"A Cottage on Dartmoor" is the perfect companion piece to Anthony Asquith's other silent masterpiece, "Shooting Stars" (1928). The latter concerning the perilous production of silent cinema in Britain, especially in the face of Hollywood competition, and this one about film spectatorship against the storm clouds of talkies upon the horizon.
The story of a madman infatuated with a coworker he appears to hardly know doesn't make much sense if one thinks about it, but it's not the thing here. Well, not entirely, that is; his gaze and paroxysms are important. I suppose, too, that I can't blame one for, in looking for inspirations or precedents to Asquith's film, turning to comparisons with that other, more well-known contemporary British filmmaker, Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, no, this isn't Hitchcockian, at least not of the Hitchcock of the silent era--the director of the highly reflexive Hollywood pair of "Rear Window" (1954) and "Vertigo" (1958), sure, but not the Englishmen making "The Lodger" (1927) by way of, loosely defined, German expressionism. And, yes, the techniques here surely owe much to European cinema, including some Soviet-style rapid montage. To see where Asquith was most importantly coming from in this case, however, we need to cross the Atlantic and, then, go all the way around to the Pacific, as he did as an Oxford student, to meet another English filmmaker and arguably the foremost genius of the silent era, Charlie Chaplin. (Being the aristocratic son of a prime minister has its advantages, it would seem; his associations also including Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.)
It's with this understanding of the undergraduate being schooled by Chaplin in the art form that he could go on to produce this dark version of "City Lights" (1931)--even before Chaplin finished "City Lights" (although, perhaps tellingly, Asquith visited Chaplin on the set for "The Circus" (1928), made as the talkies had just emerged). Both films are essentially about the beauty of silent films against the blind barbarism (heh, get it, because the lead is a barber) of the newfangled talkies, of synchronized-sound films. Chaplin relied more purely on sight analogies to make this point, whereas Asquith lays it all out in the movie theatre scene, where in a silent film, the characters go to see a talkie.
Reportedly, "A Cottage on Dartmoor" was also released in a goat-gland format. That is, it featured sound-on-disc music and some dialogue sequences, which were done with a German system and recorded in Berlin (whereas the rest of the picture was filmed in London studios and the eponymous moorland since proclaimed a national park), but most British cinemas weren't yet equipped for the technology, so there would've been a purely silent version, from which the BFI restoration available on home video appears to be derived. While I fear these talkie sequences would've been as horrendous as those in other such goat-gland productions ("Lonesome" (1928) comes to mind), they were reportedly limited to the talkie film-within-the-film, so it may've been unusually effective. As is now, we never see the talkie feature our surrogate audience views (nor the silent comedy short preceding it). This is brilliant, because the implication is that there's nothing worth seeing there; all the interesting action based around looks is happening in the silent film in attendance to the unseen talkie.
There's a lot to love about this overtly-meta sequence. The reveal of the program information is initially delayed until after the silent short and which contains some jokes: the talkie title "My Woman" being the gender reversal of the "My Man" film-within-the-film from "Shooting Stars" and as adapted from the play by "W. Shayspeare," it's "200% ALL TALKING!!! ALL SINGING!!! ALL DANCING!! DRAMA." That's just spot on for how these monstrosities were advertised. The tagline for the pathetic excuse for a Best Picture winner "The Broadway Melody" (1929) went something like that. The brief withholding of the program details may allow for the opportunity to confuse one over the rapid montage of an energetic band playing spliced with audience reactions to be interpreted as part of the musical talkie--or, at least I was a bit unsure at first. It's only after we see the program that we know with certainty that the band was actually providing musical accompaniment to the Harold Lloyd silent that preceded the talkie. And, duh, early talkies didn't feature such dynamic camera positions and shot juxtapositions. I mean, by and large, we're talking about ugly canned theatre at this point.
Note, too, the joyful audience reactions to the Lloyd film. Then, see their behavior when the talkie begins. The band starts playing cards without any work to do. Several shriek or turn away in horror. One man falls asleep. The deaf grandmother with an ear trumpet is an especially nice touch, as here she must rely on the woman sitting next to her to describe the picture into the hearing aid, the quality of the talkie's sound not even being sufficient--creaky noise that that they were. The double in the audience for Harold Lloyd's glasses character is wonderful, too, and as played by none other than Asquith himself and who leaves when the talkie begins. The kid who points him out isn't wrong that he's the guy from the movie; it's just that the movie is "A Cottage on Dartmoor."
There are some minor drawbacks in the picture, although I maintain not with the narrative when understanding its reflexive construction. Some of the visual gimmickry may be excessive, though. Arguably too on the nose are the shots of shadows that at least a couple of times resemble prison bars. The cutting to newsreel footage of sporting events to represent the chit-chat at the salon was a novel notion, too, but it's not flawlessly pulled off. Regardless, this is more than compensated by the apparent subtlety of the narrative's self-reference, which although the movie theatre sequence announces it well enough, I have yet to read another review that explores how thoroughly this reflexivity is the raison d'être of the entire film. It's all about the end of the silent era and the emergence of sound films. The impassioned love triangle is but a mirror's reflection to this movie-going experience.
The men's barbershop, or hair and beauty salon, is an analogy for filmmaking and specifically silent filmmaking, full as it is of cutting, mirror-reflected imagery and entire scenes based around looks with nary a word spoken--and, indeed, there are relatively few intertitles in this one. This mirror motif continues into the home of the first date sequence, too, before it's rudely interrupted by the piano tune that shares its title with the talkie, "My Woman." Sally, the manicurist, appears to either be infatuated with the song or employing it to distract from the gaze of Joe, a barber. Thus, we have a silent city infiltrated by the talkie, where Joe's romance with Sally is doomed by the hairy situation of the rival suitor Harry (get it?) as a stand-in for the prospect of his cottage on the moor of sound cinema. A love triangle for the affections of the movie-goer and pictorial beauty as represented by Sally. And, by the way, the three leads are performed by an international cast of a Brit, a German and a Swede and in what was a Britain-Sweden co-production (although the Swedish re-cut sounds like it was an abomination)--a universality of silent cinema that would evaporate with the talkies. Three people from different countries can't just interact on a barbershop sound stage without some accounting for divergent accents, after all.
The climactic gaze upon Sally's photograph especially brings the point home, as we get a seaside sprint that's a bit reminiscent of a Harold Lloyd movie, "The Kid Brother" (1927)--a climactic romantic race motif that, before passion was eventually diluted by rom-com hackery, had quite a cinematic legacy, including in "The Graduate" (1967), "Manhattan" (1979) and, in what's at least a surprising coincidence, "When Harry Met Sally" (1989).
Moreover, while the talkie remains unseen, Asquith and cinematographer Stanley Rodwell repeatedly underscore how the infiltration of the talkie has blinded these movie-goers to the details, including by repeatedly using music in a thematically more sophisticated manner than would most sound films. The tickets and flower note that Joe drops are particularly indicative of the blinding effect of the talkies, but there's all the visual cues throughout from facial expressions that only the camera catches while the gaze of other characters are distracted.
One has to hand it to Asquith, too; he saw the writing on the wall. The time of silent cinema was numbered. The arrival of talkies was too violent a transformation. It's at the theatre that Joe first fantasizes about violently attacking Harry, and it's when he's at the razor's edge, so to speak, between cackling women on either side of him where he first snaps (again with the puns, this film) from the post-traumatic stress of the audio-visual assault upon him and the rest of the audience at the theatre. When he sees even the affections of Sally turning towards her talkie date, he sees red--and the film briefly becomes a striking red in an otherwise tinted black-and-white picture. The tension is built up all the more by flashback plotting seemingly anticipating film noir, psychological editing and artistic cinematography. We know Joe and the silent film will wind up as escaped prisoners and that, as with Chaplin's Tramp, this cinematic prison was only temporary. We don't require spoiler warnings here; we already know which art form tragically dies. This is a mournful picture. If Chaplin's "City Lights" is silent cinema's celebratory eulogy, this is its lamenting elegy.
The story of a madman infatuated with a coworker he appears to hardly know doesn't make much sense if one thinks about it, but it's not the thing here. Well, not entirely, that is; his gaze and paroxysms are important. I suppose, too, that I can't blame one for, in looking for inspirations or precedents to Asquith's film, turning to comparisons with that other, more well-known contemporary British filmmaker, Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, no, this isn't Hitchcockian, at least not of the Hitchcock of the silent era--the director of the highly reflexive Hollywood pair of "Rear Window" (1954) and "Vertigo" (1958), sure, but not the Englishmen making "The Lodger" (1927) by way of, loosely defined, German expressionism. And, yes, the techniques here surely owe much to European cinema, including some Soviet-style rapid montage. To see where Asquith was most importantly coming from in this case, however, we need to cross the Atlantic and, then, go all the way around to the Pacific, as he did as an Oxford student, to meet another English filmmaker and arguably the foremost genius of the silent era, Charlie Chaplin. (Being the aristocratic son of a prime minister has its advantages, it would seem; his associations also including Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford.)
It's with this understanding of the undergraduate being schooled by Chaplin in the art form that he could go on to produce this dark version of "City Lights" (1931)--even before Chaplin finished "City Lights" (although, perhaps tellingly, Asquith visited Chaplin on the set for "The Circus" (1928), made as the talkies had just emerged). Both films are essentially about the beauty of silent films against the blind barbarism (heh, get it, because the lead is a barber) of the newfangled talkies, of synchronized-sound films. Chaplin relied more purely on sight analogies to make this point, whereas Asquith lays it all out in the movie theatre scene, where in a silent film, the characters go to see a talkie.
Reportedly, "A Cottage on Dartmoor" was also released in a goat-gland format. That is, it featured sound-on-disc music and some dialogue sequences, which were done with a German system and recorded in Berlin (whereas the rest of the picture was filmed in London studios and the eponymous moorland since proclaimed a national park), but most British cinemas weren't yet equipped for the technology, so there would've been a purely silent version, from which the BFI restoration available on home video appears to be derived. While I fear these talkie sequences would've been as horrendous as those in other such goat-gland productions ("Lonesome" (1928) comes to mind), they were reportedly limited to the talkie film-within-the-film, so it may've been unusually effective. As is now, we never see the talkie feature our surrogate audience views (nor the silent comedy short preceding it). This is brilliant, because the implication is that there's nothing worth seeing there; all the interesting action based around looks is happening in the silent film in attendance to the unseen talkie.
There's a lot to love about this overtly-meta sequence. The reveal of the program information is initially delayed until after the silent short and which contains some jokes: the talkie title "My Woman" being the gender reversal of the "My Man" film-within-the-film from "Shooting Stars" and as adapted from the play by "W. Shayspeare," it's "200% ALL TALKING!!! ALL SINGING!!! ALL DANCING!! DRAMA." That's just spot on for how these monstrosities were advertised. The tagline for the pathetic excuse for a Best Picture winner "The Broadway Melody" (1929) went something like that. The brief withholding of the program details may allow for the opportunity to confuse one over the rapid montage of an energetic band playing spliced with audience reactions to be interpreted as part of the musical talkie--or, at least I was a bit unsure at first. It's only after we see the program that we know with certainty that the band was actually providing musical accompaniment to the Harold Lloyd silent that preceded the talkie. And, duh, early talkies didn't feature such dynamic camera positions and shot juxtapositions. I mean, by and large, we're talking about ugly canned theatre at this point.
Note, too, the joyful audience reactions to the Lloyd film. Then, see their behavior when the talkie begins. The band starts playing cards without any work to do. Several shriek or turn away in horror. One man falls asleep. The deaf grandmother with an ear trumpet is an especially nice touch, as here she must rely on the woman sitting next to her to describe the picture into the hearing aid, the quality of the talkie's sound not even being sufficient--creaky noise that that they were. The double in the audience for Harold Lloyd's glasses character is wonderful, too, and as played by none other than Asquith himself and who leaves when the talkie begins. The kid who points him out isn't wrong that he's the guy from the movie; it's just that the movie is "A Cottage on Dartmoor."
There are some minor drawbacks in the picture, although I maintain not with the narrative when understanding its reflexive construction. Some of the visual gimmickry may be excessive, though. Arguably too on the nose are the shots of shadows that at least a couple of times resemble prison bars. The cutting to newsreel footage of sporting events to represent the chit-chat at the salon was a novel notion, too, but it's not flawlessly pulled off. Regardless, this is more than compensated by the apparent subtlety of the narrative's self-reference, which although the movie theatre sequence announces it well enough, I have yet to read another review that explores how thoroughly this reflexivity is the raison d'être of the entire film. It's all about the end of the silent era and the emergence of sound films. The impassioned love triangle is but a mirror's reflection to this movie-going experience.
The men's barbershop, or hair and beauty salon, is an analogy for filmmaking and specifically silent filmmaking, full as it is of cutting, mirror-reflected imagery and entire scenes based around looks with nary a word spoken--and, indeed, there are relatively few intertitles in this one. This mirror motif continues into the home of the first date sequence, too, before it's rudely interrupted by the piano tune that shares its title with the talkie, "My Woman." Sally, the manicurist, appears to either be infatuated with the song or employing it to distract from the gaze of Joe, a barber. Thus, we have a silent city infiltrated by the talkie, where Joe's romance with Sally is doomed by the hairy situation of the rival suitor Harry (get it?) as a stand-in for the prospect of his cottage on the moor of sound cinema. A love triangle for the affections of the movie-goer and pictorial beauty as represented by Sally. And, by the way, the three leads are performed by an international cast of a Brit, a German and a Swede and in what was a Britain-Sweden co-production (although the Swedish re-cut sounds like it was an abomination)--a universality of silent cinema that would evaporate with the talkies. Three people from different countries can't just interact on a barbershop sound stage without some accounting for divergent accents, after all.
The climactic gaze upon Sally's photograph especially brings the point home, as we get a seaside sprint that's a bit reminiscent of a Harold Lloyd movie, "The Kid Brother" (1927)--a climactic romantic race motif that, before passion was eventually diluted by rom-com hackery, had quite a cinematic legacy, including in "The Graduate" (1967), "Manhattan" (1979) and, in what's at least a surprising coincidence, "When Harry Met Sally" (1989).
Moreover, while the talkie remains unseen, Asquith and cinematographer Stanley Rodwell repeatedly underscore how the infiltration of the talkie has blinded these movie-goers to the details, including by repeatedly using music in a thematically more sophisticated manner than would most sound films. The tickets and flower note that Joe drops are particularly indicative of the blinding effect of the talkies, but there's all the visual cues throughout from facial expressions that only the camera catches while the gaze of other characters are distracted.
One has to hand it to Asquith, too; he saw the writing on the wall. The time of silent cinema was numbered. The arrival of talkies was too violent a transformation. It's at the theatre that Joe first fantasizes about violently attacking Harry, and it's when he's at the razor's edge, so to speak, between cackling women on either side of him where he first snaps (again with the puns, this film) from the post-traumatic stress of the audio-visual assault upon him and the rest of the audience at the theatre. When he sees even the affections of Sally turning towards her talkie date, he sees red--and the film briefly becomes a striking red in an otherwise tinted black-and-white picture. The tension is built up all the more by flashback plotting seemingly anticipating film noir, psychological editing and artistic cinematography. We know Joe and the silent film will wind up as escaped prisoners and that, as with Chaplin's Tramp, this cinematic prison was only temporary. We don't require spoiler warnings here; we already know which art form tragically dies. This is a mournful picture. If Chaplin's "City Lights" is silent cinema's celebratory eulogy, this is its lamenting elegy.