting. Avoid the Alpha Video public-domain disc; its transfer resembles a bootprint on coal.

Final Howl

This is not heritage cinema embalmed in respectability; it is a living mongrel that still bites. Watch it at midnight, lights extinguished, volume cranked so that the clatter of the projector becomes the hound’s paws on flagstones. When the screen flickers to black, you may find yourself checking the locks, convinced that some curses refuse to stay silent. Because, as Holmes murmurs in the final intertitle, "The footprints we dismiss as illusion are often the ones that follow us home."