BROKEN BLOSSOMS

By 1919 Lillian Gish and D.W. Griffith had been working together as director and muse for nearly a decade. Don't let the date turn you away from this movie: it is one of the most poetic, tenderest love stories ever put on film. A tragic romance. Gish plays an abused girl of the London ghetto taken in by a kindly, young "Yellow Man" played by Richard Barthelmess. Unfortunately his love and care is not enough to save her from her sadistic father played by Donald Crisp. Despite being ill with Spanish influenza right before rehearsals were underway for the movie's production, Lillian Gish gives one of her iconic performances as a frail, virginal waif who is almost too pure and good for this world. Gish was reticent about assaying the role but Griffith forbid her to say no; he was a powerful influence on Gish's professional life. In her later years, when speaking of Griffith, she always referred to him as "Mr.Griffith, the Father of film."

Broken Blossoms is the reason it's hard to label Griffith racist. The movie is an interracial love story, and the Chinese man is the only decent man in the movie.

The Birth of a Nation (1915)

D.W. Griffith's landmark movie epic The Birth of a Nation  from 1915 legitimized the movie industry in the United States. Birth was one of the first what we now call "feature" length movies. It ran a little over three hours and was shown as a roadshow engagement instead of the penny arcades where many watched movies in those days. The movie was the first to be shown in the White House - occupied at that time by Woodrow Wilson. Griffith earned the title "Father of film" due to the success and technical achievements of the movie. But the subject matter is seen today as racist and many historians have ambivalent feelings about the movie's huge success. Yes, on one hand Griffith set the standard for innovative film-making in his day; however, one cannot forget the awful caricatures of the African-Americans in the film, played by whites with obvious black face and what we now know and have - or should - a deep shame about: thousands of lynchings against African-Americans for sport during the early 1900's. There is a lynching in the movie. To watch Birth is to admire Griffith laying the ground work in editing, story structure, camera movements, and lighting for future movie makers; conversely it is also a time capsule of an era when the portrayal of the Klu Klux Klan so captured the imagination of certain moviegoers that not long after the terrorist group, for that is what they were, was revitalized, not only in the south but the midwest as well. Birth was a powerful recruiting tool: it fed the imagination of a glorified past when after the civil war southerners had to fight back against the carpetbaggers and Yankees who let African-Americans run wild, i.e., basically let them be the equal of whites. The thought of being molested by a African-American man sends one white woman over the cliff literally in the movie. Of course sexual assault was more prevalent the other way around: white men attacking African-American women. So one has to watch Birth for the art and not the message.

This quote from James Agee: "The most beautiful single shot I have seen in any movie is the battle charge in 'The Birth of a Nation.' I have heard it praised for its realism, but it is also far beyond realism. It seems to me to be a realization of a collective dream of what the Civil War was like..."