Un Cottage dans le Dartmoor

A Cottage on Dartmoor is a late British silent of stunning clarity and poetic justice. The use of the camera to caress the homey accents in Norah's boarding house, the use of mirrors to dramatize the lives and thoughts of the characters, the elongated camera angles of the escaped convict jumping from captivity to freedom, and running from his past into redemption. All of this and more make this late silent itself almost a valentine to the end of the silent era and the dawn of sound.

One of the most poignant scenes in the movie demonstrates this by taking us to a "talkie" that nonetheless has a full orchestra that the camera hones in on and romanticizes.

While this is a tale of obsession, it is also a story of love that has many emotionally tense elements that Norah Baring and Uno Henning handle with dignity and grace. I'm very surprised that I've not heard more about either of these actors.

A Cottage on Dartmoor is a very beautifully realized film that probably wouldn't have been as effective had it been made as a sound movie.

Anthony Asquith is best known for straightforward film-making in the so-called British literary tradition which served him particularly well in stage-to-screen adaptations of G. B. Shaw & Terrence Rattigan. Letting the writer function as auteur doesn't win you critical kudos, but films as fine as PYGMALION/'38 and THE BROWNING VERSION/'51 don't just 'happen.' Even so, it's fun to watch the young Asquith show off, even needlessly, on late silents like this & UNDERGROUND/'28, also out on DVD. You can all but hear him parsing the latest Russian or German import just screened at his CineClub. There's some strikingly fast montage work and psychological P.O.V. stuff (even a shock-flash of red tinting as in the original prints of Hitchcock's SPELLBOUND/'45), but the main influence is UFA studios with their posh camera moves, rich visual texture, expressionist acting, shadowy lighting & diagonal slashes The opening works best as Swedish actor Uno Henning (in his only British role, he's an intriguing mix of Buster Keaton & Conrad Veidt) breaks out of prison in search of revenge. The story flashes back to detail a rather commonplace love triangle that gives Asquith plenty of space for his set pieces (a visit to the cinema, a very close shave, et al.) which tend to run on a bit too long. But no matter, it's all ravishing to watch and if the characterizations never quite add up, the visual touches are worth the stretch.

Uno Henning escapes from Dartmoor Prison and makes it to a small cottage where he confronts Norah Baring. We see in flashback that he worked in a barber shop and had a crush on Baring. After she (kind of) unintentionally leads him on, he discovers that she plans on marrying customer Hans Adalbert Schlettow. Bad things happen.

The last of four silent films made by Anthony Asquith, it was made so much on the cusp of talking films that the characters go see one in the film. It's a striking visual film with strong expressionist elements and odd, dynamic editing. It's also about 15 minutes too long.

Asquith cameos as a customer in the quite long movie theater scene.

Sally lives in a cottage on Dartmoor when, on a dark and quiet night, a man breaks into her home having just escaped the high-security prison across the moors. That man is none other than Joe, a former barber's assistant at the place where Sally used to be a manicurist. As they connect eyes, the audience flashback to the times where Joe and Sally once worked together and he had tried to woo her at the beginning of a series of events that now brought them to this place.

The BBC's summer of British films this year turned out to be better than I expected it to be because, instead of wheeling out Zulu, Dam Busters and all the usual British films, they actually screened lots of films that I had not seen or, in some cases, heard of. Of course this meant that some of them were not any good but at least it was an attempt to fresh up the idea of what British cinema is. A Cottage on Dartmoor is a good example of this as it is rare for silent films to be screened on television and far more rare for them to be British silent films. I had never seen this and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Narrative-wise the film opens with an element of fear and tension before jumping back to more of a comedy and romance. As this builds back to where it started again for a good finish. The film is maybe 15 minutes too long for the material to sustain but otherwise it is well delivered. The funny bits are amusing, the tense bits tense and the romance nicely melodramatic and tragic, however it is the delivery that makes the film – specifically that of Asquith and his cinematographer. Visually the film matches the tone of the film really well – opening and closing with sharp shadows on the moors, and enjoying a bright and carefree air early in the barbershop scenes. The images are sharp and really well formed with plenty of clever shots. Mirrors are used well, conversations represented by stock footage, flashbacks delivered within flashbacks and a great scene where we watch a cinema audience reacting to a film they are watching. Visually and technically it is very impressive and I enjoyed it a great deal.

Deserves to be screened a lot more than it is and be seen by more people than it is, but credit to the BBC for showing it recently.

COTTAGE ON DARTMOOR: an expressionistic and claustrophobic account of sexual obsession and jealousy, very Hitchockian in the way it deals with the resulting crescendo of suspense, especially in connection with a key throat-cutting in a barber's chair incident. Asquith was a director who grew stodgy as his career entered into the sound era, viz his terribly British adaptions of Rattigan, but the present film (1929) is rather an eye opener. One standout scene is set within a cinema, partly a comment on the imminent and creatively burdensome coming of clunky sound, and which contains an extended eye opening use of editing, cutting about within an audience as the beady-eyed boy friend watches his victims - a bravura sequence which ought to be much better known to cineastes.