Trivia

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.

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.

The first Sherlock Holmes film of Basil Rathbone.

This was 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.

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.