Red herrings, blue murder, green with envy.

That’s a lot of colour for the seemingly black and white case at the heart of Arthur Conan Doyle’s fog-engulfed thriller set in the boggy moors of Devon.

But the stock ingredients combine to masterful effect to heighten the atmospheric mystery which has spawned countless adaptations since it was first serialised in The Strand Magazine at the turn of the twentieth century.

Given that Richard Oswald’s version Der Hund von Baskerville – the final Sherlock Holmes “silent” – was made two years after the first feature-length “talkie” The Jazz Singer and received a limited release mainly in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, it’s hardly surprising that the movie was filed under missing presumed lost.

Imagine the surprise, then, when an original copy turned up in the basement of a parish priest in southern Poland. Incomplete, somewhat degraded and with Czech intertitles (the film, not the priest!), the restoration teams at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival (SFSFF) and Filmoteka Narodowa – Instytut Audiowizualny (Poland’s National Film Archive) had a job on their hands.

But drawing upon text from an original script and censor records, as well as stills and sequences from an incomplete copy with French intertitles, bridging scenes were created. And as Rob Byrne, Board President of the SFSFF remarked in his informative introduction, the result is an “almost complete film” which receives its UK premiere at HippFest – ninety years after its original release.

Filmed in a former zeppelin hangar in the outskirts of Berlin which was converted into a movie studio after the Great War, set designer Willy Schiller’s prolific CV which includes the saucily entitled Yes, Yes, Women Are My Weakness, Beware Of Loose Women and Love In The Cowshed suggests something akin to Carry On Dogging.

But nothing could be further from the truth, for Richard Oswald and his Danish cinematographer Frederik Fuglsang have created a moody drama laced with suspense – with only a pair of shifty eyes in a suit of armour and Holmes’ dry deduction that “Supernatural dogs do not leave footprints” providing inadvertent light relief.

American actor Carlyle Blackwell, who received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, plays the “genial detective” complete with violin, deerstalker and pipe; and George Seroff his ever-smiling and chain-smoking accomplice. Though the star turn is undoubtedly Fritz Rasp as “the devil in human form” Stapleton whose obituary in Der Spiegel read: “the German film villain in service, for over 60 years”.

An atmospheric thriller beautifully restored for future generations which along with Mike Nolan’s engaging live score and the 1934 introductory short Horatio Spink accompanied by Stephen Gellatly on piano drew a warm round of applause from the appreciative audience.

Director: Richard Oswald
Writers: Arthur Conan Doyle (novel), Herbert Juttke
Stars: Carlyle Blackwell, Alexander Murski, Livio Pavanelli
Peter Callaghan
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