Anthony Asquith

Anthony Asquith appears in British Film Institute criticism only through later films by other directors. Peter Matthews, reviewing a 1999 Oscar Wilde adaptation, calls his 1952 version of The Importance of Being Earnest very nearly the only one to catch the overripe artifice the text asks for, and describes it as magnificently inert. Geoffrey Macnab, writing about David Mamet's remake, notes that The Winslow Boy had first been filmed by Asquith in 1948 and finds the newer version surprisingly faithful. Each of his seventeen titles with us is a directing credit, two of them shared, and only A Cottage on Dartmoor also lists him as a performer, fourth of five. Berlin's 1951 festival gave two citations to The Browning Version, the film he made that same year, the German jury's Bronze Berlin Bear for drama and the audience section's Small Bronze Plaque. Neither one names a director; the film is the recipient in both.