St. Olaf Classic American Film Festival
7 p.m. Monday Feb. 18: Broken Blossoms
"The first memorable European film made by an American” -- Richard Schickel, D.W. Griffith
If the films for which pioneering American filmmaker D.W. Griffith is most famous, The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916), are grand epic symphonies of images and emotions, Broken Blossoms (1919) is a lyric piece of chamber music.
In what has been called the first tragedy ever filmed, D.W. Griffith tells the story of two broken people in London’s Limehouse slums—a young girl abused by her prizefighter father, and a lonely Chinese immigrant—who attempt to make one another whole. This old-fashioned melodrama and morality tale centers on aspects of race and gender which still resonate today: racial prejudice and domestic violence. In this classic film of the “silent movie” era, you’ll experience the beautiful photography of Billy Bitzer and the luminous acting of Lillian Gish.
Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl, directed by D.W. Griffith (1919) 90 minutes
Cast:
Lillian Gish: Lucy Burrows Richard Barthelmess: Cheng Huan Donald Crisp: Battling Burrows
Based on a short story, “The Chink and the Child,” from Limehouse Nights (1917) by Thomas Burke
Famous line from the movie:
Battling Burrows: “Put a smile on yer face, can't yer?”
Lillian Gish (1893-1993), one of the first, and most luminous, of American “movie stars”--a great screen actress whose acting career spanned nearly a century.
“Gish was possessed by a phenmomenal romantic intensity—she was like a nun with Christ when it came to meeting the camera. . . . . she drew equally upon viens of hysteria and transcendence, abandon and purity, that leave her eternally fascinating” --David Thompson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film
Here’s what one fan wrote about Broken Blossoms on the Internet Movie Data Base (imdb.com):
“Richard Barthelmess plays Cheng Huan, a Buddhist missionary who now takes residence in Limehouse. His original intentions, to help the violent Anglo-Saxons understand pacifism, are subverted by his opium addiction. He runs a small shop in the fog of the city and it becomes his own depressed microcosmic world. The stunning Lilian Gish, who seemingly has no bounds as an actress or as an object of feminine beauty, plays Lucy, the daughter of an abusive alcoholic boxer. Donald Crisp plays this part so well that the lack of sound does not inhibit the volume of cruelty he enforces on his only daughter, nor our ability to feel her level of sheer pain and suffering.”
Something to think about when you watch Broken Blossoms: Griffiths shows himself to be chillingly racist in his depiction of African-Americans and his glorification of the Ku Klux Klan in Birth of a Nation. Some have said that Broken Blossoms was his attempt to make amends. What do you think?
