A Cottage on Dartmoor

Joe works in a barber's shop and is obsessed with Sally, the manicurist there. Sally is not interested in him; she grows close to a farmer who comes in regularly. Joe watches this and one day cannot hold himself back. At the start of the film, meanwhile, a man has escaped from prison and is walking across the moor towards a house. Anthony Asquith's film is one of the last British silent productions. It was made right in the middle of the change to sound and takes that up inside itself: the characters go to the cinema, and the film they watch is a talkie. The suspense scene built around the razor at the barber's chair is unusually harsh for the period. The telling does not present the obsession as love.