Anthony Asquith

The early '30s caught Asquith adrift, 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). The mid-'30s marked the nadir of his career. In 1938, all of that changed, however, when Asquith -- owing in part to his longtime friendship with Shaw -- co-directed the screen adaptation of the latter'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 England), the most celebrated and prominent filmmaker in England.

Asquith's first notable project after the Shaw film was the chance to direct 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 that the movie use a pair of less-than-ideal performers in its leading roles. (Paramount was putting up half the production money for the U.S. rights, and it was a sign of just how high Asquith's stock was, along with that of the original play, that there was a major American studio eager to put up that money.) His wartime 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 trials (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. Yet it was Asquith's long association with Rattigan (and producer Anatole de Grunwald) that rescued him and carried him through this rough patch, so that by the early '60s he was -- along with Carol Reed -- one of the few members of his generation of British directors 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, 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 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. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide