This close scrutiny of the map ends in an iris-in to the place where the treasure is hidden, irising-out to show two of these men at the place indicated on the map:
Intensified scrutiny is a strong motif in this film, especially through its protagonist Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Wontner). With his magnifying glass he examines an object bearing the Sign of Four:
He gets to examine the map, of course, first with a magnifying glass and then with a microscope:
We aren't given sight of what he sees, but in this same sequence we have a close up of Holmes's magnified eye, slowly coming into focus, as a kind of belated emblematic shot:
This optical effect has its complement later when the villain, Jonathan Small, applies pressure to a man's neck, distorting the man's view of Small's face:
The film plays with the intense-scrutiny motif in a sequence where the female protagonist is kidnapped at a fairground. As she waits while Dr Watson makes a phone call, a passing man looks her over:
The next shot shows one of the villains looking intently from behind a curtain. This is followed by a shot of Watson in the kiosk with the woman behind him. The implication is that this is the villain's point of view, and that in the shot above he is positioned off-screen left:
In fact he is behind the woman, which we could work out by matching the curtains in the two shots, but which we discover more immediately when he seizes the woman from behind:
Wontner as Holmes is no Basil Rathbone, but Graham Cutts's film has many fine things in it. The tattooed man, in particular, is very striking:
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Several shots and sequences are worthy of Hitchcock, ironically, perhaps, since Cutts is supposed to have been professionally jealous of his former assistant (see here).
The close up of a speeding wheel during a car chase is directly borrowed from a car chase in Hitchcock's Blackmail:
Blackmail (Alfred Hitchcock 1929)
The Sign of Four (Graham Cutts 1932)
Cutts is highly adept at the Hitchcockian 'God's Eye View' shot:
When Small passes the swag down to his associate Tonga in a snake pit, their shot-countershot exchange closes with a view from a higher plane:
When Tonga falls to his death in the final scene he is shown plunging vertically down:
Since this post is supposed to be about maps, I should mention the globe lying on the floor of a trashed room:
