Retrospective programming at the Seattle International Film Festival is rarely either imaginative or well-informed, and sometimes suggests no one has been paying attention even to the local film scene. Given two film noir slots to fill, you decide to present, out of myriad possibilities, Joseph H. Lewis' "The Big Combo" - a stunning movie, to be sure, but also one showcased in last fall's Seattle Art Museum noir series.
So it's all the more striking that the current SIFF season should include an authentic rarity and little-known milestone in the evolution of film artistry, Anthony Asquith's "A Cottage on Dartmoor." Made in 1929 just as sound was knocking on cinema's door (and originally including a sound sequence, now lost), the picture boasts all the stylistic adventurousness and technical envelope-pushing we might expect of a fervid young English art-film buff seizing the chance to apply Continental flourishes to a tale of sexual obsession. That filmmaker was Anthony Asquith, son of an erstwhile British prime minister and future director of some of the blandest artifacts in a national cinema oversupplied with such things. (Also some lovingly realized theatrical adaptations: the Wendy Hiller-Leslie Howard "Pygmalion," the delightful Technicolor chocolate box "The Importance of Being Earnest" and the delicate 1951 version of "The Browning Version" starring Michael Redgrave.)
The story involves a barber's assistant (played by German actor Ugo Henning) who becomes fixated on a co-worker (Norah Baring) who is in turn involved with a local landowner (Hans Schlettow - who as Hans Adalbert von Schlettow was a towering Hagen Tronje in Fritz Lang's "Die Nibelungen"). Moving in and out of flashback and deploying a creative arsenal of subtle camerawork, dynamic editing and mesmerizing light-and-shadowplay, Asquith develops an emotional and psychological intensity that, in the words of British Film Institute critic-historian Simon McCallum, "easily counters the entrenched criticism that British cinema in the silent era was staid, stagy and lacking emotion."
"A Cottage on Dartmoor" will be shown tonight, June 13, at 7 p.m. at SIFF Cinema in McCaw Hall, with onsite piano accompaniment by the talented Donald Sosin.
SIFF's entertaining but less-than-groundbreaking series of classic swashbucklers serves up one beauty that's never become as widely known as it deserves to be: the 1952 "Scaramouche," playing Saturday, June 16, 1:30 p.m. at SIFF Cinema. It doesn't star Errol Flynn, and indeed the key reasons for its neglect may be the mostly dull legacy of the actors who do take the main roles, Stewart Granger and Mel Ferrer. But both gentlemen acquit themselves on this occasion with considerable wit and panache, and the film overall is a whirlwind of breathless action and vigorous comedy.
Permit me to quote myself, in a blurb written a few years ago for Amazon.com:
"As first lines go, Scaramouche's is irresistible: 'He was born with a gift of laughter, and a sense that the world was mad.' This exuberant period adventure is pretty irresistible itself - even more than 'Captain Blood' and 'The Sea Hawk,' likewise derived from Rafael Sabatini novels. Within more or less one day in pre-revolutionary France, devil-may-care Stewart Granger learns he's the bastard offspring of a nobleman, gets orphaned, realizes he's fallen in love with his sister (Janet Leigh), swears to avenge his best friend's murder, becomes a hunted traitor and breaks into show business. George Sidney directs as if making an MGM musical, only with swashbuckling instead of song-and-dance. The unlikely casting of Granger and Mel Ferrer as overripe nemeses proves delightful, cameraman Charles ('Sunrise') Rosher's Technicolor palette alternates commedia dell'arte garishness and misty, Watteau-like imagery, and the climactic six-and-a-half-minute duel all over a Parisian theater is a tour de force."
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