Who exactly was Anthony Asquith? A British cinema pioneer, a reluctant aristocrat, a Hitchcock imitator, a repressed homosexual – Asquith has been subjected to all of these nondescript labels and more by various commentators, and yet today he remains a shadowy figure within the annals of film history. Despite his prolific output, which spans from the last years of the silent era up through the mid-sixties, as well as the popular acclaim he received within the British film industry during his own lifetime, remarkably little criticism has been written about his work in recent decades, and he was never included among the pantheon of major classical filmmakers formulated by the early auteurists.
The critical marginalization of Asquith might be related to the kind of material he was known to direct: early film adaptations of witty British stage dramas, most notably of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion in 1938, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in 1952, and his close friend Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version in 1951. While these Asquithian adaptations of plays are sometimes derided as stagey and decidedly “un-cinematic” (which frankly makes sense given the theatrical nature of the material), they do not represent the flavor of Asquith’s art in its totality. A cursory glance over his filmography reveals an overwhelming presence of variety in terms of genre and subject matter, ranging from noirish thrillers and expressionistic silent melodramas to war films and sports comedies.
Asquith (1902-1968) hailed from the upper echelon of London society, the son of former prime minister H.H. Asquith and celebrated socialite Margot Asquith. Much of what we know about Asquith’s biographical details come to us from remarks made by the English actor Jonathan Cecil, a close family friend of the Asquiths, who revealed that “Puffin” (the nickname that the director preferred to be called by his friends) initially became involved in the film industry because it was then seen as a disreputable form of employment by the London elite, suggesting that his career choice was a means of distancing himself from his aristocratic background. The director’s early silent films, such as Underground (1928) and A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929), betray an aesthetic mastery of both naturalism and expressionism that situate them as stylistically akin to the consummate late works of American silent cinema, including F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) and Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928). Like his British contemporary Alfred Hitchcock, Asquith made the transition easily from silence to sound, and eventually earned comparisons to Hitchcock for mystery thrillers like The Woman in Question (1950), though the two artists were hardly similar in a visual sense. I recently had the pleasure of viewing Asquith’s underrated film A Cottage on Dartmoor, which complicates the director’s standard reputation in a number of remarkable ways.
The opening moments of Dartmoor let us know immediately that we are in for much more than stagey theatrics: Asquith lingers on the rising mists and twisted limbs of the moors which surround the titular cottage, imbuing the setting with a kind of mystical, quasi-Brontëan wildness before any of the main action commences. The film begins desperately, near its tense final moments, as Joe (Uno Henning), who has just escaped from a Dartmoor prison, is about to confront Sally (Norah Baring) in her own home. Asquith then proceeds to tell us, through a series of elegantly structured flashbacks, the narrative that led up to this moment. Dartmoor is a kind of romantic tragedy which contains some taut thriller elements, dealing with Joe’s unrequited amorous feelings toward Sally, who work together as barber and manicurist in a hair salon, as well as with some of the more dire consequences of Joe’s actions. The film, made right at the brief, transitory moment that saw silent cinema transitioning to sound, includes some knowing, self-referential details about its own historical context: the characters in this silent movie at one point go to the cinema to see a “talkie”, and there is briefly a bit of verbal singing heard on the soundtrack in the version I watched.
Dartmoor’s most inventive stylistic tic must be mentioned: the film possesses some wildly distinctive and discontinuous editing rhythms. Early on, in a scene that shows Joe shaving some of his customers in the barbershop, Asquith ably illustrates the subject matter of the characters’ conversations without the use of intertitles. Rather, he cuts from a close-up of a customer speaking to a shot of a 1920s baseball game, or later to shots of riders on horseback traversing a stretch of open prairie, a possible reference to popular silent westerns of the period. Later in the film, during a musical performance by a jazz band that takes place in the cinema before the talkie begins, the editing actually seems to be structured by the piece itself, with shot length varying in speed as the music progressively intensifies. By the end of the piece, the editing is so quickly paced and heightened that the resulting visual cacophony resembles the experimental montage of Dziga Vertov’s The Man with a Movie Camera!
Additionally, Asquith makes excellent use of expressionless faces; the essentialist nature of the performances here, combined with lingering close shots of hands, seems to anticipate the austere, metaphysical work of Robert Bresson. The assured and deliberately strange filmmaking on display in this film is very much at odds with Asquith’s reputation for “filmed theatre” and second-rate Hitchcock imitation. In a directorial career which spans four decades and 39 films, perhaps it is safe to say that this shadowy figure of film history has yet to reveal all of his secrets to us.
Asquith’s film noir The Woman in Question is being shown in a 35mm print at the IU Cinema on October 28 as part of their series The Rashomon Effect. A Cottage on Dartmoor has been released on DVD in the United States through Kino Lorber.
Jack Miller enjoys the films of Howard Hawks, Jacques Tourneur and John Ford. He studies literature, and has been a habitué of the local film revival scene since he moved to Bloomington a few years ago. He also enjoys listening to country and disco music.