August 3, 2008
Silent Sunday: Broken Blossoms (1919)
Is this a good place to admit that this is my first feature-length Griffith film? Probably not, but it's too late now. I've seen chunks of The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, but I'd never really tackled the guy who basically invented the modern cinema. I'm a bad cinephile, but I'm working on that.
My first foray is into his depressing tale of a forbidden, interracial love between a Chinese man and a white woman. Of course, it's so understated that it's possible to read it as a completely unreciprocated love. Richard Barthelmess, a great, unjustly forgotten actor, is very good as "The Yellow Man," but the film belongs to Lillian Gish, who works her closeups with dazzling skill.
Posted by mike, August 3, 2008 11:27 AMI find Griffith's influence and pioneering film techniques much more interesting than any of the four films of his I've seen. The Birth of a Nation would probably be his most watchable today without all of the overt racism. Intolerance is a butt-numbing 3 1/2 hours and doesn't get interesting until the final 30 minutes when the editing picks up and Griffith masterfully weaves between the stories. But should I have to wait that long for a film to be good? Orphans of the Storm was pretty average and his least fascinating in concept and execution. Broken Blossoms had an amazing final 20 minutes, but the hour or so before it was pretty God-awful. Griffith slows every action down to the point of madness. Every slight tilt of the head or shift of the eyes is supposed to reveal character and the actors spend a good portion of the time staring off-screen contemplating things they'll never understand. I recognize that his techniques are quite inventive, I just wish that the films around them weren't quite so lousy.
Posted by: Dame James Henry at August 8, 2008 9:29 PM