The New Pictures

The Hound of the Baskervilles

(Twentieth Century-Fox) exhibits the skyscraper profile of Basil Rathbone becomingly topped by the fore & aft cupola of fiction's most famed detective. Unlike his pipsqueak present-day imitators, who solve crimes while airing their wives' dogs, getting drunk or talking pidgin English, Sherlock Holmes was a literate patrician who always took his work seriously, permitting himself no distractions except an occasional shot of morphine when he was bored. For the Hays Production Code, according to which "the drug traffic should not be presented in any form," Basil Rathbone exhibits proper disdain. But before he asks Watson (Nigel Bruce) for his needle, he solves in satisfactory style Conan Doyle's gloom-ridden mystery of murder on the Grimpen Mire.

All impersonators of Sherlock Holmes must stand comparison with William Gillette, who created the role on the stage. Basil Rathbone acquits himself fully as creditably as John Barrymore, his cinema predecessor. The only serious bit of miscasting in The Hound of the Baskervilles is in the title role. The proper selection, obviously, would have been a calf-sized Norwegian elkhound; equipped with fright wig and false fangs. Instead, Associate Producer Gene Markey, perhaps in the delightful confusion attendant on his recent marriage to Hedy Lamarr, put his O.K. on a friendly old Great Dane named Chief, who, despite all his yelpings, cannot even make his bark seem worse than his bite.

Alexander Nevslcy (Mosfilm Studios) puts back into circulation famed Russian Director Sergei Eisenstein, after six unproductive years that followed his ill-starred trip to Hollywood in 1930-32. All Russian pictures are advertisements for the U.S.S.R. This one is no exception, but it shows, not the handiness of modern peasants with mowing machines, but the first faint stirrings of Russian social consciousness, circa 1242 A.D. Fortunately, for U. S. audiences, even this patriotic ferment occupies Director Eisenstein's attention only for a few minutes at the beginning of Alexander Nevsky. Thereafter he becomes intoxicated with the cinematic possibilities of a battle fought on a frozen lake between medieval armies. The set-to between invading German knights and a horde of moujiks ends in a German rout, the ice breaking under them as they run away.

Fussy cinemaddicts who accuse Hollywood of extravagance will do well to see what happens when the D. W. Griffith of Russia really gets his teeth into a war panorama. If the Russo-German engagement in Alexander Nevsky bears no resemblance to the one actually fought at Lake Peipus on April 5, 1242, it is also like no battle ever before recorded on celluloid. For visual splendor, romantic nonsense and pure comic-strip flamboyance, the derring-do of Eisenstein's moujiks with battle-axes, boat hooks and wine pails has never been topped.

This sequence, rather than the concluding victory celebration, which can be construed as a warning to Hitler, probably caused Joseph Stalin to make his debut as a movie critic at the Moscow premiere of Alexander Nevsky last year. Dictator Stalin hit Eisenstein on the back, roared, "Sergei, you are a true Bolshevik."

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