Rent A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929)

A Gem from 1929 - A Cottage on Dartmoor review by Cato

You won't actually see much of Dartmoor in this film, only a poor criminal running across it at the beginning, but it's a wonderful example of late British silent films, in fact the last that was made. This was the second film of the director, Anthony Asquith, who went on to direct The Winslow Boy, The Importance of Being Earnest and The Millionairess later in his career. Most of the action takes place in a barber shop, and is a melodramatic love story which of course tragically ends, but the filming is exquisite and can stand with the rest of European films of the time, so brilliantly is it made.

Another Razor's Edge - A Cottage on Dartmoor review by CH

A decade separates Anthony Asquith's A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) from his wartime thriller Cottage to Let. With the latter he had become what is known as a dependable director, faint praise incarnate, a polite term for stagebound (we still await a good film version of The Importance of Being Earnest: his attempt handbagged Wilde's play).

To go back to A Cottage on Dartmoor is something else. The title is misleading. More of it in fact takes place in a barber's chair, a blade silently swishing - so much that one almost suspects that there is a pie shop next door. Murder is indeed likely to be on the menu, for sinister obsessive Uno Henning is smitten with Norah Baring, a manicurist on the premises who prefers the attentions shown by a burly customer, farmer Hans Schlettow.

That is the essence of the plot, a variant on one which has done service down the ages: the love triangle - there should have been a Greek playwright called Isosceles. What makes all this so absorbing is Asquith's continual use of light and shadow, camera angles which owe much to Expressionism, that look in the eye which, without sound, denotes terror itself. A set piece is a visit to the “talkies”. Ironically, the sound section of this film is lost, but it is is fascinating to watch the close-ups of a pit-band orchestra: the strings are as taut as the emotions shown by those three adults who have shown up in the audience while two schoolboys' affectation of bravery in the face of on-screen horror serves them ill.

Strange to think that it was a decade in which prose and poetry had taken new forms while film was still in its early stages, and yet silent images remain far more a part of Modernism than the early talkies.

Would that a version of The Waste Land had been filmed in the London and Europe of the Twenties. Perhaps it could yet be done.

British Silent. - A Cottage on Dartmoor review by Steve

Anthony Asquith's final silent film was partly shot on location in Cornwall. As it's a melodrama which climaxes with an attempted murder, it's tempting to imagine the influence of contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, though more realistic to suppose they were both inspired by German cinema. But the director does have a cameo. Like Hitch.

It opens at an isolated cottage as a young mother (Norah Baring) is terrorised by an escaped convict, and then flashes back to a barber shop in London where she was a manicurist who provoked the violent jealousy of a colleague (Uno Henning) by flirting with a customer, her future husband. The fleeing prisoner is that barber, back for revenge.

Asquith was an adventurous and versatile film maker but some of the cinematic tricks he attempts here now seem a bit gimmicky. Most startling are the brief flashes of red that are edited into the barber's assault on his rival with a razor. But it's not all visual technique; Baring gives a soulful, yet vivacious performance in the central role.

In his early films, Asquith was a stylist, as well as a brilliant visual storyteller. The rural locations limited the movement of the camera, but the photography of the windswept moors is evocative. The London scenes are exceptional, particularly a sequence in a cinema which focuses on the audience watching a talkie. Shame he didn't direct more silents.