“REAL ART ENDURES” blared a printed United Artists sales pitch to theaters in 1920. “Art is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of popular selection. D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms is a more powerful attraction today than when it was first shown last Spring, because people speak of it, they see it again and again, and those who have not yet had the opportunity are looking for it. They feel it is the one film they must not miss. That is why Broken Blossoms is a more compelling box-office feature for you now than ever before. It’s name above your theater entrance means big business and prestige for your house.”

In our last installment, we read one critic from the 1920s refer to silent films as the “uncertain art of the unspoken drama.” What made it so uncertain was its newness. People then had no way of knowing how the technology was going to play out. Were “flickers” a fad, or something more? Would they be superseded by some newer, better, impossible-to-predict technology, making them as irrelevant as the horse and buggy had become by 1919? Or was this “uncertain art of the unspoken drama” fated to last for centuries, with names like Griffith and Gish remembered and admired in the year 3919 the same way ancient names like Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides still carried weight in 1919?

As it happened, silent films vanished in the face of synchronous sound only a decade after Broken Blossoms appeared. Black-and-white photography lasted a few more decades, but that, too, eventually gave way to color. The art of film continued, but the art of silent film was dead and largely forgotten. (more…)

When in 1918 D. W. Griffith asked Lillian Gish to star in a tragic story of love, opium, dreams and death, all set against a Dickensian backdrop of poverty and despair, she was intrigued. But when he told the twenty-six-year-old actress that she would be playing a twelve-year-old girl, she was incredulous. Gish was a grown adult now, and fairly tall –  what possible trick of camera or posture could create the pixyish physique and innocent features that such a part would demand?

After much arguing, Griffith grudgingly agreed to raise the character’s age from twelve to fifteen, while still insisting that she play the part as a child. Lillian wasn’t convinced she could pull it off: “Virgins are the hardest roles to play. Those dear little girls — to make them interesting takes great vitality.” But seven years together had given the director full confidence in her abilities: “I gave her an outline of what I hoped to accomplish, and let her work it out in her own way. When she got it, she had something of her own.”

Sometimes events that look like setbacks prove to be fortuitous. On the way home from being fitted for her costumes, Gish collapsed with Spanish Influenza, a deadly pandemic then spreading throughout the United States which ultimately killed over thirty million worldwide. By the time she rallied and recovered, her already svelte frame had degenerated so dramatically that her costumes had to be refitted. But in hindsight, this pathetic and emaciated look proved perfect for the role. (more…)

“Old Lil” was an actress. It was a good job, paid the bills, but it was a tough life. Oatmeal or a cold sandwich was her usual meal, an idle table or bench her usual bed. There were dangers, too. One night on stage, an accidentally discharged shotgun put some buckshot in her leg. On another, she was unceremoniously cast into a cage of live lions as horrified women in the audience (who had been lured into the theater by flyers promising just such a spectacle) screamed and fainted dead away. Yet through it all she proved a consummate professional, enduring the hardships of performing with quiet dignity.

Her name was Lillian Gish, and she was eight years old.

She was born in Ohio, in 1893, to a pair of seventeen-year-old parents. A little sister, Dorothy, followed four-and-a-half years later. By 1902 their alcoholic father had abandoned the family, and mother turned both herself and her two little girls towards acting to pay the bills. “I learned what it was like to work,” Gish remembered with appreciation. “And. . . to be hungry at times.”

They moved to New York, where the action was. To save on rent, the Gish family shared an apartment with another abandoned mother, Charlotte Smith, and her own three thespian kids. Little Gladys Smith was near to Lillian’s age, and they became fast friends, going so far as to substitute for each other on stage whenever one fell ill. (more…)

“I want a river,” murmured D. W. Griffith, his eyes unfocused and gazing into space. “A misty river. A river of dreams. The Thames as Whistler — or perhaps Turner — might have painted it. Only it must be a real river. Do you understand? A real river. Flowing, endlessly flowing. Carrying destiny — the never-ending destiny of life — on its tide. I must see that flow, that silent flow of time and fortune, with all the mystery of unknowable future there. To be seen — and yet not to be seen. . . .”

For cinematographic “boy Friday” Karl Brown (1896–1990), this latest impossible request was all in a day’s work. Ever since begging his way into a job with Griffith as a camera assistant, he had often been sent on strange excursions to capture some particular shot haunting the director’s imagination. “One man who was the master designer, Griffith, drew all the plans,” Brown wrote as an old man in his book Adventures With D. W. Griffith. “The rest of us, from the highest to the lowest, gave whatever was in us to the realization of the master plan. I was the lowest, a beast of burden by day and a chore boy by night. The work was cruelly hard, the hours exhaustingly long.”

This latest task, Brown soon discovered, was for a new film called Broken Blossoms, a title “so sickly sweet that the working crew, a godless bunch by definition, never called it anything but Busted Posies.” The film was supposed to take place in the infamous Limehouse district in London, a poverty-wracked den of thieves, swindlers, brutes, hookers, and opium addicts bordering the Thames. Griffith had pulled strings to get young Mr. Brown called back to Hollywood (from a World War I stint in the Army) just so he could create and capture one master image of the Limehouse riverfront on celluloid. (more…)

On April 14, 1978, the industry trade daily The Hollywood Reporter carried a tiny blurb on an event of outsized historical significance. During the upcoming Los Angeles Film Exposition (today known as The Los Angeles International Film Festival), personnel from New York’s Modern Museum of Art were to visit the west coast and present a ten-picture selection of rarities from its vast archive of cinematic treasures.

Their keystone attraction was Broken Blossoms (1919), a then sixty-year-old silent film. The Museum, as it happened, possessed the only “original tinted nitrate print” known to still exist in the world. This precious and brittle jewel would be projected at the Exposition for the last time, before being tucked away into temperature and humidity controlled storage (from then on, future screenings would use copies of the original). For its last hurrah, this ancient print would be accompanied by a full, live orchestra, like in the old days. And to cement the evening as a particularly notable occasion, the movie’s eighty-four-year-old star, Lillian Gish, “would be presented following the screening.” (more…)

Lilian Gish, Broken Blossoms, 1919, a genuine Hollywood star.

Americans admire excellence and authenticity.

The rise of the Hollywood movie star was built on powerful performances that projected the idea of authentic emotions. Film audiences experienced a magical connection—often, deeply intimate—with scores of charismatic actors.

Lillian Gish’s heartbreaking performance as the abused daughter in Broken Blossoms (1919) cemented the image of a sensitive and vulnerable child/woman. It did not matter that Gish was, in fact, rigid and hard-headed. The huge shadows on the silver screen settled the matter in the public’s mind. (more…)

Lillian Gish

The great twin tragedies of the fate of silent films in the modern era is indifference and ignorance. And for those who have seen clips from silent films, they invariably view muddy, degraded prints projected at the wrong speed, hence the jerky motions that give the impression that all silent films are bad slapstick.

Of course, we all owe a great debt to Robert Osborne and TCM for programming so many fine silent films. At last, film lovers have the opportunity to screen a varied selection of silent films and appreciate the great craft that was abruptly short-circuited with the advent of talkies. The best silent films were a universal language in which image, motion and emotion were paramount. (more…)

9:45pm - Night Of The Hunter, The (1955) – A bogus preacher marries an outlaw’s widow in search of the man’s hidden loot. Cast: Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, Lillian Gish, James Gleason Dir: Charles Laughton BW-93 mins, TV-PG

Absolutely brilliant chiller anchored by Robert Mitchum’s larger-than-life performance as a psychotic preacher chasing two children for a doll stuffed with money. Equally good is former silent screen star Lillian Gish, as the children’s protector. The testament to her abilities as an actress is the dialogue she gets away with, especially near the end. (more…)