Against a tumultuous sky, an escaped prisoner runs across the barren landscape of Dartmoor towards an isolated farmhouse. Inside, Sally is alone with her baby and hears the alarm raised at Dartmoor prison; she sees the prisoner lurking in the shadows and cries "Joe!"
A COTTAGE ON DARTMOOR was Anthony Asquith's fourth and final silent film, released at the advent of talkies - a sound version has luckily been lost.
Son of Herbert Asquith, Anthony became a director of high-class, star vehicles but in 1929 he rivalled Hitchcock as a young master of visual story-telling, influenced by silent European and Soviet film-making.
At Sally's shout of "Joe!" Asquith flashbacks to a hairdressers, where barber Joe secretly adores manicurist Sally. An attempted date between them ends without any interest from Sally.
But when Sally becomes friendly with farmer and shop regular Harry, Joe is driven insane with obsessive jealousy...
Shelf or charity shop? Shelf! Asquith's masterpiece hooks you immediately with it's pervasive air of ominous dread and still delivers several genuinely disturbing moments as Joe becomes consumed with murderous jealousy. Asquith tells his story through Expressionist cinematography packed with dazzling flecks of detail, montage shots and bravura editing. The film also shows the universality of silent cinema casting: British Norah Baring as Sally, Swedish Uno Henning as Joe and German Hans Adalbert Schlettow as Harry. Asquith's magnificent setpiece is set in a cinema where Joe quietly sits in the row behind Sally and Harry, his eyes staring at them while all other eyes are on the screen. This thriller motif is offset by lovely observations of those around them: the audience roars with laughter at the silent Harold Lloyd comedy while the pit musicians play with gusto only for them to start drinking and playing cards during the talkie feature film which the audience watch in fascinated silence. When the musicians play "Good Save The Queen", the audience stands - apart from a man who is fast asleep although his younger male companian gently lifts the sleeping man's hat; a lovely detail. Anthony Asquith appears in this scene as a Harold Lloyd lookalike that a young boy gets excited about. A reclaimed classic of British cinema.
No comments:
Post a Comment