Anthony Asquith

For too long languishing in Hitchcock’s burly shadow, Anthony Asquith was a charming maverick who emerged from one of Britain’s most patrician families—his father, the Earl of Oxford, had been Prime Minister, and his mother, Margot Asquith, was a celebrated socialite and aspiring writer. Film historians tend to regard Hitchcock as the only saving grace to have emerged from from the British silent period, but Asquith (or “Puffin,” as he liked everyone to call him), who also easily leapfrogged from silent to sound, has surely been underestimated, blessed with a self-effacing talent that could be applied to numerous genres.

A reluctant aristocrat, Asquith went to Oxford but then journeyed to Hollywood to study the film industry in the mid-1920s, staying with Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford for three months in their palatial home. Immediately on his return to England, he cowrote the screenplay of Shooting Stars (1927), a satirical melodrama directed by A. V. Bramble. Puffin served as assistant director and also as editor. “One prided oneself at not needing a musical accompaniment,” he recalled in a conversation with me in 1963, “but we did a musical soundtrack because the film appeared just as sound was coming in.”

By 1929, his reputation as an adroit filmmaker was assured—based on two silent gems, Underground (1928) and The Runaway Princess (1929)—and in that year he directed his finest silent (well, almost) movie, A Cottage on Dartmoor (at that point, sound technique in Britain was still developing, and he could insert only a brief “talking” scene). The script was based on a story that had appeared in the Weekly Dispatch, about a barber who accidentally wounds his rival in love and is sentenced to prison on Dartmoor, in the southwest of England. “But except for the actual escape from the prison, we concocted the sequences ourselves,” said Puffin. “The last sequence is a sort of liebestod,” he said, referring to the hero’s death in the arms of his beloved, “edited in the style of Eisenstein and Pudovkin.”

This succès d’estime introduced the richest decade in Asquith’s career, including Tell England (1931), a harrowing description of the Gallipoli campaign in World War I; Dance Pretty Lady (1932); Unfinished Symphony (1934), a biopic about Schubert; and Moscow Nights (1934), starring Laurence Olivier and released in the U.S. as I Stand Condemned—a period that culminated with Pygmalion (1938), which Asquith codirected with star Leslie Howard. For his film version, the third already by that time, he made one major addition to the Bernard Shaw play. As he explained: “I wanted to include a scene of triumph at the ball. So I arranged a lunch with Bernard Shaw, and for some reason or another, Shaw liked my line ‘she came up the stairs with the frozen calm of a sleepwalker,’ and he wrote the scene for us.” Professor Higgins’s removing his hat in the final shot was a felicitous touch invented by Puffin, who also told me that he was proud of having written the line “In Hertford, Hereford, and Hampshire, hurricanes hardly happen.” In fact, he added, “My Fair Lady is really closer to the film than to the play.” Higgins was played by Howard, whom Puffin remembered as “a brilliant technician. He could repeat a shot half a dozen times and his eyebrow would be raised to exactly the same degree.”

The Browning Version (1951) remains Asquith’s most poignant achievement. He seemed to be on exactly the same wavelength as playwright Terence Rattigan, with whom he made several films. “I’d wanted to do this play for years,” said Puffin. “Fortunately [producer] Earl St. John fought on my behalf against the entire Rank board—and won.” Michael Redgrave’s performance as the tortured schoolmaster justly earned him the best actor award at Cannes the following spring. Asquith was, like Rattigan, a closeted gay man whose tense features and social timidity suggested that he felt ashamed of his sexuality.

The Importance of Being Earnest (1952) proved to be Asquith’s greatest box-office success, and arguably the smartest screen adaptation of any Oscar Wilde play. “I insisted on ‘curtain up,’ ‘curtain down’ so as to preserve the stage conventions.” Who can forget Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell, her tone forever interrogatory, her comportment a regal passage of purple plumage across the drawing rooms of one fashionable house after another? “I remember we were told that the Americans didn’t know the word perambulator,” smiled Puffin. “And so we decided to say ‘baby-carriage’ instead. But Edith drew herself up and pronounced magnificently, ‘As a Dame of the British Empire, I protest against this!’ ”

In late 1957, Asquith’s plans for making a film about Lawrence of Arabia came tantalizingly close to fruition. Rattigan wrote a script, later converted into a stage play entitled Ross, and Paramount, followed later by Rank, had agreed to back the project. “I’d been to Iraq and found the locations,” said Puffin wistfully, “and we were thinking of Bogarde, Guinness, or Burton for the title role,” adding, “I’d met Lawrence once at my sister’s house—he was so small physically and the most striking thing about him were his blue eyes.” Alas, Rank rejected the idea—and five years later David Lean would direct the definitive film on Lawrence.

Related Films

• 

• 

•