DAS CABINET DES DR. CALIGARI (THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI)

 DAS CABINET DES DR. CALIGARI (THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI): 1920, 74mins. Director: Robert Wiene, Cast: Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss), Cesare (Conrad Veidt), Jane (Lil Dagover), Franzis (Friedrich Feher)

Hyperbolic or not, bestowing the title of “the first horror movie” on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari somehow sells it short. To what degree it is even a horror film or, more accurately, what sort of horror it is, largely depends on how much faith we put in Franzis (Friedrich Feher) as a narrator. We first see him a forlorn man telling a companion the tale of murders that took place in his hometown of Holstenwall some years earlier when a mysterious showman by the name of Caligari (Werner Krauss) wandered into the village with his travelling sideshow, a somnambulist named Cesare (Conrad Veidt). At face value, Franzis was witness to the terror brought on by the sinister Caligari and his accomplice. But in the end, none of this may have happened outside of the narrator’s mind.

The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari succeeds where so many other films have failed attempting the same mental flip largely because the chilling atmosphere is sustained regardless of which truth we accept, even if it’s only a man’s dissent into madness.

Indeed, the much-celebrated look of the film, depicting the abstraction of a Bavarian village using sharp jagged edges, crooked alleyways and spiraling rooftops, has earned it a place in the retrospectives of German Expressionism. Set designer Hermann Warm would recall, “We spent a whole day and part of the night reading through this very curious script. We realized that a subject like this needed something out of the ordinary in the way of sets. Reimann, whose painting in those days had Expressionist tendencies, suggested doing the sets Expressionistically. We immediately set to work roughing up designs in that style.”

But, as some film historians have pointed out, apart from the superficial backdrops, the film bears little resemblance to the nature of Expressionism. In The Haunted Screen: Expressionism in the German Cinema and the Influence of Max Reinhardt, Lotte H. Eisner argued, “A lack of continuity is apparent between the Expressionistic sets and the utterly bourgeois furniture-the chintzy armchairs in Lil Dagover’s sitting-room or the leather armchair in the madhouse yard. The break in style is fatal. Similarly, the façade of the asylum is not distorted, yet the end of the film is seen in the same weird décor. It is hard to say which is the more responsible for this: the Expressionist tendencies of the designers, or the parsimony of the producer.

The stylization of the acting is dictated by the sets. Yet Werner Krauss in the part of the satanic Dr. Caligari and Conrad Veidt in that of the sinister somnambulist are the only actors who really adapt themselves  to it, and-in Kurtz’s words-achieve a ‘dynamic synthesis of their being’, by concentrating their movements and facial expressions. Through a reduction of gesture they attain movements which are almost linear and which-despite a few curves that slip in-remain brusque, like the broken angles of the sets; and their movements from point to point never go beyond the limits of a given geometrical plane. The other actors, on the other hand, remain locked in a naturalistic style, though, owing to the old-fashioned way in which they are dressed (cloaks, top hats, morning-coats), their outlines do achieve an element of the fantastic.

The characters of Caligari and Cesare conform to Expressionist conception: the somnambulist, detached from his everyday ambience, deprived of all individuality, an abstract creature, kills without motive or logic. And his master, the mysterious Dr. Caligari, who lacks the merest shadow of human scruple, acts with the criminal insensibility and defiance of morality which the Expressionists exalted.”

Ah, but this misses the larger point. This bizarre view of the houses, streets and even offices reflects a literally distorted view of the world as seen by Franzis. This is his homeland, rendered unrecognizable by the literal and psychological ruin brought on by the war.

As Anton Kaels wrote in his essay on the film for Masterpieces of Modernist Cinema, “The film’s historical unconsciousness-what the film does not or cannot say-is the war, or more precisely, the traumatic memory of the war. The film itself serves as a flashback to the period that had hardly passed; it invites the audience to recover the memory, as discomfiting and contradictory as it may appear. The film’s disregard for temporal linearity blurs the boundaries between past and present, fantasy and experience, dream and delusion. A detective story on its surface-who is the monster in our midst?-the film conceals as it reveals, it deceives as it uncovers, it represses as it remembers.”

But Franzis also speaks on behalf of the writers Hans Janowitz and Carl Mayer, pacifists whose view of life and home was shattered by the war, to them a diversion for the powerful at the expense of the sleepy citizens they send off to battle.

For the rest of his life Janowitz stood by his account that the frame narrative, ultimately revealing Franzis to be a patient in an asylum, was added at the insistence of the producers in an attempt to restore faith in authorities, accomplished by revealing the director of the asylum to be the real-life counterpart of Caligari, still played by Krauss, now seen as simply a man of medicine running an institution.

In his 1947 From Caligari to Hitler, once considered a seminal essay on the film but now marred by discoveries made since, Siegfried Kracauer, accepting this version of events, commented, “Janowitz and Mayer knew why they raged against the framing story, it perverted, if not reversed their intrinsic intentions.  While the original story exposed the madness inherent in authority, Wiene’s Caligari glorified authority and convicted its antagonist of madness.  A revolutionary film was thus turned into a conformist one—following the much-used pattern of declaring some normal but troublesome individual insane and sending him to a lunatic asylum”

Eisner, in The Haunted Screen, repeated the same version of events in, “We know from the comments of one of the authors of the scenario-quoted by Kracauer in From Caligari to Hitler-that the prologue and epilogue were added as an afterthought in the face of objections from both authors. The result of these modifications was to falsify the action and ultimately to reduce it to the ravings of a madman. The film’s authors, Carl Mayer and Hans Janowitz, had had the very different intention of unmasking the absurdity of asocial authority, represented by Dr. Caligari, the superintendent of a lunatic asylum and proprietor of a fairground side-show.”

Janowitz’s account was substantially discredited in 1995, however, when the original screenplay surfaced with the frame narrative already intact (though in a significantly different form). It remains unclear, then, if Janowitz was speaking out of displeasure in how the frame narrative was ultimately rewritten rather than in the idea of a frame narrative being written at all. A more probing question is whether Janowitz was blaming the producers due to faulty memory or, more likely, a misplaced anger with himself and his cowriter for their failure to write a direct attack on authoritarianism.

It’s intriguing how similar the questions we ask about Franzis are. Is there a grain of truth in his story or is he, like his writer, subconsciously blocking memories he would rather not reckon with? Was he, for instance, the real murderer of his friend Alan (Hans Heinrich von Twardowski) with whom he held a gentleman’s competition for the heart of Jane? Did he then opportunistically blame Cesare (or did he fabricate the monster himself), until remorse drove him to madness? Franzis himself remains a blank but the film offers a clue. Almost every player of his story (from Jane to Cesare to Dr. Caligari himself), is based on inmates and staff of the asylum.

In the end, no matter what the truth, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari depicts a world in which nothing looks or feels right. If the core of the film is a window into Franzi’s mental state, however, the film itself says much about the moods of Janowitz and Mayer even in unexpected places. Jane, for instance, was based on Gilda Langer, an actress who inspired the two writers and encouraged their work. Mayer fell for her, but Langer became engaged to rising Hungarian director Paul Czinner and then, tragically, died of a lung infection at the age of 23 about a month before the release of the film she helped inspire.

As David Kalat explained, “She didn't miss out on Caligari because she was dead. She was actually alive during the entire production. Torn between Mayer and Janowitz, Gilda Langer took the chance to trade up from a pair of starving writers in favor of an up-and-coming director and producer named Paul Czinner. By marrying Czinner, Gilda effectively left their orbit.”

Tellingly, Jane (played by Lil Dagover) is the only intended victim Cesare cannot bring himself to kill. Instead, he runs off with her but doesn’t get far before she is rescued by her father and a pose. Perhaps this was Mayer’s wish fulfillment, rescuing Langer both from the man who took her away and her untimely death. But Jane was only Langer’s avatar and her escape a mere fantasy of the screen. But the stark reality also creeps in for Franzis in the end when we discover Jane was based on a woman living in the mental hospital.

Further evidence of a dream in which the world, including the officials in charge, works as it should is in how easily Franzis recruits help. For all of the film’s alleged anti-authoritarianism, both the police and the orderlies in the asylum are easily convinced and eager to help when Franzis warns them of the somnambulist’s deeds.

But this only makes the bleakness of the ending hit harder. The real Jane (if that’s even her name) is as far from Franzis’s grasp as Gilda Langer was from Mayer’s and Germany itself was headed for darker times despite the initial hope of a compassionate and ethical state.

As Kaes wrote, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari marks a bold beginning in Weimar’s engagement with the trauma of the war. Implicitly participating in the debates at the time about war psychiatry and shell shock, the film is concerned with saving a memory of the war experience that runs counter to the official, harmonizing commemoration practices that began in 1920. Instead, in the spirit of George Grosz, Otto Dix, and the Berlin Dadaists who portrayed a scathing picture of the German professional classes in 1919-1920, Caligari offers an equally aggressive and grotesque image of bureaucracy and the medical establishment. It also critiques traditional filmic realism by adopting a highly abstract and provocatively primitive form that mimics the physical and mental desert the first technological war had left behind. By extending the concept of shell shock into the very form of the film, we realize to what extent trauma has fractured and shattered both narration and mise en scene. Caligari is a film in which the liminal experience of the front-its hallucinatory, ineffable, and disorienting effect-is preserved more authentically than in most naturalistic war movies.”

If a single philosophy, then, were to be settled on for a film as complex as Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, nihilism and existentialism are the likeliest candidates. If neither a story of a murderous fiend or the ravings of a lunatic, Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is more clearly the story of Germany rising from the ashes of war only to step into a darker future. Cesare predicts the death of Alan early in the film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was also prophetic in a way Janowitz, Mayer and director Robert Wiene could not have guessed.

WITHIN OUR GATES

 WITHIN OUR GATES: 1920, 79 mins.  Director: Oscar Micheaux Cast: Evelyn Preer (Sylvia Landry), Flo Clements (Alma Prichard), William Smith (Philip Gentry), Charles D. Lucas (Dr. V. Vivian), William Stark (Jasper Landry)

Within Our Gates was an unquestionable candidate for inclusion into the National Film Registry if for no other reason than it bears the distinction of being the oldest surviving film by a Black director. Its predecessor, The Homesteader, predates it by a year but that, alas, has been lost to time. But Within Our Gates is a precious artifact for far more influential reasons. It is one of the few surviving pieces of the prolific career of director Oscar Micheaux, a trailblazer in every sense.

One name out of a flurry of Black filmmakers to emerge upon the end of the Great War, Micheaux had been telling the story of his struggles before film was even thought of as an option, writing and selling stories in South Dakota where he experimented as a homesteader. Film gave him a new medium and his body of work has remained the standout of what would come to be termed “race films” of the early 20^th century.

This despite the fact that a large portion of his oeuvre has been lost in the same manner a lot of early cinema was lost. In the case of Micheaux, an entire career has nearly vanished through nitrate degradation. Within Our Gates, an invaluable survivor, offers clues to the style and direction of one of cinema’s first auteurs.

The film is a complex, almost Dickensian, narrative with many layers, innovative narrative devices, and a sizeable roster of characters. Sylvia, a sweet young woman played by Evelyn Preer, drives the story. After her life falls apart while staying with a cousin up north, she leaves for the rural south to help a failing school intended to prop up the Black residents of the area. When she realizes how dire the financial situation of the school looks she returns to north to solicit an endowment. Here the film appears to become disjointed from where it began. The jealousy of Sylvia’s cousin who sabotaged her engagement, her cousin’s slimy step-brother who lusts after her and the compromising position Sylvia finds herself in through her cousin’s treachery all seem to fizzle out inconclusively, but Micheaux weaves it all back in seamless fluidity by the end.

In the meantime, the film shifts to address the questions many Black Americans were asking themselves in the early 20^th century. Micheaux draws a distinction between the Blacks who remained in the south and the ones who sought a better life in the industrial cities of the northern states. This disparity is also explored among the White characters, Micheaux reminding us that the dichotomy is not as clear as the north would like to pride itself.

For instance, Sylvia is eventually able to secure funds to save the school from the generosity of a Boston socialite, but not before the benefactor’s mind is almost changed by her snooty girlfriend, a southerner now living in Boston, her resentment so steep she is fighting against the 19^th Amendment, willingly sacrificing her own right to vote in order to prevent the same right to Black women. The socialite eventually honors her promise to Sylvia, but Micheaux’s reminder that even well-meaning Whites can be misled by persuasive sounding bigotry stands.

As Anna Siomopoulos observes in The Birth of Black Cinema, “But the racial reversals in the plot of the film are not the only challenges that Within Our Gates poses to Griffith’s film. Within Our Gates also counters Birth of a Nation in the politics of its aesthetics, specifically in its very different use of parallel editing. Griffith’s film uses cross-cutting to present a very simple opposition between white virtue and black villainy; in contrast, Micheaux’s film uses a complex editing pattern to present a larger social vision of many different, competing positions within both white and African American society.”

Micheaux’s harshest condemnation, however, is for traitors like the treacherous Efrem (E.G. Tatum) who endangers the lives of his own people to ingratiate himself to White mobs, and Old Ned, the unscrupulous Black reverend who preaches complacency to his Black assembly while secretly collecting bribes from Whites determined to keep them down.

 Dr. Vivian (Charles D. Lucas), a medical student in Boston who ultimately wins Sylvia’s heart, and Rev. Jacobs, who runs the crumbling school for Black children make for a revealing comparison. Both men embody the divergent philosophies offered by two Black leaders at the time. In the former Micheaux seems to have placed the ideas of Booker T. Washington while in the latter the teachings of Marcus Garvey. Both men, as did their historic counterparts, see education as the key to the path forward but Dr. Vivian’s emphasis is on patriotism. Micheaux’s decision to end the film with the triumph of this philosophy puts the film ideologically implicitly in Washington's camp.

Although the brutal lynching of Sylvia’s parents depicted through a flashback invert the horror of the murder of Gus in Birth of a Nation, the influence of Griffith on Within Our Gates is overstated. More than a rebuttal, Micheaux wanted to tell the story of his people in film for his people by his people, this explaining the title more than any other aspect of the film.

This entailed the establishment of Micheaux’s own production company and while he would come to sport many hats, this precluded Micheaux the budget offered by the larger film production companies. Getting the film made was only part of the struggle. Releasing and distributing the picture proved equally as challenging as many cities (notably Chicago, which was still reeling from the race riots of the previous summer) were reluctant to allow the film a run, at least before some cuts were made.

Despite these obstacles and financial restraints, Micheaux persevered and Within Our Gates was seen widely enough to have an impact. What it lacks in cinematic polish it more than compensates for with a pointed vision. Its multiple angles, both of the narrative and topical kind, tell a story that only a mind like Oscar Micheaux’s could tackle. While one would give much for more of his filmography to turn up, and it may as Within Our Gates itself was thought lost until a print was discovered in Spain in 1979, Within Our Gates is something of an overall testament to his contribution to cinema.

SOUTH

 

SOUTH:1919, 80mins.     Director: Frank Hurley

South, assembled from the footage shot by Frank Hurley on his fateful voyage to Antarctica with Ernest Shackleton on the Endurance, began life merely as a documentation of the voyage, the ice and wildlife of the South Pole. History turned it into an account of survival.

In July of 1914, with the backing of the government, Shackleton, accompanied by a crew of twenty-seven men including renowned Australian photographer Frank Hurley and some seventy dogs, left England to finish what his fellow countryman Robert Falcon Scott had tragically failed to do two years earlier; reach the Antarctic and return home with footage and specimens of the expedition. Scott and his men perished, Shackleton who, unlike Scott, was not burdened by a race to the Pole against the Norwegians, lost not a single man and his tale of heroism became a national motivator in the age of Antarctic Exploration.

Indeed, the outlook must have looked bleak when the Endurance, already trapped in pack ice, began to succumb to pressure winds, eventually crumbling to the bottom of the Weddell Sea. After surviving on provisions, Shackleton left 22 of his men on Elephant Island and made his way to a whaling station in South Georgia Island where he was able to solicit help for his crew.

If South is not as harrowing an experience as such a tale would suggest it is because much of it is the film Hurley initially set out to make; a documentation of the ice caps and marine life. It wasn’t until the crew became stranded that his focus shifted to the daily ordeals.

On film the crew appears determined and optimistic, but what were they really thinking as they are stoically digging through the ice or playing with the dogs? Was this where they were going to die once the supplies ran out? For that matter, what was Hurley’s real motivation behind the camera? Was his footage to be the only way to know their story once their frozen carcasses were discovered?

South was not assembled until three years after the rescue and it recounts the experience through the eyes of survivors. The whimsical footage of penguins and elephant seals, along with drawings standing in for footage Hurley couldn’t film, was spliced together years later, when the dread had subsided and it became easier to smile at animal antics. If the film does not quite grip us and lacks a sense of urgency as we see the situation becoming more hopeless by the day it does provide some striking images of the Antarctic at a time when many nations were racing to stake out the mysteries of the Pole. It works best as a capsule, being an impressive early documentary.

After its initial run in 1919, however, South was rarely seen in its entirety. In 1996 a restoration began which was met with praise when the finished product was screened in 2000. In 2022 it went under another polishing up, which added tinted colors and a beautiful score, and South was brought to life in a way that Frank Hurley would have been proud of. 

BROKEN BLOSSOMS

 

BROKEN BLOSSOMS: 1919, 87mins. Director: D.W. Griffith Cast: Lillian Gish (Lucy), Richard Barthelmess (Cheng Huan), Donald Crisp (Battling Burrows), Ed Peil Sr. (Evil Eye)

D.W. Griffith was somewhat past relevancy when he released Broken Blossoms in 1919. By the time he would make his Abraham Lincoln talkie in 1930 his name above the title was practically an anachronism. Even more so than Chaplin and, to a lesser extent only because he began later, Keaton, two contemporaries who would surpass him in popularity, Griffith spent much of the final war years catching his breath.

Intolerance had put him over budget in 1916 and so he laid low in 1917 and reemerged as a filmmaker in 1918 only to make some shorter features and shorts for the war. By February of the following year, however, he was one of the founders of the newly established United Artists Corporation and turned to features once more.

Nonetheless, Broken Blossoms would be a much more modest endeavor both in scale and length, running just under an hour and a half. A $115,000 the production would cost slightly more than Birth of a Nation, the inflation predictable almost five years later, but remained well under the whopping $1,600,000 of Intolerance. Apart from the opening shots set in an unnamed Chinese port-city capturing some of the grandeur of the Babylonian set pieces in Intolerance with Griffith’s striking close-ups of the locals, Broken Blossoms is a stagier and, comparatively, minimalist work though by no means devoid of atmosphere.

Intentionally or not, however, this scaling back provides a serene return to basics for Griffith, harking back to the slight but effective use of sets and location in his early Biograph shorts. The foggy London docks, for instance, where Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp), the brutish prizefighter keeps his battered adoptive daughter Lucy (Lillian Gish) more or less captive, recall the how expertly Griffith created desolation and despair in the slums in such shorts such as The Musketeers of Pig Alley with the least bit of old wood and a few establishing shots of decaying buildings.

As Martin Williams recounted in Griffith: First Artist of the Movies, “Griffith decided that such a tale needed a special telling. To gain absolute atmospheric control over every frame of his film, he built his sets entirely indoors and used with care only artificial light. Much of the photography is in a soft focus, and it is the work not only of Bitzer, but also-for close-ups and “special effects”-of Hendrick Sartov. A former portrait photographer whose work Lillian Gish had admired greatly, he had been used for some of her added close-ups in Hearts of the World. Griffith also used carefully tinted film, differently colored from scene to scene, even from shot to shot. Further, he hand-tinted some scenes with additional colors. Broken Blossoms, in its studio-controlled atmosphere, in its scaling down of emotion, and in its theme, marked a distinct stage in American movies. In his use of atmospheric studio sets, where design, proportion, and lighting could be strictly controlled form shot to shot, Griffith may have been influenced from certain Danish productions of the time. In any case, his film had a sizeable influence on production methods in Germany as well as at home. Ironically, he had originally hoped to shoot Broken Blossoms in London in its actual locales.”

Griffith’s early work, after all, struck chords because his focus was always on the tight narrative, carried by a handful of actors. As much as one can be awestruck by the spectacle of, say, Intolerance, the closer-knit cast of characters allowed for a deeper connection. In Broken Blossoms this resulted in a more moving film, gentler and more humaine than anything Griffith had attempted since his Biograph days.

How much Lillian Gish can be credited for this impact cannot be overstated. She had been making films with Griffith for seven years but, here, as the abused young woman, a unique talent emerges. Crisp is in fine form mugging his way as the animalistic father, but Gish foregoes theatrics and for all its slightness, her performance gives her much more complexity than her previous work. Lucy is both the soul of the film and an enigma.

Being forced to smile through the daily drudgery, Gish’s Lucy has learned by forced to hide her truest emotions for fear of retribution. Take for instance, the scene in which she pleads with her father to stop the beating, warning him that if he kills her, he will be hanged. Is she simply protecting herself with this warning or is she also trying to save a man she inexplicably cares about? So effective is Gish’s portrayal of this girl who has learned to hide what she is feeling that the very ambiguity, because we recognize it is a defense mechanism, elicits both pity and horror at the realization.

“The terror in her final scenes provides one of the great examples of pure pantomime in American silent films. If a soundtrack of her screams had been included, the effect would have become bathetic and ludicrous; when the inner ear of the viewer provides her screams for what he sees, the effect is harrowing,” wrote Williams.

She lets her guard down but once. After a particularly brutal beating, she escapes her entrapment and, exhausted, falls on the doorstop of Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess), the compassionate shopkeeper who fled China for London to preach the teachings of Buddhism. As she is nursed back to help in the tiny flat above Cheng Huan’s shop, her smile feels genuine for the first time.

Cheng Huan is something of a mystery himself. Keeping to himself after his arrival in London, his stoic expression inspires speculation. What are his thoughts on the world he sees before him? Is the Anglo world ready for the teachings of Buddha, as he had thought? In the short story by Thomas Burke on which the movie is based, Cheng Huan himself is swayed by the allure of the opium dens in London’s Limehouse District. In the film he doesn’t quite dodge their pull but remains aware enough to note the irony of local missionaries telling him they are travelling to his homeland to “convert the heathen”.

Why does he care for Lucy as much as he does? Is it lust or sheer pity for the broken girl? Perhaps it’s because beneath her bruised and closed exterior he sees another beautiful soul dimmed by an unforgiving world. A moment early in the film, before the fateful day he takes her in, is particularly revealing. While shopping in town, Lucy is harassed by a local vendor known around the slums as Evil Eye (Edward Peil). Cheng Huan comes to her defense but then refuses to approach her himself, happy only to see her continue safely on her way.

He will, eventually, provide her with the only kindness she ever sees, an act that will ultimately cost him more than his life. For Cheng Huan the tragedy is not in his own death but in being forced to betray his principles. When the jealously enraged and, by then, murderous, Burrows turns his aggression on him Cheng Huan resorts to the very violence he hoped to eradicate. His final act expresses not only his grievance for Lucy, the only blossoming heart he saw, but that his own soul was consumed by the darkness of the world.

“Miss Gish’s performance is all curves, it has been said, and Richard Barthelmess’s, as Cheng, is its compliment, all angles,” wrote Williams. “Miss Gish perceived this for herself, and Barthelmess shows us the fear under Cheng’s self-effacing calm. Donald Crisp’s is all effective cruelty and brutality, but it may strike us as overdone, because he did not grasp, or did not let us glimpse, the hidden fear that a brute such as Burrows masks with arrogance and violence.”

It is no secret that Barthelmess was not Chinese. Yellow-facing, however, was an abomination too widespread to fairly condemn Griffith’s use of it here as an isolated incident. Still, after Birth of a Nation it became impossible not to consider racial dynamics in his works. Perhaps without the tarnish to his name, it would have been easier to not associate the otherwise tender scenes with Cheng Huan and Lucy with the troubling racial hierarchy of His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled where the worthiness of a Black man is measured by his care of his wife enslavers. Griffith never felt the need to retract his past but, with consideration of this, it must be said that Broken Blossoms is the closest he ever came to addressing the storm. If nothing else, it is a more direct condemnation of racism and xenophobia than anything he did since or would subsequently do.

Bigotry is given the invariably ugly and scarred face of Battling Burrows. When his xenophobia is revealed, though, there was already so much stacked against the character up to that point that it comes as one more tiny nail in the coffin. More interesting is the contrast between Cheng Huan and the world that has him in dismay. Memories of why making Broken Blossoms was such a courageous undertaking are becoming lost to history, but the Chinese Exclusion Act would not be repealed for more than twenty years after its release and large swaths of the world believed in the virtues of missionaries travelling to foreign lands to bring salvation. Some, like Mark Twain in the brilliant essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”, saw inherent egotism at play.

Griffith took the bold step of reversing the mirror. What if our ways seemed just as barbarous from the outside looking in, he asks. Contrast, for instance, the serenity of the scenes in the Chinese village with the grimy docks of East London. Peace is disrupted in China only when rowdy American sailors begin brawling and light enters in Limehouse upon the arrival of Cheng Huan. Accordingly, the only time we see optimism in Cheng Huan’s face is early in the film before he leaves his homeland and never again once the world disappoints him.

Finally, it is Cheng Huan who is converted in a way the missionaries who travel to his country could not have foreseen. The reality of their world changes him irrevocably.

“But for Griffith himself,” observed Williams, “the range between Intolerance and Broken Blossoms is the range of a major artist.”

Indeed, Griffith now had the confidence of a new studio to back his picture when Adolph Zukor, head of Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, the studio that originally funded the film expressed disgust at the film’s somber tone. Griffith repaid Zukor the $250,000 for the rights to his film and launched the newly founded United Artists (which he founded along with Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford) with this as its opening film when it premiered at the George M. Cohan Theater in May.

Broken Blossoms proved to be both a commercial and critical success.  The New York Times commented: "Mr. Griffith chose a tragic story of impossible love, love impossible in this world of passions and prejudices and brutal forces, he absorbed it in its full meaning, recast it in his mind pictorally, translated it from the written words of the author into the scenes and actions of a photoplay, added what was needed to make it live in pictures, left out what pictures could not have adequately expressed and Broken Blossoms came to the screen a masterpiece in moving pictures. Bare narration of the story cannot hope even to suggest the power and truth of the tragedy that Mr. Griffith has pictured. All of his mastery of picture-making, the technique that is preeminently his by invention and control, the skill and subtlety with which he can unfold a story...all of the Griffith ability has gone into the making of Broken Blossoms. Many of the pictures surpass anything hitherto seen on the screen in beauty and dramatic force. The whole is a photoplay that cannot fail to impress anyone who looks at it in any mood short of the most resolute hostility."   

A review in Current Opinion was equally enthusiastic stating, “Once again has David Wark Griffith delved into his seemingly inexhaustible bag of trick and brought out another novelty in the way of a film to intrigue the public and amaze his rivals. This time it is a film version of one of Thomas Burke’s sophomorically grewsome [sic] tales of London’s Limehouse district. It is called Broken Blossoms and is that might be termed a bit of intensive cultivation of film possibilities.

The picture itself inaugurates what one might term the fully elaborated short story of the screen. It consumes about eighty minutes. It abounds in pictorial and so-called “artistic” effects of photography-artistic in the sense of that dimming and blurring and unfocussing of the negative so that a photograph may look like anything but a photograph. Perhaps Mr. Griffith will soon catch up with the real photographers who are not ashamed of being photographic. However that may be, there can be no doubt that Mr. Griffith possesses the power of making critics and public take his work seriously.”