STATE THEATRE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 15 September 1939, Page 2

STATE THEATRE

‘ THE HOUND OF BASKERVILLES.”

That matchless sleuth, Sherlock Holmes, is brought to vivid life on the screen by the distinguished Basil Rathbone, who shares top billing with Richard Greene and Wendy Barrie in 20th Century-Fox’s thrilling production of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Hound of the Baskervilles,” which will be shown tonight at the State Theatre. The classic, one of literature’s most realistic, spine-chilling mystery stories, has been transferred to celluloid with thrilling realism. For background the picture has perfectly reproduced the misty, fog-shrouded moor in England’s Devonshire country, where a fiendish, ghostly hound is believed’ to wander, leaving a terrifying trail of horror and chilling the blood of the countryside with its unearthly howls. On Dartmoor’s edge stands the gloomy old Baskerville mansion, to which young Sir Henry Baskerville (Richard Greene) has come from Canada to claim his inheritance. It has been closed since the mysterious death of his .Uncle Charles. Preoccupied with his whirlwind romance with his pretty neighbour, Beryl Stapleton (Wendy Barrie), Sir Henry laughs at the stories about the hound. But Dr. Mortimer (Lionel Atwill) and his spiritualist wife (Beryl Mercer) have clues to Sir Charles’s murder that send them to the great Sherlock Holmes, and his equally famous aide, Dr Watson (Nigel Bruce). Holmes enters the case and after a series of spinetingling developments his amazing deductions result in the tracking down of the strange beast and the solution of the mystery of the moors, just in time to save Sir Henry from his uncle’s fate. Every member of the great cast, which also includes John Carradine, Barlowe Borland, Morton Lowr and Ralph Forbes, turns in a first-rate performance. The supports include the New Zealand badminton players in action in Australia.