The last silent film to feature Arthur Conan Doyle’s eminent detective has been less a legend than a rumor among cinephiles and Sherlockians. The Hound of the Baskervilles (Der Hund von Baskerville), a seven-reel film with a long German pedigree that even included a movie written while the country was fighting a ghastly war against the detective’s homeland, has long been considered the most important of the Hounds made in Europe. Long pronounced lost, it was filmed in Berlin in early 1929 when German studios were the envy of the world and then almost immediately dropped out of sight. Until recently it was remembered, if at all, for its eerie red poster of a wolfhound exhaling a torch-like light over ghostly ruins. (Russell Merritt)
The restoration of Der Hund von Baskerville is based on an original 35mm nitrate print held by Poland’s National Film Archive, with some missing scenes bridged with a Pathé-Baby print belonging to Michael Seeber of FILM Verlag. German censor records provided a complete document of the original intertitles, allowing for a restored version in the original German, which was then translated for a second version in English. However, a significant portion of the film is still missing from reels 2 and 3. The narrative gap is bridged with a series of still images from the collection of Deutsches Filminstitut and the storyline was gleaned from a draft shooting script and the censor record. A partnership between the Filmoteka Narodowa and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, this restoration was made possible through the generous support of Glen Miranker, the Sunrise Foundation for Education and the Arts, Rick Andersen, and John and Susan Sinnott.
