Another Triumph for Father Richard!

On Friday, I went down to St Mary's for a showing of A Cottage on Dartmoor, part of the Film Festival, with Father Richard accompanying the film on the organ. The church was packed.
This was, in fact, the last silent film made in Britain, in 1929 - and part of the storyline was a trip to the "talkies". That scene was brilliantly done - Joe, the jealous barber's assistant, sits glowering at the back of the audience as Sally, a manicurist where he works, sits with Harry, the farmer who fancies her (probably the best groomed farmer on Dartmoor, the amount of time he spends in the barber's shop!). You never see the film they are watching - it's all about the audience reactions. At first, the film is silent, and the band are playing. Then the band put down their instruments and start playing cards. At first, the audience are puzzled, leaning forward to hear (with a few comedy moments from the old lady with the ear trumpet), and then they get swept up by the action on screen.
There's another brilliant scene in the barber's shop. Joe chats to a customer as he cuts his hair. This is shown by clips from news reels, of a cricket match, and then a speedway accident and even Lloyd George pushing a plough! Later, he is distracted as Sally cuts Harry's nails in another chair. This time the customer is chatting to Joe - with similar clips (I wonder if the cricket match was a well known one?) and then the cut is to a chicken squawking, in exactly the same position on the screen as the customer's face (with his rather prominent beaky nose), as Joe gets more and more frustrated.
The costumes fascinated me, too - Sally wears a quite short skirt which would not look out of place today, while the older women still look Edwardian, with lace collars and long skirts, and the barber's shop is prosperous enough to employ a boy in uniform (with a huge peaked cap) at the door. This would have been just before the Wall Street Crash, when everything was going well. I wonder how many of the staff would have kept their jobs during the Depression.
It really is a cleverly put together film, and the director, Anthony Asquith, went on to a distinguished career which included The Way to the Stars. He'd also been in a position to see films that hadn't been released in Britain, like Metropolis and Battleship Potemkin, and films like these, and Hollywood films starring actors like Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, were an influence on his work. In fact, some of the main actors in this film were German.

Father Richard will be accompanying Nosferatu again in May, and there is a CD available from the last time he did it.