The Hound of the Baskervilles is a 1939 American gothic mystery film based on the 1902 Sherlock Holmes novel of the same name by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Directed by Sidney Lanfield, the film stars Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr. John Watson. Released by 20th Century Fox, it is the first of fourteen Sherlock Holmes films produced between 1939 and 1946 starring Rathbone and Bruce. Among the most-known cinematic adaptations of the novel, the film co-stars Richard Greene as Henry Baskerville (who received top billing, as the studio was unsure of the potential of a film about Sherlock Holmes) and Wendy Barrie as Beryl Stapleton. The Hound of the Baskervilles is notable as the earliest known Sherlock Holmes film to be set in the Victorian period of the original stories. All known previous Holmes films, up to and including the 1930s British film series starring Arthur Wontner as Holmes, had been updated to a setting contemporaneous with the films' release.