l'eclisse

Orphans of the Storm (1921) was the last movie that Lillian made with D. W. Griffith, and following its completion she left his production company.  This was not the first time she had left Griffith — after Way Down East (1920) wrapped, Griffith urged her to go because she commanded too high a salary for his uncertain finances.  Her box office power was such that now, after an almost ten-year partnership, she was a bigger draw for audiences than Griffith was.  Orphans of the Storm would be the last critical triumph for Griffith, and the fact that it was also his last collaboration with Lillian punctuates this point rather well.

Since delving a bit more into Lillian’s work with Griffith, I find that something just turns me off about Griffith’s epic films.  Way Down East struck me the same way when I saw it several months ago, but I thought it was probably just the film itself.  Now with Birth of a Nation and Orphans under my belt as well, I see that it is probably just Griffith’s grandiose ventures in general.  I got the sense that something needed to be reined in; the sort of pastoral settings that Griffith uses in his films to denote gentility and a certain feminine ideal seem to be slathered on like too much makeup.  I can’t fault him too much, however — Griffith’s creativity was molded in the style of turn-of-the-century melodrama, as well as that of Lillian Gish.  Much of the story for this film came from the play The Two Orphans by Adolphe D’Ennery an Eugene Cormon, a critical success in the repertoire of theatrical melodrama.

Orphans of the Storm concerns two sisters in Pre-Revolutionary France — Henriette (Lillian), the daughter of a poor farmer, and Louise (Dorothy Gish), the daughter of a French noblewoman who married a commoner.  Henriette and Louise are not blood sisters (Henriette’s father finds the abandoned baby Louise on the steps of a cathedral), but their bond is as close as any family and Griffith shows their utter devotion from girlhood to maturity.  Louise is a victim of the Plague, bu loses her sight when she recovers.  Henriette resolves to take her on a trip to Paris in order to seek a cure.  While there, Henriette catches the eye of a wanton nobleman who kidnaps her shortly thereafter and brings her to a party (that actually borders on orgy).  Louise, alone and without the eyes of her sister, is taken in by a ragtag family of beggars.  The matriarch, Mother Frochard (Lucille La Verne), is an old hag who will do anything for money and orders Louise to sing and beg with them.  La Verne’s performance is actually one of the highlights of the film.  Her ruthlessness is tempered somewhat by her oafish drive to get more money, family be damned.  Rather than playing to the menacing aspects of such a character, La Verne seems to play for laughs as she is so ugly and so exaggerated as to be somewhat unbelieveable.

Poor Henriette is rescued from this orgiastic depravity, of course, by the handsome Chevalier de Vaudrey (Joseph Schildkraut), and agrees to help her search for Louise.  As luck would have it, de Vaudrey is also the nephew of Louise’s mother, who is now the Countess de Linieres (Katherine Emmet).  Lillian’s best and most touching scene occurs when she meets with the Countess.  Sitting near an open window, she hears the sweet strains of Louise’s voice in song down in the street below.  Henriette hears her, but mistakes the sound for her imagintion.  She tries to put it out of her mind, but the singing persists.  Unable to stand it anymore, she springs from her chair to survey the scene on the street.  It is Louise!  She calls desperately to her sister and makes haste to hurry downstairs.  In a cruel twist of fate she is seized at the door by the police for harboring a revolutionary, Danton (Monte Blue).  Lillian’s performance in this scene displays a wrenching delicacy that simultaneously restrains her emotions and gives them a breathtaking vibrancy, as if they were fit to burst from her fine features.

Griffith condenses the revolution, showing the storming of the Bastille and immediately following it with Robespierre (Sidney Herbert) and the Terror.  Henriette is forced to sit before a revolutionary tribunal because of her association with a nobleman (de Vaudrey), and is sentenced to death by the guillotine.  After a few hair-raising moments under the gleaming blade, Henriette is saved at the last minute (one of Griffith’s favorite plot devices) by Danton, who hears of her sentence and rushes to save her because of the kindness she previouly showed him.  All ends on a note of tranquility — Louise recovers her eyesight, and Henriette (upon the approval of Louise) agrees to marry de Vaudrey.

While Orphans enjoyed considerable critical success — many believed that it was Griffith’s return to the top of his form — the premium prices placed on tickets did not assist Griffith recoup the enormous expense he lavished on the film.  This, in addition to the considerable salary that Lillian was now able to command, was too much for his precarious finances (a situation that Griffith faced on several occasions in varying degrees with past films).  While Griffith certainly had his faults, his tireless (if not financially sound) enthusiasm for the medium of cinema is truly remarkable.  His creative visions bordered on the boundless, and I can’t help but feel that it was unfortunate that they also proved to be his financial ruin.

Broken Blossoms (1919) is a significant departure for D. W. Griffith away from the prestigious epics he had produced by 1918 (The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Hearts of the World), toward something more straightforward yet delicately ethereal.  Lillian Gish stars as Lucy, the 15-year-old daughter of prizefighter Battling Burrows (played to the sadistic hilt by Donald Crisp).  Waifish Lucy is the object of Battling’s abuse and the outlet for his anger.  Lucy cowers when she comes near him, ever fearful that she will receive yet another beating for some unknown offense.  Incredibly, Burrows reprimands her for her constant state of fear. “Why can’t you smile?” he snarls.  Ever compliant, Lucy takes two fingers and forces the corners of her mouth up in a bizarre attempt to smile for her father.  As in the climactic closet scene, Lucy is the picture of tragedy here, when we see that something so common as a smile is completely foreign to her abusive life.

One day while in town shopping for the evening meal, we see that a Chinese shopkeeper, Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess) lets his gaze linger adoringly on little Lucy.  There is no violent sexuality or malice in his look, as might be expected from her abusive father, but rather a sort of dreamy quality.  Lucy is his vision of heaven in the pits of the grimy Limehouse district in London.  Barthelmess as the Chinese Cheng does not stoop to easy ethnic stereotypes, which are readily available from Griffith (the film’s subtitle is “The Yellow Man and the Girl”).  Some of the film’s title cards contain an interesting mixture of Anglo paternalism (one referencing Battling’s attitudes toward Cheng describes how he hates anyone not born in his own country of England) with blatant ethnic slurs (after being rescued by Cheng, Lucy asks him, “What makes you so good to me, Chinky?”).  This is a step beyond the sort of typing exhibited in Birth, but it is nonetheless very visible.

Inevitably, Burrows goes on to beat Lucy into a senseless heap.  She struggles to make her way out of this den of violence, and wanders the fog-lined streets of Limehouse.  Exhausted, she collapses in the middle of Cheng’s shop.  In a slight opium stupor, Cheng cannot believe that this vision has come to his little cubbyhole.  Wasting no time, he carries the senseless Lucy upstairs and outfits the room into something fit for a princess so she can make a full recovery.

The climax of the film comes during the famous “closet scene.”  Burrows discovers that Lucy has been recovering in one of the upstairs rooms of Cheng’s shop.  Outraged that his daughter may have had relations with Cheng, he storms into the shop, racing upstairs and trashes the apartment.  He grabs Lucy and takes her back home, where he prepares to giver her the beating of a lifetime.  Totally given over to terror, Lucy locks herself in a closet, begging Burrows not to beat her because “t’ain’t nothing wrong.”  Lucy runs in circles within the narrow closet, her face a mask of total shock all the while clutching a little doll given to her by Cheng.  While preparing for this scene, Lillian visited a mental asylum in order to learn the true look of terror.  Her performance in this scene is nothing short of masterful, displaying the sort of tragedy that no child actor could ever achieve (Lillian initially balked at Griffith’s request that she play Lucy, because, at 25, she thought herself too old for the part).  Burrows takes a hatchet to the door, and finally kills Lucy with his rage.

Of course, tragedy can be the only ending to the story of such brokenness.  Cheng finds the lifeless Lucy, and brings her back to his shop.  He lays her out on the bed she used, putting things around her as he would on a funeral pyre.  Cheng shoots Burrows, which is another tragedy in itself.  He originally came to England from China in order to spread the pacifist meassage of the Buddha.  With nothing else to live for, he then kills himself.

The photography in Broken Blossoms is some of the most beautiful that I have ever seen in a Griffith film.  Griffith makes liberal use of tinting in order to show daytime and nighttime, which further lends itself to the ethereal mood of the film.  Clocking in at only 90 minutes, the story of Blossoms is succinct and splendidly told.  Every scene has its place (which is more than I can say for the more operatic Birth) and every actor is allowed to explore the characters to the fullest extent of creativity.  This films is truly a masterful example of not only Griffith’s and Gish’s work, but of silent cinema as a whole.