Cushing played Holmes in a 1960s BBC series, but his best remembered performance as Sherlock was his first, in Hammer’s 1959 adaptation of The Hound of the Baskervilles. (Christopher Lee, Cushing’s frequent co-star in Hammer horror films and other movies, shows up as Henry Baskerville, the imperiled heir seemingly targeted by the legendary monster canine of the title. He’d go on to play Sherlock Holmes himself in three movies and Sherlock’s brother Mycroft in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.)
Cushing is his usual self — waspish, intense, cerebral, surgically incisive. As his Watson, Andre Morell is serious, in a manner that goes a long way toward rescuing the character from Nigel Bruce’s avuncular frivolity.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5V012rB1Iw]