Shooting Stars [d: Anthony Asquith, A V Bramble, 1928] must be one of the earliest - and the finest - films about films. Asquith’s first film as director, it’s - like Underground, (1928) and A Cottage On Dartmoor, (1929) - innovative, accomplished, wonderfully shot, and, most importantly, really engaging. It starts out as an affectionate satire of the film industry, focusing on the gap between film and reality (the leading lady of sweet romances who is bitchy and mendacious, the macho heroic leading man who is a sweet sap), and the always fascinating backstage shenanigans of the silent stages. What’s really interesting is that it gradually, almost imperceptibly becomes less comic and more dramatic, with an ending that’s poignant and rather tragic.
Asquith clearly loves cinema - the scene with the leading man (Brian Aherne) watching his own film and getting caught up in the action (along with the schoolboys) isn’t just to show he’s a bit of a dork, it’s a tribute to the power of cinema. Asquith does this again in A Cottage on Dartmoor, where there’s an extended scene in a cinema, showing the reactions of the patrons. (In that film it’s a celebration of silent film and a dissing of the talkies, as well as an increasingly tense depiction of the character’s relationships).
Watching this along with those other two films, it’s astonishing how different Asquith’s early films, his silents, are from his later, more famous films (The Browning Version, The Way to the Stars, The Winslow Boy, The Importance of Being Earnest). They’re as entertaining, as fast paced, as innovative as any other films of the period. Asquith in the 1940s onwards feels somewhat trapped in aspic, static and repressed (I’m not saying these films aren’t good, apart from The Way to the Stars which I alway ditch once Michael Redgrave carks it) but they feel like chamber pieces, like they’re made by a different person. Maybe it was the confidence of youth combined with the almost limitless possibilities of silent film at its height that makes the early films feel so different.
