Fatal Attraction

A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929)

Wednesday June 13, 7:30p.m., SIFF Cinema
(The Nesholm Family Lecture Hall), Seattle International Film Festival

Sunday July 15, 6:00p.m., The Castro, The San Francisco Silent Film Festival

A deranged man escapes from prison to seek revenge on the woman who put him there in A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929). Revealed in flashbacks and punctuated with rapid montage, this late silent era film displays the mastery of visual narrative achieved just prior to "the talkies" using lurid metaphor and a minimal number of intertitles.

Joe (Uno Henning) a barber’s assistant, is obsessed with Sally (Norah Baring) a pretty manicurist who has fallen in love with a customer and local farmer (Hans Schlettow). As their attachment grows, Joe becomes increasingly jealous, cutting the farmer’s throat with a straight razor when he finally snaps.

Director Anthony Asquith etches his characters with sparing light against the darkness of night, in the street, the theater and farmhouse. By contrast, the dark doings of Joe’s crime are all the more shocking in the only bright setting, the barbershop. As mayhem ensues, a bottle falls from an overturned table, its liquid contents burbling onto the floor. An overwrought Joe smears real blood across his face and claims his innocence, "I never meant to do it." A glowing ceiling light over his shoulder recalls the earlier image of a sinister moon hiding behind clouds as he runs across the darkened countryside.

In production …
Fundamentally a silent film, A Cottage on Dartmoor was released during the period of transition into sound when hybrid productions were common. The original film included one scene, in which Joe spies on Sally and the farmer at the movies, with a synchronized soundtrack. Ironically, the group who would soon be thrown out of work by sound is featured in this segment, the theater orchestra. Anthony Asquith appears briefly as an audience member, mistaken for the star on the screen by two boys. While this scene remains in the film, the synchronized soundtrack recorded in Germany is now presumed lost.

Multi-national in the truest sense, A Cottage on Dartmoor was co-produced by British Instructional Films and the Swedish Biograph Company. Schlettow, a German, appeared in numerous Fritz Lang productions, also working with D. W. Griffith and Joe May. Henning, a Swede, appeared in G. W. Pabst and Victor Sjöström films, while Baring, a Brit, was featured in Alfred Hitchcock’s Murder (1930).

Anthony Asquith …

Following his graduation from Oxford, Anthony Asquith spent six months as a guest at Pickfair, observing the minutia of Hollywood film production. A student of European and American cinema, Asquith became known for his technical brilliance in the nineteen-twenties with Shooting Stars (1928), Underground (1928) and A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929). As the son of British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith (1908-16), social connections provided opportunities but also welcomed detractors. He is most often criticized for never developing a distinctive style as did contemporaries Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell. Asquith is remembered today for Pygmalion (1938), The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) and other literary adaptations, but his journeyman filmmaker’s approach lent itself to a wide range of subjects. Attracting the finest actors and material available, his films reveal a consistently high degree of quality that made Asquith a stalwart of British cinema for decades.

A Cottage on Dartmoor is presented courtesy of the British Film Institute and the San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Returning to SIFF, Founder and President of the Film Noir Foundation Eddie Muller will introduce this screening and noted silent film pianist Donald Sosin will perform musical accompaniment.