1929 silent drama
Rating: 15/20
Plot: After a guy escapes from jail and winds up in some woman's house, a flashback shows how their encounter isn't exactly a chance one.
This is also called Escape from Dartmoor apparently.
I don't know a lot about silent movies from England unless they're the couple I've seen from Alfred Hitchcock. This is a late silent movie and probably as good or better than almost every talkie that came out in 1929. At the top of my head, I can't think of any movies I've seen from 1929.
OK, I got sidetracked and looked up movies from 1929. Man with a Movie Camera, Pandora's Box, Un Chien Andalou, and Diary of a Lost Girl are all superior silent movies, and I didn't skim across any movies with sound that I've seen except Cocoanuts, and that's not a very good Marx Brothers movie at all. But I digress.
I'll say this--I love how leafless trees look in black and white movies. There are quite a few really nice shots in this. There are great angles--and one slightly experimental moment--in a scene where there's a razor and a throat. That's probably a spoiler. I also loved the way a dizzying sequence in a theater was edited, a great and wild clash of visuals and sound. That scene, like a few others in this, was way too long though. This movie should have clocked in at just over an hour instead of the 90 minutes it was. I can forgive the length, however, because of the scarcity of intertitles. The first doesn't show up until around the 7-minute mark (just the word "Joe!"), and the story is told adequately without any words.
"Joe" is played by Uno Henning, a guy who would find the playing of the popular card game he shares a name with to be really confusing. Every time somebody would be down to one card, they'd say "Uno" and he'd have to say "What?" I'd rather watch that than Cocoanuts again, I think. Henning's performance in this is really good if "looking rapey in most of his scenes" qualifies as being really good.
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