I’ve just stumbled across another version of The Hound of the Baskervilles, this time starring Stewart Granger as Sherlock Holmes and Bernard Fox as Watson.

Yes, it also stars William Shatner as Stapleton together with Anthony Zerbe as Mortimer.

The main positive is the set design.  It’s very atmospheric and authentic-feeling.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty much where the positives come to a grinding halt.  The rest of this film is, at best, adequate.  There’s nothing that’d put you off about it, but nothing that’d make you rate it highly either.

All of the key actors do a creditable job with their characters.  Nothing exemplary, just enough to tell the story.

The story itself deviates in many places from the original (although not enough to change the plot or the characters) such as Holmes travelling with the Sir Henry back to Baskerville Hall.  He makes an excuse to leave later, but there’s never any of that “telegram” diary-taking that Watson does.  As a result, Bernard Fox is given very little to.  He doesn’t even do much in the way of protecting Sir Henry.

The secondary characters aren’t handled all that well.  There’s very little sense of Stapleton using his wife to lure Sir Henry into his trap.  The Laura Lyons sub-plot is mixed at best, with Franklin being quite underwhelming.

There’s a lot of effort spent trying to convince the audience that the killer is Mortimer – almost too much, but Anthony Zerbe plays the character with enough snideness that he almost pulls it off.

In short, this is not the best version of The Hound of the Baskervilles you’ll ever watch.  I’ve always questioned the merits of making The Hound of the Baskervilles as it is.  Except for a couple of scenes, there’s very little involvement of Sherlock Holmes and very little detective work in figuring out who the killer is.  Other than the opening deduction of Mortimer from his stick, The Hound of the Baskervilles almost always comes off as a b-movie horror flick.  Odd that it’s probably the most famous Sherlock Holmes story, and odd that it’s probably the one story that has been made the most times, given that there are many other better examples to pick from.