A Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith, 1929)

 

Anthony Asquith’s 1929 film A Cottage on Dartmoor is as skillfully varied an entertainment as any silent film, placing elements of bustlingly orchestrated social comedy within a starkly tense thriller. It may be true that one responds to individual moments more than to the film in its totality - it lacks (say) the intensity and broader implication of Lang’s best silent work, or the sustained poetry of Murnau's, and the ultimate narrative trajectory is unremarkable – but this caveat emerges more in retrospect than while watching and submitting to the film. At the start, we follow Joe, an escaped prisoner, making his way over the moor to a lonely house containing a woman and her young child; she recognizes him and calls out his name, and we’re immediately in the busy beauty salon where they once worked together, tracing the events that brought them to their sorry place, setting up an ultimate sorry ending. Throughout, Asquith keeps intertitles to a minimum, trusting on the audience’s engagement with the evocative power of images: to randomly pick from countless examples, when an ebullient Joe chatters away to a customer, Asquith juxtaposes images of cricket and racing and other conversational fodder with shots of the bored customer; later on, with Joe now disconsolate and unable to engage with a garrulous client, the device is reversed (this being the Britain of the time, cricket is a constant). An extended sequence in a movie theater is a tour de force, depicting a varied crowd taking in a sound film preceded by a Harold Lloyd silent (nicely indicated by a couple of kids noting another attendee’s resemblance to Lloyd and arguing over whether or not it’s him up there on the screen), the talkie's novelty summed up by shots of the live accompanists now killing time by drinking and playing cards, the camera taking in a rich range of audience reactions, all punctuated by flashes of Joe’s jealous, uncomprehending, furious inner life, the overall effect quite thrilling.