Amazon.com Essentials:
D.W. Griffith was many things: movie innovator, maker of grand
statements
(The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance being among the
biggest of all silent films), the first American superstar director--the
Steven Spielberg of his era. Griffith was also very much a conscious
artist, a man who did not think of movies as a mere medium for
entertainment but as an art form. The mute evidence of this can be found on
ample display in Griffith's 1919 drama Broken Blossoms, a tragic and
completely uncommercial project that proved to be hugely popular. The
director's most favored leading lady, Lillian Gish, plays an adolescent
girl in London's rough Limehouse district; abused by her father (Donald
Crisp), a crude boxer, she is cared for by a poetic Chinese man (Richard
Barthelmess). Gish, who had doubts about playing a child (and was not yet
fully recovered from a brush with the deadly Spanish flu epidemic),
delivers a magnificent performance. Justly famous for her hysterical
meltdown while trapped in a closet, she also brings off the smaller
moments: her hesitation while gazing at a flower she can't possibly afford
to buy is a heartbreaking piece of pantomime. Griffith's delicacy of touch
extends to matters of race, as he clearly sides with the refined man from
China, who must endure the prattle of white men boasting about traveling to
the Orient and converting "the heathen." Small in scale compared to
Griffith's mightier projects, Broken Blossoms is nevertheless one
of his most beautiful films, and a landmark of the silent era. --Robert
Horton
