Rent A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929)

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.

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.