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. A review in Current Opinion said, “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.”