Fox Farm

Warwick Deeping: book cover art for Fox Farm (1911) aka The Eyes of Love.

Fox Farm (1922) opening credits. My screenshot from YouTube.

Guy Newall: Fox Farm (1922) starring Ivy Duke and Guy Newall. Photo: BFI Player.

The finale: Guy Newall: Fox Farm (1922) starring Ivy Duke and Guy Newall. My screenshot from YouTube.

FOX FARM (George Clark Productions, GB 1922)
    Dir: Guy Newall; sc: adattamento dal romanzo di / adapt. from the novel by Warwick Deeping; art titles: Alex Scruby; ph: Hal Young; cast: Ivy Duke, Guy Newall, A. Bromley Davenport, Barbara Everest, Cameron Carr; trade show: 7.1922; 35 mm, 5648 ft, 84’ (18 fps), BFI / National Film and Television Archive.
    Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
    30 minutes from the beginning viewed at Teatro Zancanaro, Sacile, Le Giornate del Cinema Muto (GCM) / Asquith e gli altri, 9 Oct 2004

Bryony Dixon (GCM): "Part of the Eminent British Authors series released through the Stoll Film Company, this was the last-but-one collaboration between George Clark and Guy Newall, and it saw the end of a partnership full of potential as the business succumbed to the crisis in the British film industry of 1924–25. It also marked the pinnacle of achievement for the real-life husband-and-wife team of Newall and Ivy Duke, both gifted actors and charming as a couple. Christine Gledhill, in her new book on 1920s British cinema (Reframing British Cinema 1918–1928: Between Restraint and Passion), quotes a contemporary opinion from Kine Weekly on Newall in particular, but which would describe the acting styles of both: “natural without being commonplace, dramatic without being unnatural”."

"This simple rural drama concerns a farmer (Guy Newall) scorned by his wife (Barbara Everest) but loved by a local girl (Ivy Duke). When the farmer is blinded in an accident (that so-common theme of post-war films), the girl gets a job at the farm in order to take care of him. Fine photography by Hal Young of the pastoral English countryside compensates for the lack of production values, and sites us firmly in the Hardyesque tradition of melancholic, “realistic” drama. One wonders that if the British film industry had been allowed to develop along the lines that Guy Newall was working on in these films, it might have attained the heights that French cinema was achieving in the late 1920s." – Bryony Dixon (GCM)

AA: I watched 30 minutes of Fox Farm in the first screening of this year's edition of Le Giornate. A sober and moving drama of a farmer turning blind in an accident, being estranged from his wife and a farm girl becoming his new partner, the leading roles played by the real-life couple, the actor-director Guy Newall and Ivy Duke.

BFI Player:
The Fox Farm

This beautifully acted, melancholic rural drama concerns a farmer, blinded in an accident, who is scorned by his wife. Based on the 1911 novel by Warwick Deeping, Distributors Stoll Film Co. commissioned the film in its Eminent British Authors series from talented filmmaking partners George Clark and Guy Newall. The lead roles are played by Newall and his real-life wife Ivy Duke, both gifted actors and charming as a couple.

Drama 1922 94 mins Silent