Available to stream from 18 to 20 August at https://stummfilmtage.culturebase.org (This movie is only available in Germany for copyright reasons.)
Actress Mae Feather is on her way to becoming a big film star. Bored in her marriage to fellow actor Joe Gordon, Mae begins an affair with comedian Andy Wilks. When Joe discovers the affair, Mae fears that the ensuing scandal would destroy her career – and her dream of Hollywood. To prevent this, Mae resorts to drastic measures – with disastrous consequences. This cleverly directed melodrama, peppered with plenty of insider humour, was the directorial debut of Anthony Asquith, who, alongside Alfred Hitchcock, is considered to be the most important British film director of the silent era.
The influence of the Soviet school is clear throughout, as would be the German Expressionist influence in Asquith’s later silents, UNDERGROUND (1928) und A COTTAGE ON DARTMOOR (1930). Beyond the Soviet influence, SHOOTING STARS illustrates throughout Asquith’s interest in the culture of cinema and its history. This is displayed through the ironic view of conventional filmmaking that is the film’s hallmark. The joke on Hollywood is at its strongest in the opening scenes of ‘Prairie Love’ being filmed, where a stereotypical view of the cowboy hero and his sweetheart is deconstructed as the camera pulls back and we see that she is sitting not on a horse but on a dummy, and the romantic West is revealed to be located in a cold, vast film studio. The bare mechanics of cinematic illusion are revealed in this key establishing sequence. Its theme is then echoed in a shot of Andy Wilks removing his make-up, turning the merry comic into the mean and bitter little man that he is in reality. The filming of the knockabout comic scene by the sea contrasts the sunny action with the dismal reality of a drab English seaside location.
The Englishness of the seaside setting points up a problem that the film does not resolve. Are the satiric barbs aimed at American filmmaking, at British filmmaking, or filmmaking in general?
Luke McKernan, in: The Cinema of Britain and Ireland. London 2005
