Cottage on Dartmoor was one of the last gasps of Silent cinema.
It is an unexpectedly accomplished picture, with fluid cinematography, superb editing and great imagery and is a master class in how to build and sustain tension. Its climactic scene is probably as good as anything Hitchcock was doing at that time. It is not the sort of movie-making I associate with Anthony Asquith.
It is tempting to see this movie as an unfairly neglected classic, but it isn't quite that good. The story is pure melodrama and even at a brisk 84 minutes the movie is heavily padded. The most obvious example is the cinema scene. It is a virtuoso piece of cutting, but is way too long. The point is made in the first 30 seconds, but the scene lasts over 13 minutes.
There is one small point here that needs to be clarified. Sally and Harry have gone to see a talkie, but the lobby poster shows a Buster Keaton film that was silent. This is not necessarily an error. In 1929, talkies were thin on the ground and were often shown as part of a largely silent programme. Hence, we see the theatre musicians playing through the early part of the programme and then putting down their instruments and playing cards when the Sound feature begins.
Cottage on Dartmoor is very economical in its use of inter-titles, so could be regarded as an example of how the mature silent cinema had perfected the art of nearly wordless storytelling. Because it was released right on the cusp of the transition to Sound, it also invites comparison with all those 'photographs of people talking' that so bothered Hitchcock at the time.
However, this claim is rather belied by an analysis of its story and structure.
Firstly, it can economise on title cards because the story itself is very simple. It starts with a young mother being menaced by an escaped convict and goes into a lengthy flashback which explains their shared history before returning to real time for a resolution of the story. There are only three named characters: Sally, a manicurist; Joe, the barber's assistant who is in love with her; and Harry, a Dartmoor farmer whose wooing of Sally drives Joe into a near-homicidal jealous rage.
Most of the action takes place on just four sets: A cottage; a barber's shop; Sally's boarding house and a cinema.
In essence, it breaks down into just 8 scenes with a few short bridges.
Scene 1: A montage of Joe's escape from prison.
Scene 2: The introduction of Sally and her confrontation with Joe.
Scene 3: A flashback to the barber's shop, establishing Joe's love for Sally.
Scene 4: Joe's visit to Sally's boarding house
Scene 5: A montage, depicting Harry's increasing infatuation with Sally and Joe's growing jealousy.
Scene 6: Joe stalking Sally and Harry in a cinema.
Scene 7: Joe's mounting desperation as he shaves Harry, leading to his eventual murder threat.
Scene 8: The continuation of the prologue, ending in Joe's death.
These eight main scenes average about ten minutes each.
In other words: for all its cinematic merits, Cottage on Dartmoor is actually structured very much like a stage play.
Rather than illustrating the advantages of Silent cinema at its peak, I believe it really just demonstrates its inherent limitations. Without the resources of sound, movie makers were limited to relatively simple stories and even the best of them needed a long time to tell those stories effectively. From the perspective of later cinema, Cottage on Dartmoor is a 45 minute short stretched to feature film length.
That is an unacknowledged truth about much of Silent cinema.
It is an unexpectedly accomplished picture, with fluid cinematography, superb editing and great imagery and is a master class in how to build and sustain tension. Its climactic scene is probably as good as anything Hitchcock was doing at that time. It is not the sort of movie-making I associate with Anthony Asquith.
It is tempting to see this movie as an unfairly neglected classic, but it isn't quite that good. The story is pure melodrama and even at a brisk 84 minutes the movie is heavily padded. The most obvious example is the cinema scene. It is a virtuoso piece of cutting, but is way too long. The point is made in the first 30 seconds, but the scene lasts over 13 minutes.
There is one small point here that needs to be clarified. Sally and Harry have gone to see a talkie, but the lobby poster shows a Buster Keaton film that was silent. This is not necessarily an error. In 1929, talkies were thin on the ground and were often shown as part of a largely silent programme. Hence, we see the theatre musicians playing through the early part of the programme and then putting down their instruments and playing cards when the Sound feature begins.
Cottage on Dartmoor is very economical in its use of inter-titles, so could be regarded as an example of how the mature silent cinema had perfected the art of nearly wordless storytelling. Because it was released right on the cusp of the transition to Sound, it also invites comparison with all those 'photographs of people talking' that so bothered Hitchcock at the time.
However, this claim is rather belied by an analysis of its story and structure.
Firstly, it can economise on title cards because the story itself is very simple. It starts with a young mother being menaced by an escaped convict and goes into a lengthy flashback which explains their shared history before returning to real time for a resolution of the story. There are only three named characters: Sally, a manicurist; Joe, the barber's assistant who is in love with her; and Harry, a Dartmoor farmer whose wooing of Sally drives Joe into a near-homicidal jealous rage.
Most of the action takes place on just four sets: A cottage; a barber's shop; Sally's boarding house and a cinema.
In essence, it breaks down into just 8 scenes with a few short bridges.
Scene 1: A montage of Joe's escape from prison.
Scene 2: The introduction of Sally and her confrontation with Joe.
Scene 3: A flashback to the barber's shop, establishing Joe's love for Sally.
Scene 4: Joe's visit to Sally's boarding house
Scene 5: A montage, depicting Harry's increasing infatuation with Sally and Joe's growing jealousy.
Scene 6: Joe stalking Sally and Harry in a cinema.
Scene 7: Joe's mounting desperation as he shaves Harry, leading to his eventual murder threat.
Scene 8: The continuation of the prologue, ending in Joe's death.
These eight main scenes average about ten minutes each.
In other words: for all its cinematic merits, Cottage on Dartmoor is actually structured very much like a stage play.
Rather than illustrating the advantages of Silent cinema at its peak, I believe it really just demonstrates its inherent limitations. Without the resources of sound, movie makers were limited to relatively simple stories and even the best of them needed a long time to tell those stories effectively. From the perspective of later cinema, Cottage on Dartmoor is a 45 minute short stretched to feature film length.
That is an unacknowledged truth about much of Silent cinema.