It's an easy-going, mildly entertaining mystery, the solution of which is given before the ending. The mystery itself could have been cooked up by Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle as a neat Sherlock Holmes short story. This one is rather dragged out. There's a subplot involving a French businessman and Dana Wynters that has nothing to do with the main story. Some of the Reveals are telegraphed ahead of time. Holmes could have solved the whole thing in a few hours over three pipes of shag.

That doesn't matter. It's kind of relaxing and enjoyable. I mean, here are all these famous faces hidden behind rubber masks, sometimes with dubbed voices. The only one we can consistently recognize from beginning to end is Kirk Douglas. (That nose! That chin!) Well, that's not entirely true. In an epilogue, Robert Mitchum struggles manfully to remove his makeup and when he's through he looks almost exactly as he did before. Some mysteries are easier to solve than others.

No need to go on about the plot. I will bet my riding breeches that whoever wrote the script had read "The Hound of the Baskervilles" not long before.

However, here are John Huston and a lot of megastars of the time having a vacation in Ireland. (Not the only Huston vacation, to be sure.) Few of the megastars appear in the same shot. That's because -- well, it works this way. You hire, say, Burt Lancaster for a week. No more than that because he's expensive. And you shoot all his scenes in a few days. Then you do the same with, say, Frank Sinatra. By featuring them all in short and separate scenes, you wind up with more cameos for your buck.

The lead is George C. Scott, with a reasonable British accent, at least to untutored ears. The unnecessary French friend may have added some appeal for French audiences. Kirk Douglas has a more substantial supporting role as the head heavy, and Robert Mitchum is on screen several times as a drunken scoundrel.

The director, John Huston, had an estate in Ireland at the time and rode in exaltation to the hounds in fox hunts. Fox hunts -- "The unspeakable after the inedible," commented Oscar Wilde.

Yet I have this vision of them all having drinks and dinner at Huston's country place. And Huston getting to his feet at the end of a long evening and suggesting they all start half an hour later tomorrow. To him, at least in my vision, this is what "Donovan's Reef" was to John Ford. And the disguised cameos are kind of fun, even after you know who's who.