Il segno dei quattro

The DVD I got of two Arthur Wontner Sherlock Holmes movies listed this one as Sign of the Four. The print was pretty bad and the dialogue was not very easy to understand (though the British accents may have also have been a factor). Still, I found myself mesmerised by many of the set-ups especially the London-Years Later scene as the man who killed his partner for the treasure confesses to his two sons about what he did with his fear of the one-legged man he betrayed coming to get him having just broken out of prison. Great use of sound effects here to convey possible sounds of a wooden leg off screen. The rest of the film hardly comes close to that in effectiveness but by that time Wontner and Ian Hunter as Watson are on screen with their entertaining banter of Holmes' powers of deduction. There's also a pretty entertaining chase scene at the end. Worth a look for Holmes fans but I hope anyone reading this can find a better print than I saw here...

The form — at least as established in the Holmes stories and subsequent early detective fiction, has the reader experience things in the order the detective does. In the best, there is some tension as we know the detective is ahead of us in deducing the truth from the same information we have. If you deviate from this, there should be some value because the cost is relatively high.

Now here we have one of the earliest experiments with detective talkies and they went directly to Holmes. What they did here was break the rule in an odd and experimental way. All the history that we are supposed to discover is presented before we even meet Holmes. That is, the story is presented in the historical order of events instead of the order of discovery.

I cannot know the effect this had on the audience when it was new. This film is far closer to when the Holmes stories appeared than it is to me here now. But my guess is that it failed.

There is another experiment, and pretty interesting. Two scenes are shot from high. One of these has an established human perspective: Holmes climbs up a ladder and when he comes down, the camera stays there looking down. Later, when the big chase/fight climax is going on, we again have the camera at this angle — a little further away. The effect must have been striking to the contemporary audience.

These two decisions are at least consistent: we don't *see* things the way our detective does.

I am a huge Sherlock Holmes fan. I've read all the stories and up until the Jeremy Brett series was created, I always felt that those who created the Holmes films had a lot of contempt for the original material. The modern image of is simply NOT the Holmes created by Conan Doyle. While this film starring Arthur Wontner did have Holmes uttering the "elementary" phrase again and again and that pipe was also present, this was about as close to the Conan Doyle you could find until the 1980s. Most casual viewers don't realize that up until Granada Television made the films with Brett, the Sherlock Holmes being portrayed in films was more an imitation of William Gillette than Holmes. Gillette had made a career of playing Holmes on stage and in silent films and he liberally changed the character to make it his own--not Conan Doyle's.

While far from perfect, this low budget Sherlock Holmes film at least tried more than most subsequent films--being much closer to the source material than the Basil Rathbone films or even the later Wontner films (SILVER BLAZE was a bit of a mess). I especially like how that accursed deerstalker hat (with the double bill) isn't worn by Holmes like it was in most other films (but not in most of the original stories) and how Lestrade and Moriarty aren't present (they were only in a small number or stories). Those who read SIGN OF THE FOUR would recognize the original story--the same can't be said of Wontner's SILVER BLAZE.

The only serious negative about the film is its quality due to the ravages of time. Being in the public domain, it has been copied and re-copied again and again and by now it's a bit of a struggle to watch and the print is a tad fuzzy. However, being slightly hard of hearing and an American, I was STILL able to follow it reasonably well, so it's likely the film will be very watchable for you.

I have been a huge fan of Sherlock Holmes for many years, both in book form and movie/TV versions. Movie versions have been churned out for well over 100 years and there have been some odd casting for the great detective e.g. Clive Brook, Rupert Everett & even Roger Moore! Personally, I have always favoured the Rathbone/Bruce versions even though they stretched the imagination on occasions by leaping from Victorian London to London during the second World War. I only recently managed to obtain copies of Arthur Wontner in The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes and The Sign of Four and I have to say Wontner seems to be the perfect Sherlock Holmes. What a pity he didn't make more Sherlock Holmes movies! Apart from the sound quality of the print (which has been mentioned in other reviews), his physical similarity to the original Strand Magazine illustrations by Sydney Paget (and others) and his portrayal of Sherlock Holmes is quite remarkable.

This Sherlock entry is more a colorful character crime drama than a Holmes whodunit. Wortner's okay as the cerebral detective, less forceful and more recessive than Rathbone's iconic role. Still, he makes you believe. On the other hand, Ian Hunter's Watson carries much of the action load. He's both sleeker and less bumbling than Nigel Bruce's comedic version. Here Holmes is trying to retrieve a stolen necklace and protect its rightful owner, Bevan, from the fearsome one-legged Soutten. In fact, Bevan's disability is real and not faked. At the same time, he shows a new and non-medical use for a wooden stump. It's a bang-up finale, made more so by director Cutts's imaginative camera angles. I suppose the generally poor sound and picture quality of my DVD is due to the age of the original. However that may be, the programmer amounts to a generally entertaining and sometimes interesting 75-minutes from a rather unknown production company.