Diagonaldi Very well executed

TrueJoshNight Truly Dreadful Film

Pluskylang Great Film overall

Acensbart Excellent but underrated film

Robert J. Maxwell It's an imperfect telling of the tale -- and a truly lousy print -- but entertaining nonetheless. The script spends too much of the running time on two hoodlums who are after the Rajputana pearls or whatever they're called. Good thing they're Indian, not Italian. And too much time on innocent young Mary Morstan in her flower shop. Holmes and Watson don't appear until about twenty minutes into the film. In the story as written, she simply shows up at 221b Baker Street because she's puzzled about the gifts of pearls she's been receiving. But at least, in this movie, the escaped Andaman convict, Jonathan Small, has his lengthy back story shown in a brief prologue, so that's gotten efficiently out of the way. The rest of the film follows roughly in the footsteps of the printed tale. Holmes and Watson pursue a stolen treasure that's in the hands of the two goons and their curious friend. Holmes makes some fantastic deductions that not even Conan-Doyle would have dreamed up. He infers from a man's penmanship that the writer had only one leg. Credo quia absurdum. But he gets one thing right when he deduces from a footprint that the foot had never worn shoes. I spent two years on a small Pacific island and it was almost immediately apparent whether the marks of bare feet in the sand had been left by natives or tourists.For those of us accustomed to a Sherlock Holmes that looks and acts like either Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett, Arthur Wontner is a strange specimen. He LOOKS like the Paget drawings! And in profile he strongly resembles Rathbone. But he's also shorter, like Brett. And, like neither of his two famous successors, he moves lazily, casually, stiffly. And his chief weakness is his voice. It's rather mousy and pinched. It sounds as if it's HE who should be behind the counter in that florist's shop, not Mary Morstan.Watson is Ian Hunter, better known as Richard the Lion Heart in "The Adventures of Robin Hood." As one of the Sholto brothers, Miles Malleson is incredibly youthful and looks something like Alfred Hitchcock. No one else in the cast stands out except Thug Number Two, a tattooed giant of a man who could take Mike Mazurki apart.I've sort of made fun of it but I shouldn't be too harsh on the movie. It was hard to produce a sound movie with any dexterity in 1932 because of technical limitations. You can see some obvious examples in the movie. But it is, after all, Sherlock Holmes and, unlike the updated versions from Universal Studios in the 40s, this one tries to show us something of the original story.

bkoganbing The Sign Of The Four or at least the screen version of the Arthur Conan Doyle novel has something you'll never see in another Sherlock Holmes film. It's Baker Street heresy in fact to have Dr. Watson get the girl.But that's what happens here as young Isla Bevan seeks the aid of Holmes and Watson portrayed here by Arthur Wontner and Ian Hunter. She's scared out of her mind because she has some valuable pearls that belong to a treasure taken from the Island of Andaman off the Malay and Bengal coasts. She didn't acquire them honestly, in fact her Indian army father along with another two partners stole them. They acted on a tip from a crazed one legged prisoner played by Graham Soutten who swore vengeance upon them for leaving him in the joint and denying him his share. Soutten's out and taking his revenge.The part of the crazed prisoner is played by a real life amputee who gets around pretty good. If Soutten had been American, MGM might have cast him as Long John Silver in Treasure Island instead of Wallace Beery. Soutten has a couple of cronies from the carnival where he is employed and traveling incognito. That part of the film could almost have been called Sherlock Holmes meets Freaks.Young Ms. Bevan and Hunter start falling for each other, but Hunter in his attempt to one up Wontner puts her in harm's way. It leads to more of an action climax than you will usually find in the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce series of Holmes films.Still the idea of Watson getting the girl is really too much for Baker Street purists to take.

tavm 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...

classicsoncall I always go into a Sherlock Holmes film expecting the best, but fearing the worst. With "The Sign of Four", my fears for the worst were unfortunately realized. Poor production values and a largely unintelligible sound quality contributed to my difficulty in following the story. But where I really lost it was when Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Wontner) was able to determine that a note sent to florist Mary Morstan (Isla Bevan) was written by an amputee, because the letters STAND UP on their own legs! With that line, the film immediately made it to my Top Ten Worst list without Passing Go, with the dubious distinction of joining my previously worst ever film - "The Beast of Yucca Flats". At least with The Beast, there's a lot to ridicule. Here, one doesn't know what's to be taken seriously and what's to be taken in good clean fun.With "The Sign of Four", nothing is "Elementary My Dear Watson", especially in Ian Hunter's portrayal of the acclaimed detective's accomplice. Watson fancies himself a romantic, and quite literally gets the girl at the end of the film. By that time my interest in the movie was gone, although I was jolted at inopportune moments by the appearance of a tattooed man and a black man with a snake around his neck. By the time they got to the speedboat chase, I was glad I had a bottle of brandy beside me.I'll admit the mystery started reasonably enough before getting bogged down in unbearable boredom. To be fair, I probably should give the film a second viewing, but it will be a long while before it comes to that. Until then, "The Sign of Four" doesn't even hit that numerical equivalent on my radar screen, and they don't allow negatives here. So for now, it's just a +.