The Sign of Four: Sherlock Holmes' Greatest Case

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.

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 recently saw this film simply because it was in a multi-pack of "B" mystery movies. I was very dubious since I had eagerly watched the Sherlock Holmes movies starring Basil Rathbone and didn't expect this film to best his performance. I was wrong. Arthur Wontner was able to convey Holmes' intelligence without the superciliousness that often mars other actors' portrayals. The Holmes/Watson relationship was one of equals instead of Super Genius/Amiable Bumbler. It was a refreshing take on a relationship that can grate as portrayed in the Rathbone films. There are drawbacks to this film, however. The sound quality is not first-rate--at least not on the DVD. The audience is not introduced to Holmes and Watson until 15 to 30 minutes into the film and the main villain's thick Cockney (?) accent made his dialogue heavy slogging--at least to these American ears. Is the print perfect? No. Can the pace be slow? Yes. Don't be deterred. See a wonderful Holmes, an intelligent and rakish Watson. It's a welcome eye-opener for those who have only seen the Rathbone films or the Brett television versions. Don't get me wrong--I think the above-mentioned actors are marvelous and had fine takes on Sherlock Holmes. I just prefer Wontner's ability to portray a wry braininess and the rapport he shared with Ian Fleming's superb Watson.

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've seen all four extant films with Arthur Wontner playing Sherlock Holmes (the others are "The Sleeping Cardinal," "The Triumph of Sherlock Holmes" and "Silver Blaze"), and this one is definitely the best. Associated Talking Pictures clearly had better facilities than Twickenham (the company that made the others), and the multiple producers (including Rowland V. Lee and Basil Dean, who had previously directed a Holmes film himself) picked a story with lots of action and hired a capable director, Graham Cutts. Cutts usually gets dismissed patronizingly in biographies of Alfred Hitchcock (Cutts directed a number of films in Britain in the early 1920's on which Hitchcock assisted, including "The Rat" and "The Triumph of the Rat" with Ivor Novello) as a mediocre director who drank and womanized his way out of a major career. Judging by his work here, Hitchcock fans should probably be looking at Cutts as an influence on the Master; this film MOVES (most of the other Wontner Holmes films are boring and plodding), it's clearly staged with a sense of pace, it makes good use of unusual camera angles (including a surprising number of overhead shots), and the final fight scene (though obviously done with a stunt double for Wontner) is a genuinely exciting action highlight. Cutts also gets a marvelous villain performance out of Graham Soutten, and effectively uses the sound of his peg leg at a time when the art of suggesting off-screen action with sound effects was common in the U.S. but relatively unknown in Britain. He also makes Wontner a more convincing Holmes than in his other films in the role — Wontner even LOOKS younger here than he did in "The Sleeping Cardinal," made two years earlier — and Ian Hunter is a more effective Watson than usual even though it's a bit jarring to see a Watson who's clearly taller than his Holmes. As someone who'd watched the other Wontner Holmes films wondering what all the fuss was about — he's always seemed overrated in the role to me — this one has raised my opinion of Wontner as Holmes considerably. Isla Bevan is a striking leading lady with an interesting resemblance to Ginger Rogers — later one of the cinematographers on this film, Robert de Grasse, became Ginger Rogers' favorite cameraman at RKO.