Broken Blossoms
Broken Blossoms (D.W. Griffith, US, 1919)
Although Griffith is most widely known as the director who established the Hollywood epic, it’s the more intimate, smaller-scale ‘Broken Blossoms’ that might just be his finest achievement. Produced on a considerably smaller budget than the likes of ‘Birth of a Nation’ and ‘Intolerance’, Griffith adapts the rather politically incorrectly titled short story ‘The Chink and the Child’ by Thomas Burke. Filmed entirely in the studio, Griffith creates a depiction of Limehouse, East London; a seedy, run-down area filled with opium dens and inhabited by drunkards. Griffith contrasts this environment with the comparative enlightenment of the Far East. Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess) travels from the West to spread the word of Buddha to London, but finds himself mired in Limehouse. The sole kindred spirit he meets is Lucy (Lillian Gish), the bullied daughter of a boxer, Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp). Gish provides one of the finest acting performances I’ve ever seen, not just in silent cinema, but across the history of cinema. Its beautifully expressive but subtle, emphasised in the scene where Burrows tells her to smile despite her ceaseless misery. She forces herself to smile with her fingers, turning up the corners of her mouth, but it’s a facade she can’t continue for long. The relationship between Cheng and Lucy is chaste but respectful but its the prejudice of others that encourages the inevitable tragedy that develops. Perhaps still burned by the reception and reputation of ‘Birth of a Nation’, Griffith’s film changes aspects of Burke’s more ambiguous short story to create a plea for tolerance, to induce sympathy and understanding for the sensitive, oppressed souls of the world and the film is all the better for its more intimate nature.
Into Great Silents 