For two decades, Anthony Asquith was — along with Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, and Carol Reed — one of the most internationally successful filmmakers to come out of England. So much of his career was spent adapting plays to the screen, however, that his critical recognition was somewhat limited in his own lifetime and for many years after, and it was only in the 21st century that his movies began getting the respect they deserved. Born in 1902, Asquith was the youngest child of Herbert Henry Asquith (1852-1928), who served as British prime minister from 1908 to 1916. Anthony Asquith was known to friends by the nickname “Puffin,” given him by his mother. He had an avid interest in music as a boy, but conceded a severe lack of talent as a musician; in its place, he discovered the emerging new art of cinema, which fascinated him. As a young man, Asquith, in turn, played a pivotal but indirect role in the development of motion picture arts in England by co-founding the London Film Society, along with such luminaries as George Bernard Shaw. Their purpose was to help push the British movie industry to look seriously at adapting the bolder, more inventive cinematic influences of Germany, Sweden, and America. Asquith formally joined the British film industry in the mid-‘20s as a crew member, and advanced initially by virtue of his family name and the opportunities that it afforded for travel. He easily could have become one of England’s idle rich — even in his twenties, he was one of those people who, thanks to his family connections, was often written about for his travels and sightings in the gossip columns — but instead he decided he wanted a career in film, and made it his business to visit Hollywood at the end of the silent era. There he made the acquaintance of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and spent his time watching various filmmakers at work. He returned to England, and, with that experience under his belt and some promise already shown, Asquith was moved behind the camera, making his debut with Shooting Stars (1927). That film and his 1928 feature A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929) were among the most highly regarded releases of the late silent era in England, and Asquith was suddenly thrust into the forefront of the film industry.
He made the transition to talkies with Tell England (1931), which dealt with the World War I Battle of Gallipoli. The movie is now considered hopelessly jingoistic and dated, but it was massively popular among middle-class audiences in its own time, and seemed to portend great things for Asquith. The early ‘30s caught him adrift, however, trapped working on projects with which he had little sympathy and showed no inventiveness, including the early Laurence Olivier vehicle I Stand Condemned (aka Moscow Nights). His career was languishing by the mid-1930’s, and it seemed as though all of that early promise had dissipated. In 1937, that all changed when Asquith was chosen as the director of the screen adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. The resulting film was perhaps the finest comedy ever to come out of England, as well as the first (and some would say the best) successful screen adaptation of Shaw. The movie was a hit in England and also in the United States and most of the rest of the world, and easily ranked among the most successful British comedies ever released. Its success was due in no small part to Asquith’s ability to persuade Shaw to rewrite the ending of the play, something that the author had steadfastly refused to do or permit in earlier attempts to film his plays. In the wake of Pygmalion, major opportunities started coming Asquith’s way; he was, along with his slightly older contemporary Alfred Hitchcock (who was about to leave for America), the most celebrated and prominent filmmaker in England.
Asquith’s first notable project after the Shaw film was the screen version of Terence Rattigan’s play French Without Tears, which had been a huge success in London and the work that established Rattigan as a major playwright. Asquith made a good film, despite the insistence by Paramount Pictures, the American partner in the co-production, that the movie use a pair of less-than-ideal performers in its leading roles. The film was a hit and Asquith was on his way once more. According to Asquith biographer R. J. Minney, author of The Films of Anthony Asquith, it was at this point, as England made the transition from peacetime to wartime, that Asquith rendered what might have been his greatest service to the British film industry, by saving it.
In the final weeks of 1939 and the early months of 1940, the British film industry was in turmoil, along with the rest of the country. No one knew what, if any provision was being made by the government to keep the movie business functioning — and as it turned out, there was none. Quite the contrary, according to Minney, at the time, the Ministry of Information’s film division under Sir Joseph Ball actually planned on shutting down the entire film industry in England, with the closing of all film theaters for the duration of the war. Director Thorold Dickinson, on hearing this from Ball, enlisted the aid of Asquith and his mother, Margot — as members of the late prime minister’s family, they still had many social and personal connections with the government, right up to the cabinet level. Asquith and his mother mounted a successful effort to challenge the decision, calling meetings and gathering heads of ministries to persuade them of the necessity of keeping the movie industry alive as a wartime priority. They succeeded in having the new policy reversed before it was ever put in place, and saw Ball replaced with the much more sympathetic and imaginative Sir Kenneth Clark, who helped to put the British film industry in service to the war.
Asquith’s wartime directorial efforts, if not always massively popular, were among the more interesting and unusual movies to come out of England during World War II. The Demi-Paradise (1943), starring Laurence Olivier as an official Soviet visitor to England, is an astonishing social and political document as well as a delightful film, and The Way to the Stars (1945), telling of RAF airmen and their families, is one of the most fondly remembered dramas of the period. Asquith’s string of major postwar cinematic successes encompassed The Winslow Boy (1949) and The Browning Version (1951, which contained what was arguably Michael Redgrave’s greatest screen performance), both based on hit plays by Rattigan, and culminated with The Importance of Being Earnest (1952). The latter, amid its sparkling, piercing wit (capturing the work of Dame Edith Evans in a defining role of her stage career, as well as Redgrave in his best comedic work), held a special historical irony: Asquith was the son of the man who, as Home Secretary, had signed the arrest order on playwright Oscar Wilde, leading to the latter’s trial and imprisonment (and personal destruction) for his “indecent” relations with other men.
Asquith’s career slowed in the mid- to late ‘50s. This was due, in part, to his declining health, but also to the misplaced assessment, on the part of some critics and producers, that he was a better translator of plays to the screen than he was a filmmaker. Credit for his successes seemed to reside with the plays he’d adapted, rather than with him. He was never noted as a great stylist, but had an ability to get the best out of his actors, who found him one of the most cooperative directors with whom to work — in dealing with figures as different as a young Wendy Hiller or a veteran performer such as Dame Edith Evans, he knew best how to get the actors to shape their performances using their best instincts, and many players, including Sir Michael Redgrave (who didn’t regard himself as much of a film actor), enjoyed working on Asquith-directed projects more than any others. It was Asquith’s long association with Rattigan (and producer Anatole de Grunwald) that rescued him and carried him through this rough patch of the late 1950s, so that by the early ‘60s he was — along with Carol Reed — one of the few members of his generation of British filmmakers who was still working on major projects. His screen adaptations of Rattigan’s The V.I.P.s (1963) and The Yellow Rolls-Royce (1964) were major international productions, with big-name casts, and were considered highly successful in their time. Asquith was supposed to direct the movie adaptation of Morris L. West’s The Shoes of the Fisherman, another all-star international production, but his health took a turn for the worse in 1967 while he was scouting locations for the film, and he was replaced by Michael Anderson.
Asquith passed away in early 1968, at a point when his reputation was somewhat in limbo. His recent films, though competent, had shown little of the cleverness of his work of the 1940s and early ’50s, which the public and many critics had yet to rediscover. In more recent decades, Pygmalion, The Way to the Stars, The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, and The Importance of Being Earnest have achieved enduring recognition. And, in memory of the filmmaker and his original first creative love, the British Academy Award for Best Music Score has been named the Anthony Asquith Award. The actress Helena Bonham Carter is his grandniece.
—allmovie guide
