The Hound of the Baskervilles on Screen: 4 Adaptations

The Hound of the Baskervilles has four screen versions here: Sidney Lanfield’s 1939 film with Basil Rathbone, Terence Fisher’s 1959 Hammer version with Peter Cushing, a 1978 comedy with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, and a 2002 BBC film with Richard Roxburgh.

The novel is short, about 59,000 words, and so are the versions: 80 to 100 minutes, with densities between 1.4 and 1.7 minutes of screen per thousand words. No version has to cut a subplot to fit; they differ in tone rather than in coverage.

Every screen version at a glance

4 versions are listed here: 3 made for cinemas and 1 for television, released between 1939 and 2002. Runtimes are the length of the version as released, taken from the Wikipedia article for each title and checked against its IMDb entry.

Year Version Director Length Leads
1939 The Hound of the Baskervilles — film Sidney Lanfield 80 min Richard Greene, Basil Rathbone, Wendy Barrie
1959 The Hound of the Baskervilles — film Terence Fisher 84 min Peter Cushing, André Morell, Christopher Lee
1978 The Hound of the Baskervilles — film Paul Morrissey 85 min Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Kenneth Williams
2002 The Hound of the Baskervilles — television film David Attwood 100 min Richard Roxburgh, Ian Hart, Richard E. Grant

How the versions differ

The 1939 film runs 80 minutes and was the first Holmes film with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, whose pairing continued through the war. It is the shortest here.

Hammer’s 1959 film runs 84 minutes with Peter Cushing as Holmes, André Morell as Watson and Christopher Lee as Sir Henry. It was the studio’s only Sherlock Holmes feature in colour.

The 1978 film runs 85 minutes and is a comedy, with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore among the cast. The 2002 BBC film runs 100 minutes with Richard Roxburgh, Ian Hart and Richard E. Grant, the longest of the four.

Reading time against screen time

The novel runs to about 59000 words, which is roughly 3 hours at the 300 words a minute the rest of this site uses. Every screen version fits its own reading of the story into the times below.

Screen version Format Running time
1939 · The Hound of the Baskervilles film 80 min
1959 · The Hound of the Baskervilles film 84 min
1978 · The Hound of the Baskervilles film 85 min
2002 · The Hound of the Baskervilles television film 100 min
The novel (1902) 59000 words ~3 h to read

All four versions sit between 80 and 100 minutes, so the choice is more about tone than length: three straight adaptations and one comedy.

Questions readers ask

Which Hound of the Baskervilles film is closest to the novel?

By length, the 2002 BBC film at 100 minutes. The novel is about 59,000 words, roughly 197 minutes of reading, and all four versions compress it to between 80 and 100 minutes.

Which version is a comedy?

The 1978 film with Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. The other three, from 1939, 1959 and 2002, are straight adaptations.

Who played Sherlock Holmes in each version?

Basil Rathbone in 1939, Peter Cushing in 1959, and Richard Roxburgh in 2002. The 1978 comedy does not use the standard Holmes cast.

The novel itself is on editions.ink as a free ebook: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle, with EPUB, AZW3 and KEPUB downloads. The full list of filmed classics covers 13 books, and the rest of the catalogue sits under classic fiction.

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