A Cottage On Dartmoor (1929)

A COTTAGE ON DARTMOOR  (1929)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Anthony Asquith
    Norah Baring, Uno Henning, Hans Schlettow
In a busy, high-end salon, an intense young barber named Joe falls hard for a flirtatious manicurist named Sally, who takes up with a happy-go-lucky customer named Harry. So one day, Harry's in the chair, making eyes at Sally who's doing his nails while Joe gives him a shave, and Joe gets a little carried away with the razor. Harry survives, but Joe goes to prison, and Harry and Sally get married and move to a farm in the country and have a kid, and then Joe escapes from the prison, which is apparently just walking distance from the farm, and you just know this isn't going to end well for somebody. So, yeah, the melodramatics are kind of extreme, but for pure visual storytelling, this is a silent movie worth checking out. There are relatively few titles, it's wonderfully lit, and there are two outstanding set pieces: the sequence in the salon leading up to Joe going nuts with the razor, and one in which the spectators in a movie theater react to the picture they're watching and each other. A striking example of how good movies were starting to look as the silent era came to a close.