Quote:
Originally Posted by billy pilgrim
Surprisingly, this film felt very modern to me, as if this was a recent production about a film studio in the 1920's. The camera work is great, with long, complicated tracking shots and use of shadows. PQ is beautiful on this transfer to my untrained eyes. For a film that was made about 90 years ago, it's truly amazing.
Truly a rare find, a clever piece of writing with real suspense and a gentle comic wit that had me laughing out loud throughout. Masterfully directed by
Anthony Asquith and A. V. Bramble which is paired with a truly remarkable screenplay by Asquith and Jon Orton.
And that ending....Wow! Perfect.
...If you're looking for a modern feeling silent film with gentle comedy, great camera work, and real suspense; a film which is funny, yet bittersweet, then please take a chance on Shooting Stars.
Highest recommendation.
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Welcome to the club.
Despite its outrageous plot – a silent star plans to kill her husband and co-star during the shooting of a Western so that she can be with the knockabout comedian she loves without damaging her career -
Shooting Stars isn’t really a comedy. Parts of it are funny, and Anthony Asquith’s script certainly takes plenty of satirical swipes at the industry he was trying to break into, but it’s really more of a drama that turns into a tragedy in very different ways than you might expect.
Mae Feather (Annette Benson), the ‘Sunshine Girl,’ is the archetypal silent leading lady, beloved by all she meets, a lover of Shakespeare and all creatures furry and winged – well, except for the crew of her films who despise her and the dove she shares a scene with who shows itself an excellent judge of character by pecking at her. In fact the only two people who love her are husband Julian Gordon (Brian Aherne) and, unbeknownst to him, Ben Turpin-like (minus the wild eyes) comedian Andy Wilkes (Donald Calthrop), and in Julian’s case it’s not the real Mae he’s in love with but the sweet and loving version she plays in all her films: indeed, while she’s with her lover, he’s in the cinema across the road watching her onscreen and utterly enraptured. Yet at the same time he knows that his real life doesn’t quite match up, sighing, “I wish life was more like the movies.” Ironically it’s part of maintaining the illusion of that movie image that puts him in harm’s way: because the ‘morals clause’ in both her and Calthrop’s contracts could end their careers and hopes of a move to Hollywood if either were involved in divorce or scandal, murder is the only way they can be together – though it’s only Benson who wants it enough to go that far, and even her resolve is shaky. Not that Wilkes is in any way admirable: he takes real delight in incorporating the key to his lover’s flat into one of his films (complete with future star Chili Bouchier as the married bathing beauty his onscreen lecher has his eye on).
The behind the scenes look at a working silent studio is a big selling point of the film, from the split level studio (Westerns downstairs, comedy upstairs) revealed in a lengthy overhead crane shot and the phoney press interviews to the backstage *****ing and some convincing scenes of Wilkes workshopping his routines in a way that had largely gone out of fashion by the time the film was released in 1928 (the main body of the film turns out to be set several years before). It’s certainly more convincingly naturalistic than more traditional movies about movies like Show People: while a few try to live their dreams, for most it’s just a job, and not a very interesting one at that.
There is one major credibility problem with a key revelation depending entirely on Benson completely forgetting that Aherne is in the same flat at the wrong moment and for all the claims that Asquith’s scenario was so flawlessly worked out that the credited director was a mere technician carrying out his wishes to the letter there are sections that feel technically accomplished but don’t quite work as well as they could due to some sedate pacing. And, like many behind the screens stories, Wilkes is never as funny as everyone seems to find him: Calthrop is good as the actor but he’s not a natural comedian, and it shows. Aherne, however, is a surprisingly convincing silent cowboy, with a wistful sadness to his young good looks while Benson manages to avoid entirely demonising her shallow character and there’s some real power to her final scenes, by which time we’ve had an impromptu funeral parade and one major character has suffered an even worse fate than death: old movie stars never die, they just become obscure trivia questions, and it’s the film’s extended epilogue set several years later that is actually the film’s most powerful and memorable section. You know exactly where it’s going and how, but the inevitability of it only makes it more poignant.
There’s also another comment on the nature of celebrity and lasting reputation in the way the film is now constantly described as Anthony Asquith’s debut not merely as a writer but as a director: yet he didn’t direct the film, veteran actor-director A.V. Bramble did. But Bramble wasn’t a celebrity and didn’t go on to greater things so everything that is good about the film is ascribed to Asquith while Bramble is curtly dismissed as a mere supervisor working from a detailed script that must have precluded any possibility of his own individuality or imagination finding its way into the film. And yet, while it does feature many of his trademark shots, at times the style and look is markedly different from Asquith’s silents: the ideas may have been Asquith’s but it seems obvious that the same wasn’t always true of the execution. Nor was Asquith the only writer – he shares a credit with John Orton (as J.O.C. Orton), who, like Bramble, failed to go on to better things and so is casually disregarded as barely worth discussing. It’s all too easy to think of Bramble and Orton also being lost in the shadows of the film’s final shot and hard not to wonder who would have got the credit if Asquith’s career had fizzled out in later years and the auteur theory were not so ruthlessly backdated.
For all that, it’s a fascinating film that gains in real emotional power as it progresses – just don’t expect a comedy.
The BFI’s Blu-ray/DVD combo sadly doesn’t boast as good picture quality as their release of his subsequent silent feature Underground, presumably because they didn’t have as good materials to work with. While the picture quality is certainly good, it’s often very flat with not much in the way of depth. But there’s an abundance of extras in the form of newsreel clips and shorts with an emphasis on beauty contests studios ran to find new talent - Pathé’s Screen Beauty Competition, Around the Town – British Film Stars and Studios, The Lovely Hundred and Opening of British Instructional Film Studio (mostly an interminable shot of workers crossing a field to the entrance with very little footage inside the studio itself) and short films Secrets of a World Industry – The Making of Cinematograph Film, Meet Jackie Coogan and Starlings of the Silver Screen – a stills and pressbook gallery and booklet.
The BFI also has a couple of other good Asquith silents, although only one on BD:
‘The “Underground” of the Great Metropolis of the British Empire, with its teeming multitudes of ‘all sorts and conditions of men,’ contributes its share of light and shade, romance and tragedy and all those things that go to make up what we call ‘life.’ So in the “Underground” is set our story of ordinary work-a-day people whose names are just Nell, Bill, Kate and Bert.’
He may have become better known for his adaptations of stage plays and ended his career making glossy pictures about glamorous people as befits the son of a distinguished Prime Minister, but Anthony Asquith’s early work was considerably more down to Earth, or rather distinctly
Underground, his terrific 1928 silent film (his first directorial credit) dealing with a beautiful observed romantic triangle between three working class people whose paths cross on the London Underground system. Beginning as an observational comedy filled with all the behavioural traits that Londoners still slavishly adhere to on the Tube to this day, for much of the film it’s a traditional tale of romantic rivalry, with Cyril McLaglen’s power worker setting his cap at shopgirl Elissa Landi but merely annoying her with his boorish bravado on the train and finding himself out of the running when she meets cute with Brian Aherne’s porter on the escalator. Nothing especially novel or exciting happens, with the emphasis on the everyday, but it’s all so hugely enjoyable and good natured that it’s a real surprise when things take a much darker turn as McLaglen (yes, Victor’s brother) enlists his still devoted ex Norah Baring to break up the lovers, with disastrous results…
Despite seeming a tricky proposition to pull off, the shift in tone and genre is executed so well that it never feels jarring but rather a natural consequence of events: it’s a mundane, petty enough revenge to convince even as its consequences spiral out of control. That’s in no small part because Asquith never patronises his characters or stereotypes them because of their background – indeed, they and their world are so convincing you’d never guess the lifelong socialist was brought up in such a rarefied social circle (seen in interview footage Asquith almost sounded like a parody of the awfully, awfully nice awfully, awfully posh). He has a great eye for places and faces (a couple of which in the pub scene could pass for Alfie Bass and Victoria Wood’s grandparents) and his direction has all has the energy of a young man’s film, whether the camera is frantically following a dropped parcel as it falls down the escalator or finding moments of visual grandeur in the everyday (there’s a particularly magnificent establishing shot of the pub interior in the darts scene).
More than that, the film is constantly alive. Asquith’s sound films would become increasingly performance and dialogue-led, earning him a somewhat undeserved reputation as a staid, establishment filmmaker, but his silent work is very different – so different that you’d be forgiven for assuming the young tyro behind the camera was a completely different person. He not only knows just how to move a camera (and parts of the film really move) but more importantly when to move it depending on whether a scene needs a burst of energy or an emotional revelation. And it’s very emotional filmmaking at times: when Baring’s mind finally snaps completely outside the power station, the camera breaks loose with her as she loses herself, while the final extended chase sequence is one of the best action scenes in silent cinema.
All in all it’s a fantastic piece of filmmaking and a fantastic film: the two don’t always go together, but they genuinely do here.
Long only available in a badly water damaged print, the BFI’s Blu-ray/DVD combo release is an excellent transfer taken from two different sources that looks strikingly good and befits from an excellent score by Neil Brand (there’s the option of an alternate, more modern score by Chris Watson, but Brand’s is the more effectively appropriate). A good selection of extras includes a brief newsreel clip of the young Asquith watching early planes with his father and a selection of shorts and newsreels about the Underground system (most of the latter only included on the DVD version), a featurette on the restoration and a booklet. Very highly recommended.
Although the last of his silent features, the restoration of Anthony Asquith’s
A Cottage on Dartmoor was something of a bolt from the blue that caused many to re-evaluate the director’s work. Best-known for dialogue driven stage adaptations, most notably his collaborations with Terence Rattigan, it seemed like the work of a completely different man with a completely different language – not least an incredible sense of movement and an awareness of the visual language of cinema as an alternative to dialogue. The plot is simplicity itself, beginning with an escaped convict (Uno Henning) racing across the moors before breaking in on the cottage of a woman (Norah Baring) and her infant child. No sooner has she recognised him and called his name than we’re back in the past when they both worked in the same salon, he as a barber, she as a manicurist. At first it looks like they might become lovers, even though their first date is thwarted (well, more muted by a deaf resident of her boarding house) and he misinterprets her subsequent signals. Instead she finds herself attracted to Hans Adalbert Schlettow, who keeps on finding excuses to return to the salon for more treatments to see her, inflaming Henning’s jealousy as he stalks them before he ultimately cracks while giving him a shave with a cutthroat razor…
If the story isn’t complicated, the adventurous and articulate filmmaking more than compensates, with Asquith making innovative use of every technique in the silent filmmakers arsenal. Henning’s small talk with his clients is conveyed through montages of the recurring subjects – sports, politics, trivia – while the film’s celebrated cinema sequence is an amazingly ambitious bit of bravura filmmaking. While the pit orchestra put down their instruments and get out their cards and sandwiches and Schlettow and Baring and the audience (a bespectacled Asquith among them) are drawn into one of the new talkies, the flickering light from the screen alternately reveals and hides Henning behind them, the emotion from the unseen film reflected on the faces of the audience as the film and its title become mixed up with Henning’s thwarted fantasies. It’s such a powerful sequence that it tends to overshadow much of what follows – though not that close shave – but it’s worth the price of admission on its own.
Both Henning and Baring (who gets a chance to goof it up a bit in the early scenes) are excellent, though young Ronnie Barker lookalike Schlettow makes for an unlikely winner of her affections, though that unlikeliness helps convincingly fuel Henning’s jealousy. (The combination of genial lifelong socialist Asquith and passionate Nazi activist, propagandist and anti-Semite Schlettow must have made for an interesting atmosphere on the set, and it’s probably largely because of his active role in the Nazi Party that the least interesting of the three leads had the longest and most successful screen career.) The film’s narrower focus and more melodramatic plot ultimately makes it a slightly less satisfying film than Asquith’s previous collaboration with Baring, 1928’s Underground, at times feeling like the technique is compensating for the thinness of the story, but it’s still an impressive late silent that stands in stark contrast to Asquith’s later more soundstagebound work.
Although available on a US DVD from Kino with 90-minute documentary Silent Britain as an extra (the latter available as a separate DVD in the UK from the BFI), the BFI’s UK DVD has a much better transfer. The extras package isn’t as generous but far from negligible: an amusing short wartime information film about the importance of keeping the rush hour buses free for essential workers directed by Asquith and a 15-minute documentary about Asquith made during the shooting of Libel that includes interviews with him, Dirk Bogarde and Olivia De Havilland, as well as a booklet.
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