Broken Blossoms

Broken Blossoms

1919

Director: D.W. Griffith

Starring: Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess

Silent films are curious.  They are so far removed from the cinema we know today that it can be difficult acclimating to their distinctly separate style.  There are certainly exceptions to this rule; great films are great films regardless, but only a handful of the silents I’ve seen have managed to break through their constrictions of time and place and really, truly impress me.  Films like Keaton’s comedies, City Lights, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or The Unknown are examples of this.  Unfortunately, Broken Blossoms does NOT fall into that category, feeling instead like a film ridiculous in how utterly out of date it is.

Cheng Huan (Barthelmess) starts off in China as a well-intentioned missionary who means to go to London to spread the word of the peace of Buddha.  Once there, however, he becomes addicted to opium and winds up tending a grubby little shop in the Limehouse district.  Lucy (Gish) is a waif who shuffles to and fro in between beatings by her cruel boxer of a father.  Cheng falls in love with Lucy from afar, and one night, when Lucy is left on the streets, he takes her in, feeds her, and nurses her back to health in the most chaste way possible.  Of course everyone will pay for this act of kindness.

  

Let’s deal with the obvious first, shall we?  This being 1919, Hollywood (and America) wasn’t nearly as progressive as it is today (and frankly, I’m not so sure it’s terribly progressive today).  We have, in Broken Blossoms, a thoroughly American actor playing a Chinese character, complete with squinty eyes and everything.  Oddly enough, this doesn’t completely bother me.  I know it’s repugnant by today’s standards, but is it fair to hold Broken Blossoms up to today’s standards?  I tend to be pretty tolerant to issues like this in very old films, and when you look at the characterization of Cheng Huan in Broken Blossoms rather than simply the outward caricature, he actually becomes the kindest character in the film.  I don’t like watching Barthelmess play an Asian any more than the next blogger, but I have to hand it to Griffith for making the Chinese character the closest thing the film has to a hero, and this in the middle of a phase in American culture called “Yellow Peril” where the fear of Chinese immigrants was reaching a peak.  It’s an odd feeling, really; I very much wish that white actors weren’t playing people of color in Broken Blossoms, but at the same time, I respect the presentation of Cheng Huan in a positive light and understand that the film is ultimately a product of its time.

No, far more than the whitewashing in Broken Blossoms, the thing that turns me off about the film is the unrepentant Melodrama with a capital “M.”  Melodrama, as a genre, has never sat well with me.  Even as a young teen Siobhan, I cringed when having to read books in school like Sister Carrie or any of the “young adult” fiction foisted upon me.  When I was in middle school, I remember being agog at all my classmates who insisted on writing the most utterly ridiculous short stories and poems about drugs, abuse, suicide and the like, none of which were realistic, and all of which ended badly.  Consequently, I dislike films where I have to watch things go badly in the most predictable way possible and with as little nuance as can be managed.  And Broken Blossoms is definitely that film.  Lucy’s father is evil for no other point than to be evil and brutish because the plot demands it.  Oh, okay, sure, I don’t need any kind of believability there, go right ahead.  Gish’s Lucy is so tortured in her childhood that she cannot physically smile and must actually use her fingers to curve her mouth upwards.  To pull out a phrase from my youth, gag me with a spoon.  This style of filmmaking, so popular in the early days and certainly around albeit a bit evolved today, does less than nothing for me.  I really dislike melodrama.  So Broken Blossoms never stood much of a chance.  

  

A few comments on Lillian Gish in this film.  In general, I am a fan of La Gish; it’s difficult not to be, considering she’s one of the pioneers of cinema.  I’m not sure how much I like this particular performance, however.  For one thing, there is the age of her Lucy.  In 1919, Ms. Gish would have been 26 or 27 years old.  I cannot for the life of me figure out how old the character of Lucy is supposed to be.  In some scenes, it appears as if she’s meant to be late teens; in others, more like 13 or 14.  For her part, Gish plays Lucy on the immature and infantile side, having her entranced with a simple doll and completely unaware of the feeling of love directed at her from Cheng Huan.  Frankly, skewing Lucy so young, even if it’s only emotionally that young, makes things a bit… squicky.  It’s a bit worrisome already that I’m trying to overlook historical whitewashing, but now I have to watch an older man fall in love with a woman who has the mental capacity of a 12 year old girl.  This does not for fun times make.  

  

But there is one scene in particular where Gish shines, and that is the scene where she has locked herself in a closet to escape the temper of her father, who has just discovered that she had been inside Cheng Huan’s shop.  Here is where we really see Ms. Gish’s acting prowess, as she convincingly gives us a performance of a frightened and cornered animal incapable of seeing a way out.  The naked fear on her face is staggering, and she is sole reason why I found this scene the most emotionally affecting of the entire film.  Her face, her body language, everything is committed to the feeling of true dread. 

I suppose I need films like Broken Blossoms every now and then to remind me just how amazing other silent films are by comparison.  It’s not nearly as preachy as Intolerance or as hateful as The Birth of a Nation, but I’m still not a fan.  Melodrama’s not for me, thanks.

Arbitrary Rating: 5/10

Intolerance

Intolerance

1916

Director: D.W. Griffith

Starring: Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, Constance Talmadge, Alfred Paget

Oh, D.W. Griffith, you so crazy.  You get all mad when people bust on you cuz they don’t understand yo politickin’ in Birth of a Nation, so instead you get all up in their business with Intolerance, yo!  You all, ‘yo people always be beatin’ on the downtrodden, it’s in the history books, man!’  And you make a crazy whack movie that’s fifteen hours too long to prove it!  What up with that!

OK, I’ll stop that now.  Somehow D.W. Griffith is much more amusing to me if I picture him as a ghetto thug. 

Made in direct response to those who dared point out the racial controversies aplenty in Birth of a Nation, Intolerance tells four separate tales, each dealing with the theme of intolerance, and usually set against the backdrop of a love story.  We have classic episodes from Jesus’ life, a story in Ancient Babylon about a Mountain Girl (Talmadge) who falls in love with Prince Belshazzar (Paget), a tale of doomed love during the Catholic/Huguenot tensions in sixteenth century France, and a modern tale following Dear One (Marsh) as her life goes from poor to poorer to poorest, all in the name of the “Social Uplifters” who honestly believe they’re improving society.  Throughout it all, we continually cut to Lillian Gish who sits rocking a cradle as the “Eternal Mother.”

This = epic, especially for 19-freaking-16.

  

There are a few reasons why you should commit three plus hours of your life to watching this silent film.  First of all, as my husband even managed to intuit, D.W. Griffith was groundbreaking in his development of what we call “the language of film.”  In Intolerance, just as in Birth of a Nation, we have a sense of altered shot composition to build dramatic tension.  He cuts, and frequently.  He doesn’t simply set up a static camera and let the entire scene unfold.  We go from close-up to mid-shot to crowd shot to reaction shot throughout the entire movie.  There is a definite storyteller’s sensibility to Griffith’s work.  He knows how to edit and compose, and it’s easy to understand why the Soviet filmmakers of the twenties and thirties, like Eisenstein, were inspired by him.  Furthermore, Intolerance essentially single-handedly invented the concept of telling multiple tales at the same time.  The four stories mentioned above are constantly intercut throughout the film.  This had never been done before; several intertitles at the beginning of the film explain that this is the structure because shoot, the audience would realize that’s what Griffith was doing!  The idea of intercutting between parallel stories is a technique so familiar to us nowadays, so give credit where credit is due.  Griffith invented it.

Additionally, the scope of Intolerance is epic.  Most impressive is the Babylonian sequence.  Griffith had everything built specifically for this film, and when you see the size of the walls and sets, all the costumes and props, it’s hard not to be impressed.  The battle for Babylon is easily the most exciting portion of the film, and Griffith doesn’t hold back.  There are fires, boiling oil, battle turrets being toppled, spears shooting into people’s bodies, and what looks like thousands of extras.  There was no CGI to create an army in 1916, so Griffith, if he wanted it to look impressive, had to actually build everything.  Say what you will about Intolerance, it’s big scale, big budget, in a big way.  Michael Bay would be proud.  

OK, this bit was cool.

However, that’s about all the reason I can come up with for sitting through over three hours of people wringing their hands.  Intolerance may be grand and its storytelling technique and undoubtedly innovative, but it’s not entertaining.  Despite Griffith’s intertitles that help explain what story we’re now moving to, there is still some confusion as to who is who and what’s happening – having a cast so large will do that.  Furthermore, the acting is atrocious.  Lillian Gish is good and likeable in everything I’ve seen her in, but she’s not really *in* Intolerance.  Every twenty minutes or so, we cut back to her rocking a cradle, but really, that’s not exactly an acting challenge.  Instead, I’m subjected to a focus on Mae Marsh in the modern story.  I’ve decided I hate Mae Marsh, and if I never see another movie with her in it before I die, I’ll be happy.  Everything you can possibly imagine about silent film actors overacting, she does, and in spades.  She thrashes around the room in order to convey emotion; it’s as though she’s having an epileptic fit of some kind.  Oh, was that supposed to be joy?  Looked like a drug-induced episode to me, and Talmadge as the Mountain Girl isn’t much better.  There is zero subtlety, but I wasn’t exactly expecting any in a movie from 1916.

I kind of sort of hate you, Mae Marsh.

Furthermore, I see absolutely no reason why Intolerance clocks in at just over three hours.  The amount of dead time in this film is ridiculous.  The Babylon battle is exciting, but at twenty minutes, it could have been edited down by half and been just as exciting.  Nearly every other sequence in the film fits this description – too long.  I’m watching the same thing over and over and OVER again.  I get it!  Move on!  Yes yes, Mae Marsh is making weepy faces at her baby, I don’t need a five minute shot to establish the fact that she’s sad.  Yes yes, there’s a big ceremony in Babylon, I don’t need fifteen minutes of footage to prove this.  Yes yes, the evil Pharisees are evil, I don’t need a protracted Evil Look of Evil that lasts for one minute to get the point across.  Everything moves at a snail’s pace in this movie.  It’s long, and it’s boring, and it’s slow.  Yes, Griffith is smart in his editing to tell his story in a unique visual way, but I just wish he’d realized his audience doesn’t need to be told the same thing over and over again seventeen times in order to understand a point.

And then, of course, there's Jesus.  I don't know even know...

Ultimately, as my husband says, the title of the movie is fairly fitting.  Intolerance is rather intolerable.  Yet again we have a Griffith epic that, while not being as morally repugnant as Birth of a Nation, is no less preachy and whiny and long and dull.  I don’t discount Griffith entirely; there are films of his I actually like.  But this one ain’t one of them. 

Arbitrary Rating: 4/10

The Birth of a Nation

Hide yo' kids, hide yo' wives.

The Birth of a Nation

1915

Director: D.W. Griffith

Starring: Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Henry B. Walthall, hundreds upon thousands of extras

I will tell you this from the outset: I have precious little original content to say about The Birth of a Nation.  My opinion of this film is fairly similar to that of pretty much everyone else.  You won’t be gleaning anything terribly new here.

So… let’s get this started, shall we?

The Birth of a Nation is about arguably the most violent and disruptive of decades in American history, the 1860s.  We get an introduction to two families – the Camerons of the South and the Stonemans of the North – right before the American Civil War breaks out.  The first third or so deals with the war, then later we see Lincoln’s assassination.  The final portion of the film deals with the South after the war, about rebuilding and reconstruction, and, in what is so ridiculously troubling, about the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. 

I’ll start with the good, because there is good to say about this film.  The Birth of a Nation is often credited with “inventing the language of film,” and it would be difficult to argue with this statement.  I’ve seen a few films made prior to this, and I’ve seen another film from the same year as this (Les Vampires).  D.W. Griffith did not invent the concept of the “epic film,” (Les Vampires is even longer than Nation’s three hour running time), but he certainly took the concept of film to a much higher level.  Unlike Les Vampires, which feels like a filmed play, Nation has crosscuts, close-ups, intercutting, flashbacks, and even a bit of a moving camera.  Griffith defines what makes a movie different from a play with The Birth of a Nation.  While this might not be apparent to a thoroughly modern movie-goer, it’s apparent by watching the other films of the 1910s that Nation was a game-changer.  The “language of film” gets a vocabulary lesson.

And yet.

Why, oh why were such inventive film techniques brought to us through such a stomach-churning story?  The first hour, the one that focuses mostly on the Civil War, is fine enough, establishing many classic war movie tropes in one go.  Even the fact that Griffith tells the story from the vantage point of the South (his father was an officer in the Confederate Army), sympathizing them while brutalizing the North, is fine.  But once the Civil War ends we are treated to some of the most ludicrous racial stereotyping nonsense, so horrible that I have trouble getting through it.  The black characters in the film (most of whom were played by white actors in blackface) are nearly all portrayed as lascivious, lawless, power-hungry beasts who will beat the white men into submission while marrying all the white women.  And the only possible way the white race can save itself?  The Ku Klux Klan.  Don’t worry, white women, the KKK will save you! 

I don’t even…

I rewatched most of this film in order to write this review, even though I knew what I wanted to say.  I admit, I had forgotten just how archetypal the Civil War sequence is, how influential it was on war films, and that’s worth noting.  Griffith portrays the jubilation of the South heading off to war, the chaotic frenzy of the battlefield, followed by the despair of returning home to a ruined homeland, all formidably portrayed.  While All Quiet on the Western Front certainly portrays the disillusionment with war with greater sophistication, there is a similar sense here.  So I am glad that in watching this again, I remembered this portion of the film I had forgotten.

But then the film gets silly and the racial absurdities become too many to name, and I feel my stomach literally turning over.  And then our “hero” (Walthall) gets “inspired” to invent the KKK, and my patience is significantly shortened.  I just can’t.  Knowing how much intolerance and bigotry this particular organization has inflicted in the last century in America, how much violence and hatred it has instilled, how its effects are undoubtedly still felt in some areas of the American South, I can’t see them as any type of hero.  Griffith claims to have been blind to what he was doing, and he was, apparently, legitimately surprised when people took issue with his portrayal of race relations.  I just don’t get it.  How could he not know what he was doing? 

I had to stop watching.  I couldn’t make it through the final half hour.  I was impatient, disturbed, and frustrated.  I was NOT going to watch the KKK save the day.  I couldn’t.

The Birth of a Nation is troubling.  It advanced the art of filmmaking by light years, but it did so by telling an utterly reprehensible story.  I would never recommend anyone see this unless they needed to for a class or if you’re a list completist.  I get no sense of pleasure from watching this movie.  I respect what Griffith did in terms of filmmaking techniques, but after that, this one gets a resounding “NO” from me. 

Arbitrary Rating: 3/10.  It scrapes a few points for technical merit.