ceremony for silent cinema
by Douglas Messerli
Anthony Asquith and Herbert Price
(screenplay), Anthony Asquith (director) A Cottage at Dartmoor / 1929
The
central figure of the work, a barber named Joe (Uno Henning) has already fallen
desperately in love with the shop’s manicurist, Sally (Norah Baring) before the
film’s first shot. But he is tortured by her male customers who all seem to
find her attractive and love interlocking fingers with her as she files and
trims their nails, and is even more disconcerted by her disinterest in him. He
invites her to a double feature of a movie—a popular convention of the year was
a silent comedy before the “talkie” feature—which she immediately turns down,
he tossing the tickets to the floor in dejection.
Later, his fellow barber picks them up and invites another of the shop’s
female employees to the movies, an offer she gladly accepts. At the end of the
day, when Sally somewhat reluctantly accepts his offer, he, accordingly, no
longer has the tickets, and they are forced to have dinner at her boarding
house made up mostly of elderly women.
The evening is a disaster, not primarily because of the intrusive elders’ chatter—spotting young love on the horizon, they spread the message to one another to strategically retreat after dinner—but because Joe is so shy and innocent that he fears to even touch his date, let alone hugging her close to him and engaging in a kiss. When he finally stands and comes close to her while she plays the piano, the one elderly who has not gotten the message intrudes, demanding that each of the young pair speak loudly into her ear horn.
Despite the failure of the evening, Joe still hopes for a relationship, delivering to Sally a violet nosegay the next morning with a note expressing that she will wear some flowers to give him hope. The note falls to the floor before she receives the bunch, but still she pulls off a few of the violets and pins them to her sweater. But his hopes are dashed nonetheless as her male customers, particularly Harry (Hans Adalbert Schlettow), flirt with her and she pays utter no attention to her barber friend.
Over the next several weeks Harry returns to have his nails manicured
and treats himself to every shave, tonic, coloring job, and massage that the
tonsorial shop offers, just to get close to Sally. Harry soon announces that
he’s purchased a small farm in Dartmoor, and finally offers Sally a ring and a
marriage proposal. Joe suffers in silent despair through all of this—most
notably in a movie theater where he watches the double feature with the couple
sitting nearby as he suffers in near torture—before he is asked yet again to
shave his competitor.
Asquith focuses for a long while on Joe’s early morning sharpening of his razor and on his character’s inner suffering expressed in images of the past joy interspersed with visions of horror, before he begins the job of removing inch by inch the later on Harry’s face. So we like Sally, when the razor actually cuts into Harry’s throat find it difficult to imagine it was not intentional, even while Joe insists it was not. For a long while Harry lies on the floor, possibly near death, as the policeman queries those who saw the event, Sally herself insisting that his near murder of her lover was predetermined.
Joe is sent away to prison, and the first scenes of this film before the
long flashback, are of his escape from the Dartmoor prison facility, his race
through the moors, and his sudden appearance of Sally and Harry’s cottage. The
only questions that remain is whether his visitation is in revenge of their
testimony or a last gasp of his inconsolable love for Sally, and if, as we
discover it is the latter, how Sally and Harry will respond.
Oddly,
despite her initial terror, Sally is willing to hide him in the upstairs
bedroom where he baby lies in his crib. And when Harry returns, Sally easily
convinces him to help her keep the police who have arrived to protect the
couple of Joe, distracted long enough so that the prisoner may again escape.
The mystery of this tale is why the couple is still willing to hide and protect
the man who might have torn them apart.
Harry dismisses the police long enough to hide Joe in an outlying barn,
from which with a gift of new set of clothes, they encourage him to escape. But
at the very last moment Joe decides to make a run back to the cottage, knowing
that he will be shot and killed by the policemen who have expected him to
return to the cottage. He is shot, arriving the front door to die in Sally’s
arms; in this last moment’s tears come to Sally’s eyes and Joe attains at least
a symbolic enactment of his fantasies.
Yet
none of this, of course, actually explains in full why Sally and Harry have
tried to save Joe from his seemingly just punishment, even if we might imagine
they have come to terms with the incident and realize that he may have been
innocent of actually committing the crime.*
Perhaps to solve that mystery we may have perceive what this film is
truly about. Although the “plot” tells us that our trios’ sexual desires are
very much at the center of this film, the images and structure of the work tell
us something different: that this film is truly about cinema itself, in
particular the transition from silent to talking movies. Writing in The New
York Times, one of my favorite critics Dave Kehr puts it succinctly:
“The film’s centerpiece sequence is, in fact,
a sustained act of film appreciation: Joe follows Sally and Harry to a cinema,
where a crowd is shown laughing with delight at a silent comedy and then
falling into numb annoyance when the talking feature comes on. (A sound disc,
now lost, provided a rumble of muffled, incomprehensible dialogue.)
The
late ’20s was still a time of transition for the movies, when no one knew with
certainty whether sound would vanquish silent drama or be used mainly to
present canned music and vaudeville acts, though many filmmakers, Asquith
apparently included, believed that silent storytelling had reached such a high
level of refinement that mere chatter would never be enough to extinguish it.
This,
of course, was not to be, but A Cottage on Dartmoor provides ample
illustration of how elegantly and assuredly expressive silent film had become,
and how hard it must have been to believe that this magnificent medium, then
just over 30 years old, was doomed.”
In opposition to that silent comedy, the second, talkie film, is clearly
a romance, possibly since audience members continually turn their faces away
unable to watch the events on the screen, the kind of work such as Alfred
Hitchcock’s Murder, one of the first major British talkies, also made in
1929.
Clearly the more attractive of the two Joe, like Chaplin and Lloyd, is a
true romantic who dreams for much of the film instead of effectively acting.
Although he clearly adores the female gender, when it comes to interacting with
women he is clumsy and nearly silent. His passion is expressed in the imagined
images of the film, interposed within a montage of countering images in a
manner that demonstrates Asquith’s own influence of directors such as
Eisenstein and Murnau. And when Joe first shows up to the cottage he looks very
much like Caligari’s creation, waiting only to be locked back into the cabinet
or funeral carrying-case.
Strangely, the more effeminate Harry is nearly all action. When he
invites Sally to the movies his tickets are in hand. And so too is the ring
ready to put on her finger, his announcement of having purchased a farm on
Dartmoor, his determination to marry her and take her away from her lowly job
as a manicurist. Even in this silent film, we can almost hear his loud and
forceful proclamations. Through many scenes in the
cottage, Sally and Harry’s baby makes a series of loud noises as it cries,
whereas Joe manages later to quiet him down.
Although Sally may be attracted to Joe, she recognizes him as a loser, a
man who may remain a barber for the rest of his life, unable to sustain a
family, let alone a wife at home with a child. It is almost inevitable to Sally
would choose Harry over Joe. Joe has only what he already knows, while Harry
looks forward to a future working in nature, the real world of sound and sense.
Yet it is also clear that Sally holds Joe in her heart, realizing that if only
he were somewhat different she might have chosen him over Harry. When Harry
asks how much she loves him, she first signifies the amount with two fingers,
later with two hands a few inches from each other instead of opening her arms
wide as we might expect in reaction to such a question.
Even Joe’s death in her arms is straight out of the melodramatic silent
movies, not the real world which the talkies claimed to represent. And finally,
what we realize we are observing in Joe’s death is the end of an era, something
beautiful from the past that is no longer viable in the louder and brutal world
in which both Harry and Sally now live. It is almost as if Asquith in this film
was playing out the film’s own epitaph, an eloquent final gasp of the form that
everyone knew could no longer survive.
The couple in the Dartmoor Cottage choose to put it gently to death or
even permit it to escape into history rather than, as the unthinking police
have chosen, to simply mow it down the way police would often do in movies of
only a few years later. One might, finally, describe this director’s film as a
glorious ceremony for silent cinema.
*This film appears on some LGBTQ lists,
presumably from a gay reading of this seemingly heterosexual only tale. I can
only imagine that these viewers read the relationship of the trio as some kind
of ménage-à-trois, since both men love Sally. But there is utterly no indication
that the two men have anything but a hostile relationship, and certainly do not
have an earlier sexual friendship as in, for example, Truffaut’s Jules and
Jim. Indeed, Harry takes up a gun and tells Joe that he is helping him only
because of Sally’s wishes. Their relationship to Sally is mutually
heterosexual, and the relationship with each other is existent only because of
Sally, which manifests itself in envy and jealousy. There is utterly no
indication of an attraction to one another. Even though I have through the
years interpreted many a film that might have been read by others as completely
heterosexual as having LGBTQ implications, this is not one of them, despite the
fact that Asquith himself was apparently a closeted homosexual and I have
included others of his films in My Queer Cinema.
Los Angeles, May 28, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May
2022).
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