My first thought when I read Dartmoor was of course "The Hound of Baskervilles" (and I still hate how the villain treated the poor dog to make him this "monster", but I'm digressing).
Today's movie - "A Cottage on Dartmoor" from 1929 - doesn't have even one dog, but there is one match nevertheless - a man escaping from Dartmoor Prison (which is why it's also known as "Escape from Dartmoor" in the USA).
Let's start with the plot as usual (spoiler alert!).
Actually, that's what you see first, the moorland, then a prisoner jumping down off a wall and running. The water he's drinking from when he's taking a break turns into the water in a bathtub in which a mother is bathing her toddler.
After putting the child to bed, the mother comes down to find the prisoner in her cottage.
Sally and Joe used to be co-workers at a barber shop and now we learn the story about they ended up where they are now.
Joe is a barber and Sally a manicurist. Joe is in love with her and asks her out to the talkies, but she turns him down. When she feels sorry for him later and says she will go with him, another barber has already taken the tickets that Joe dropped on the ground. Sally asks him to have supper with her at her boarding house instead, but Joe understands everything wrong thinking Sally likes him as well.
The next day he sends her flowers with a card telling her to wear one of them if there's hope for him. The card gets lost, though, so Sally doesn't know her putting one of the flowers on her lapel makes Joe think she reciprocates his feelings. He gets very jealous when he notices that Sally is drawn to a customer, a farmer called Harry, who keeps coming back for all kinds of treatments just to see her.
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| That's not Joe in the back, but another co-worker with the shiftiest eyes ever! |
Now excuse me while I scream a little because Blogger decided it would be a good idea to delete the next few paragraphs.
Deep breath ... I'm back.
When Harry invites Sally to the talkies and she accepts, Joe follows them to the theater and sits right behind them. The more they are enjoying themselves, the more he's getting riled up until he can't take it anymore and leaves.
Harry takes Sally home and proposes to her with a ring.
The next day at work Sally overhears some co-workers talking about Harry and her. One of them says he will never marry her. She shows them the engagement ring and the co-workers keep talking about the news - standing next to Joe.
So when Harry comes for his usual shave and manicure and Joe sees Harry and Sally holding hands, his tension keeps rising. At one point Sally thinks he will cut Harry's throat, she calls out, chaos ensues and Harry actually gets slashed.
The police turns up and takes Joe away who threatens to be back for revenge on them both.
So now Joe is standing in their cottage on Dartmoor.
As he has told another prisoner about this plan, though, the police is already after him and two policeman turn up to protect Sally while she - believing when he says he hadn't meant to do it and asking for her forgiveness - is hiding him in the room upstairs.
The situation gets even more complicated when Harry comes home and insists on looking in on his child. Of course he's shocked to see Joe there. Again Joe assures them he hadn't meant to do it and Harry replies he will help him escape merely for Sally's sake.
So Sally gives Joe some different clothes and then goes to distract the policemen while Harry smuggles him out of the house and takes him to a stable with a horse.
When Joe finds a picture of Sally in the jacket she gave him, however, he decides not to go through with the plan and instead rushes towards the cottage knowing only too well that he will be shot.
He dies in Sally's arms telling her he couldn't live without her.
Hnh. I'm torn about this movie, I really am.
There are parts that are great and that I enjoyed very much, but there are also a few things that drove me nuts. Maybe it would have been different if it hadn't been so hot and I hadn't had a bit of a bad day overall, but I'm not usually that undecided.
"A Cottage on Dartmoor" was one of the last British silent films (you may have noticed the irony of the men asking Sally out to the talkies).
Its director, Anthony Asquith (who happened to be the son of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith and his wife Margot), was in his 20s when he made this movie, only his third one.
Asquith was drawn to the cinema from when he was a student at Oxford. When he visited his sister Elizabeth, who was a playwright and had many friends in the American film industry, in New York, they travelled to Hollywood where he got to meet a lot of the movie greats of that time, Fairbanks, Pickford, Lubitsch, Chaplin, and others, and also he got the chance to spend time on the set.
After Asquith returned home, he managed to direct his first film within a year and he used many of the techniques he had learned from being able to see European silent films, like lighting or montage techniques.
Those were the parts I enjoyed. The mood set by interesting camera angles, double exposures, by light and shadow, both in the scenes on the moors and in the cottage, worked beautifully for emphasizing Joe's increasing tension turning into obsession, almost insanity until the explosion.
And Uno Henning, a Swedish actor, does a wonderful job at making Joe utterly creepy. There's nothing romantic about this unrequited love.
Had Joe not been taken out of the picture early by going to prison, I'm sure he would have become a stalker. He's so convinced that Sally has to be his that I honestly didn't believe him when he said he didn't mean to hurt Harry even if it still looked like a threat to me at that moment.
If I had been Sally, I don't think I would have felt inclined to help him, and that Harry wants to help him really shows how much he loves Sally. I liked Harry and that Sally chose him. The inner values count.
(Too bad that Hans Adalbert Schlettow, who played Harry, was very close to the Nazis later which tainted my impression of his acting for me. )
Joe, however, is so beyond redemption that even at the end he just thinks of himself. HE can't live without her, HE has to tell her that, HE has to die in her arms. It's always about him.
I really loved all of the second half of the movie.
I also liked some of the first half, but I also hated some of it (I use "hated" on purpose here).
It's my old enemy, the length.
My first problem was the awkward date at the boarding house. I think you could get the idea without the camera going back and forth and back and forth between Joe and Sally. I can tell you that my tension was definitely rising through that one, but not in a good way.
Much worse was for me a scene, though, which others loved, the cinema scene. There were some fun ideas, such as the orchestra playing for the silent short at the beginning and then playing cards, smoking, and drinking when the talkie came on.
The constant cutting from one person to the other, however, drove me nuts. It got really bad with the rapid cuts, I actually had to look away. This is a technique which has always been annoying me, in a movie, in a show or even in YouTube videos.
To top it, the cinema scene was about 12 minutes long! I would have lost at least 8 of those. I got so mad that I even had to call my sister for a little rant! 😆
Another thing that annoyed me was that Norah Baring kept emoting through constantly raising mostly the right eyebrow, sometimes both. I don't know Baring, so I can't say if that was a mannerism of hers or if it was supposed to be dramatic acting, but you know how once you notice something, you can't not notice it anymore?
When she didn't do it, I actually liked her acting.
Lastly, I wasn't sure at all about the music. At the end, Stephen Horne was credited for the piano score. I really loved the piano parts, but it wasn't all piano and I honestly thought some of the other parts were terrible, for example in the cinema scene which made it even worse.
It was hectic and distracted me terribly. I know I should have tried it without the score, but a completely silent film would have been even harder.
This movie was a veritable rollercoaster for me.
If I watched it again, I would probably just fast forward through part of the date scene and skip the cinema scene completely. I'm sure I would enjoy it much more like that.
Sources:
1. Fritzi Kramer: A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) - A Silent Film Review. On: Movies Silently, August 3, 2014
2. Benjamin Schrom: A Cottage on Dartmoor. On: San Francisco Silent Film Festival. Essay. Festival 2007
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