MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*
This is an average but still tolerable adaptation of the classic Doyle tale. As I just finished rereading the source material today, I find myself excusing a lot of odd changes just because it was a TV-movie with limited time and money.
I rather liked the straightforward Holmes of Stewart Granger, while the Watson of Bernard Fox (best known as the character "Doctor Bombay" on BEWITCHED) was efficient enough. Watson's long sojourn at Baskerville Hall is cut for time, which makes sense. Yet the writer also tries to work in Holmes' masquerade as a moor-hermit, which only makes sense if Holmes is absenting himself from the hall so that he can study all suspects at his leisure.
Unlike the 1939 version, this HOUND keeps the idea that the villain Stapleton (William Shatner) has his wife masquerade as his sister to hoax his prospective victim, as well as having used another female pawn to kill the earlier target. On the other hand, the writer troubled to build up Doctor Mortimer as a red herring, which Doyle never does. This proved an enjoyable development because it gave Anthony Zerbe better lines than the literary character got.
In my review I asserted that the thing separating Doyle's novel from most film adaptations was that Doyle made the Hound-mystery a meditation on the human tendency to regress to the primitive and egoistic. The 1972 HOUND is no different, but its depiction of the killer hound is more bracing than I've seen in two of the more expensive productions. This is particularly true because the beast turns on its master, which is in some ways more visually satisfying than Doyle's conclusion. And this may be the only HOUND where, after the dog's dead, the heroes still hear a distant, mysterious howl.
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