Harry and Sally run silent

A Cottage on Dartmoor, England, 1929 (87 minutes) written and directed by Anthony Asquith, from a story by Herbert C. Price.

Black and white and silent is tough to beat when a murderous madman’s afoot and the director is a master like Alfred Hitchcock or his contemporary, Anthony Asquith.

The stories are simple and the form is effectively interactive. The viewer contributes the complexity from personal experience, cued by a montage of suggestive images and the actors’ facial expressions and gestures.

In this story, the passionate jealousy of Joe (Uno Henning), a barber’s assistant, turns near lethal when Sally (Norah Baring), a coworker with whom he is infatuated, falls in love with Harry ‘the Dartmoor farmer’ (Hans Schlettow), one of the shop’s customers.

This is an old tale about the green-eyed monster told in images that make it easy to read as the story moves along. It opens with Joe, who has the face and profile of an Egon Schiele dandy, jumping down into the frame from his prison window, fleeing across the moors to the ‘cottage on Dartmoor’ of the title, intent on wreaking a mad vengeance on Harry and Sally.

In a flashback, we see the morning of the crime when Sally came to work wearing Harry’s engagement ring. Two shop girls gossip loudly about Sally’s news, which we see in a dizzying succession of shot/reaction shot of the women’s mouths moving on either side of Joe as he rhythmically strops a straight razor between them.

Asquith gives the razor in Joe’s hands the same attention as would Hitchcock. It gleams; we know it has a very sharp edge and that Joe has every intent to use it; but there is no violence. One quick stroke, others’ horrified reactions, and circumstantial clues, such as small bottle on its side on the floor spilling liquid, tell us what we need to know.

One of this film’s most entertaining and inventive scenes comes when Harry takes Sally to a double feature. Joe creeps in tailing them. A ten-minute sequence shows individual audience members responding first to a silent action comedy, then to a dramatic ‘talkie’, without once showing the movies they are seeing.

The audience smiles and laughs, comments to each other, shows concern, gasps and grabs the arms of their seats as the movies run. The comedy is Harold Lloyd’s Safety Last!—Lloyd’s name and part of the title appear on a ticket stub. This is the 1923 film with the iconic shot of Lloyd hanging from the hands of a clock on the bygone International Savings & Exchange Bank Building high above downtown Los Angeles.

A boy in the audience nudges another boy, pointing to a clean cut young man with round spectacles in the audience who resembles the character Lloyd plays in his films. Quick cutting makes the musicians in the orchestra pit appear to be keeping the film’s madcap pace.

We know that the drama that follows is a ‘talkie’ because the musicians lay down their instruments and sit in their places eating sandwiches and drinking beer once it starts.

Everyone enjoys the comedy, and all are gripped by the drama; everyone, that is, except Joe, who stays focused on the couple throughout the show—and a man whom the drama put to sleep.