My brief, personal, entirely subjective thoughts on Christopher Lee's immortal characters, Sir Henry Baskerville & Duc de Richleau.

A recent viewing of 'The Hound of The Baskervilles' prompted a familiar recurring thought, Christopher Lee's richly nuenced performance as Sir Henry Baskerville shared a similar tonality with his no less charismatic Devil-dispatcher Duc de Richleau. I'm certainly not saying the characters are indivisible, far from it, but they do share similar subtleties, expressing refined dramatic depths, rarely portrayed in members of the higher social echelon. Both characters have a robust morality, the physical, dashingly goateed Richleau is conspicuously virile, since he so manfully takes on the Goat of Mendes and all his brimstone-blasted works, while the charmingly urbane, metropolitan Baskerville is vulnerable, droll, thwarted in love, and is stricken with poor health. And yet, for me, these two unusually amiable aristocratic characters are conjoined somehow. Duc de Richleau is almost entirely self-contained, and I have always strongly believed he was Christopher Lee's very own Van Helsing, a worldly, stalwart, indefatigable slayer of evil in all its occult manifestations! In a parallel, surrealistic Hammer Films multiverse, I could readily see him take on his very own count Dracula, as the two are evenly matched, both steely Aristocrats are powerfully adept in the eldritch arts. That being said, Dracula's preternatural resilience to any number of grisly perpetrated deaths, perhaps, might win out in the end! There are many talented contemporary actors that clearly struggle to wholly convince in genre cinema, yet, Christopher Lee made it all appear so effortless, which, I'm bloody sure it wasn't!