Rent A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929)

A Love Triangle With a Razor In It - A Cottage on Dartmoor review by griggs

Didn't expect a silent film to give me an actual tension headache, but here we are.

A Cottage on Dartmoor is basically a love triangle with a razor in it — Sally, Joe the smitten barber, and Harry the farmer she picks instead. Then Anthony Asquith gets his hands on it, and the barbershop scene turns genuinely nerve-shredding. Uno Henning spends most of the film looking like a man who hasn't slept since jealousy was invented, and it works.

The camera's the real surprise. Nothing about it feels like 1929 — it moves with real intent, like it's chasing the story rather than sitting back and recording it. There's a talkie-cinema scene dropped in as a cheeky wink at the sound era, and I loved that a film this old is self-aware enough to joke about its own extinction.

Story-wise, you could write it on a beer mat. Doesn't matter — atmosphere does the heavy lifting, and a couple of stagey supporting turns barely dent it. Nearly a century old, and that razor still makes me flinch.

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.