D W Griffith (1919)
While it’s not unusual to be surprised by the modernity of an antique talkie, I never feel that way about silent pictures, however ahead-of-their-time the director’s insights or techniques or the acting may seem to be. The live piano accompaniment (provided for this BFI screening of Broken Blossoms by Cyrus Gabrysch) doesn’t make a silent movie any less silent. The absence of human voices, especially, confers an archaeological quality on the images on the screen. The antiquity of Broken Blossoms is part of what makes its early scenes in particular – a prologue in China, scene-setting in the Limehouse area of London – so compelling. You have the sense of not only entering the time and place visualised by the film-maker but also looking direct into the ancient history of film-making. The fascination of these sequences is also the result, of course, of D W Griffith’s imaginative staging and his economical choice of arresting detail: an elderly local street vendor in the Chinese scene; the raw realness in East London of a careworn mother and a hard-faced streetwalker – both of whom warn the teenage heroine Lucy against their respective ways of life. The character who links China and Limehouse is Cheng Huan, the titular ‘yellow man’ of the film’s alternative title. He comes to England ‘to spread the gentle message of Buddha to the Anglo-Saxon lands’. The Chinese prologue also features some ‘skylarking’ American sailors. Their boisterousness is a mild foreshadowing of the viciousness and violence of Limehouse – qualities epitomised by Lucy’s father, the pugilist Battling Burrows, who, when not fighting in the ring, is tyrannising and abusing his daughter in their cramped, bare lodgings. Cheng Huan makes a living as a shopkeeper but, disillusioned by his failure to make a peaceful difference to Limehouse life, also spends time moping in an opium den – until his life is reanimated by his love for the ‘broken blossom’ Lucy Burrows.
The racial elements of Broken Blossoms are doubly interesting – in relation to the notorious racism of Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation and as an expression of contemporary attitudes more generally. The screenplay, by Griffith and Thomas Burke, is adapted from ‘The Chink and the Child’, part of Limehouse Nights, a collection of stories by Burke (a Briton) which was published in 1916. Griffith’s reputation as a racist and the derogatory title of the source material hardly prepare you for his respectful characterisation of the yellow man and excoriation of the forces that confront him in Limehouse. Not only is Battling Burrows’s declared hatred of immigrant ‘Chinks’ shown as reinforcement of his malign unreason. Griffith also criticises Christian assumptions of superiority, in a sequence in which two Christian missionaries, about to leave England in order to convert heathens in China, give Cheng a pamphlet on Hell, which they clearly assume is his destination. Buddhism is presented relatively positively from the start – as ‘peace loving’ and a ‘do as you would be done by’ ethic – although it’s striking too that the intertitles (which are consistently moralising) liken the advice that Cheng receives, before leaving China, from a priest in a Buddhist temple to the advice that would be given to any young American man preparing to travel internationally. It’s a tragic irony of the story, nevertheless, that Cheng, in order for justice to be done, is left with no option but to commit a fatal act of violence (and, finally, to use a knife to take his own life).
For the twenty-first century viewer, a more persistent racial problem is Richard Barthelmess in the role of Cheng. It’s a salient piece of casting for two reasons. First, the minor Chinese characters in Broken Blossoms are impersonated by actors and extras who are either Asian or apparently of Asian ancestry. Second, Barthelmess’s efforts to construct a creature of ‘exotic’ appearance, movement and gesture are so obviously painstaking that his technique draws attention to itself and sets up an emotional distance between the audience and the man Barthelmess is playing. This is not at all the case with the two other principal actors, Lillian Gish as Lucy (also referred to as ‘The Girl’, in accordance with the film’s alias) and Donald Crisp as Battling Burrows. Crisp melds, to remarkable effect, an expressionist study of Battling’s benighted soul and vivid behavioural details; it’s especially startling when Battling’s instinctual anger is occasionally eclipsed by sadism of a more jocular kind. Lillian Gish was in her mid-twenties when she made this film but the combination of her artistry and her slightness enables her to convince physically as an adolescent. Her character’s spiritual age is a more protean thing: Gish sometimes presents the face of a child; Lucy blooms when she takes refuge in the beautifully decorated room above Cheng’s shop; but there are times too when the girl’s face, described in an intertitle as ‘tear-aged’, suggests an old woman worn out by years of oppression. Lillian Gish makes Lucy’s terror at the prospect of another beating from her father shockingly real. A particularly brilliant invention on her (or the director’s?) part is the way that Lucy repeatedly pushes up the corners of her mouth in order to make a smile. Griffith’s hand-tinting of the film distinguishes both indoor and outdoor scenes and major emotional shifts in the narrative. The momentum of the cross-cutting in the closing stages makes for a gripping climax. The hierarchical cast list refers to ‘Miss Lillian Gish’ and ‘Mr Richard Barthelmess’ but no other actor’s name gets this formal treatment.
Postscript: The running time of ninety minutes advertised by BFI (also indicated on Wikipedia and IMDB entries for the film) proved to be a large overestimate – Broken Blossoms lasted less than eighty. Dominic Rafferty explained, in a typically clear and gently apologetic way, that the discrepancy had come to light when BFI played their print in advance of the screening proper and was thought to be the result of a ‘transfer issue’ rather than a matter of missing footage.
9 June 2015
