Beryl Mercer, who played the medium Jennifer Mortimer in the film, died less than three months after the film's domestic release and before its international release.
Lionel Atwill, who plays James Mortimer in the film, later played Professor Moriarty in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon.
After being out of circulation for many years, partly because of the 1959 Hammer remake in Technicolor starring Peter Cushing, this film was restored and re-released to theaters in 1975 with great fanfare, to the point of having the national evening news do a story on it. The film was shown at its full 80-minute length, and newspaper and magazine articles commented on the fact that the line "Oh, Watson, the needle!", referring to Holmes' cocaine habit (and usually misquoted as "Quick, Watson, the needle!") was put back in after having been cut by the censors. As an added attraction, the studio added a rare sound film featurette which showed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes books, talking about his creation.
In the original novel, and in all later film versions, the butler is named Barrymore. In the 1939 version, this had to be changed to Barryman because the famous Barrymore family was still acting in films.
Publicity materials referred to the dog who played the title character as "Chief". The dog's actual name was "Blitzen" but this was thought to sound too German.
The first of fourteen films based on Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional consulting detective Sherlock Holmes starring Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Doctor Watson.
The first Sherlock Holmes film of Basil Rathbone.
The original title "The Hound of the Baskervilles" refers to a dog that terrorizes a family called "Baskerville". The German title "Der Hund Von Baskerville", a mistranslation, refers to a hound, which just lives in "Baskerville", a town, that does not play a role in the story.
This was such a hit that Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce were hired to play Holmes and Watson on the radio series "The New Adventures of Sherlock Holmes." This radio series consisted of new Sherlock Holmes stories written by Anthony Boucher and Denis Green.
While not entirely passive, Watson's original role was mostly as an observer of Holmes and the chronicler of his cases. With this film a new tradition began where Watson enjoyed equal billing with Holmes. In Nigel Bruce's hands the character became a comedic foil and a bit of a bumbler. Later interpretations would vary, but the character remained greater than literature's original enigma.