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.

Rehearsals for Broken Blossoms began just as the clangor of America’s church bells announced Armistice Day (the end of World War I), and lasted for a magisterial six weeks. “Everything was planned and timed to the second,” Gish said. “We were craftsmen. We weren’t allowed the luxury of improvisation. But we tried these things out in rehearsal. If it was good, Griffith said, ‘Keep that in’.” There were no scripts to reference, no pages of dialogue to remember. If words were required, the actors made them up on the spot. “In the end,” Gish said, “the cutter would come in with his little paper and take down what we were saying, because later on they would become subtitles.”

The reason for their intricate preparations lay in the nature of silent film — every emotion was translated into a very subtle pantomime. Karl Brown, Griffith’s young boy Friday, remembered how, “A simple scene, apparently meaningless in itself, possibly a mere ‘bridge’ to carry the story from one phase to another, would be tried two, three, five, or a dozen different ways to settle at last into the one pattern that would work for everyone concerned: camera, setting, lighting, the placing of props, everything.” This allowed the principal photography of Broken Blossoms to be completed with astounding alacrity — eighteen days all told, with many of those night shoots. “Griffith conditioned her to the part she was to play,” said Broken Blossoms’ cameraman, Billy Bitzer, “and once she had the action in mind, she wouldn’t forget or deviate by so much as a flicker of the eye.”

Much of that footage was imbued with a previously unfathomed beauty due to a happy accident of fate. One day Lillian Gish went to the Hoover Art Company, a local Hollywood photography studio, and asked them to take a picture for her passport. She expected to sit for the usual head-and-shoulders mug shot, but what she received was destined to change the face of moviemaking.

When she later proudly showed the result to D. W. Griffith, he was deeply impressed. “Her eyes were alive with beaming life,” remembered production assistant Karl Brown about that luminous photo. “Her dimpled smile was so real and so rounded that you could reach right into the picture and touch it, while her lips were incomparably delicious just to look at. Her hair was in glowing tendrils, so alive that it was actually real, and not a picture at all.”

Griffith promptly hunted down and hired the previously unknown photographer, Hendrik Sartov, and gave him a single job on Broken Blossoms. “All Sartov had to do was make close-ups,” says Brown, “nothing but close-ups. . . The magic lens that performed his miracles was quite long of focus, six or eight inches, and in order to make a full-head close-up he had to back away over almost to the other end of the stage, while his lens shade seemed eighteen inches long. Specially made, of course, and specially mounted.”

When Brown finally snuck a closer look at this magic lens, he couldn’t believe his eyes. It was

nothing in the world but a yellowed old spectacle lens with all its imperfections on its head. It wasn’t much more than the bottom of a beer bottle, and its great virtue was that it was full of all the bad faults that optical scientists had been working for decades to eliminate. It could form an image, yes, but only in the middle part. From that one inch or so of recognizable image, the rest splayed out like a raw egg dropped on the kitchen floor. And this image part was all loused up with chromatic and spherical aberration.

However, if you’d stop it down far enough [cinematographer-speak for using more light and then contracting the lens iris to compensate, the same way your pupils shrink when exposed to bright light -- LG] these defects would diminish. . . Adjust the stop until the two aberrations can be just barely sensed but not actually seen, make your exposure, and what you get is pure peaches and cream.

In the wake of Sartov’s uncredited work on Broken Blossoms, film cinematographers the world over strove to emulate his wonderful diffusion effect. Some pulled pantyhose over their lenses to soften the image, others smeared a thin layer of Vaseline on the glass. By the 1930s, just in time for Hollywood’s Golden Age, many had perfected ways to trick the camera lens into taking years of wear and tear off a starlet’s face, thus giving audiences prodigious helpings of cinematic “peaches and cream.”

While Sartov did much to make Gish look younger, it was in the memorable nuances of her performance that she really managed to bring off the illusion. The most famous of these is now known as “The Smile.” In the story, Gish’s monstrously cruel father, sick of her incessant gloom and despair, orders her to give him a smile. Griffith and his cast thought long and hard about some meaningful response Gish could give her father in that moment, some bit of pantomime that could expose the depths of sorrow permeating her soul. But it was Gish who came up with the answer, a perfect gesture that has since gone down as an iconic image in the annals of filmmaking. As she explains it:

Suddenly it came to me: in the midst of the scene, and while the camera was grinding, I lifted my hand, spread my index and second fingers, and pushed up the corners of my lips into a ghastly, fixed-mouth smile.

“Mr. Griffith leapt to his feet,” Gish remembers, “and shouted: ‘Hold it!’ We did the scene many times until he was satisfied, and then he said to me: ‘Lillian, that is the only original piece of acting I have ever seen in the pictures’.” Griffith would have Gish repeat that ineffably sad and pathetic gesture at several points in the film. (So much for Gish’s claim that, “We weren’t allowed the luxury of improvisation.”)

Just as The Smile became a universally known shot depicting sorrow, the famous “Closet Scene” from Broken Blossoms became a benchmark for scenes of sheer terror in cinema. Its preeminence in that regard would not be seriously challenged for over forty years, until Hitchcock gave us the “Shower Scene” in Psycho. In the movie, Gish’s father has dragged Gish home and is preparing to horsewhip her. Terrified, she dives into the closet and locks the door against him, listening in raw terror to his angry ravings before completely falling apart as he begins battering down the door with a hatchet, Shining-style.

On the day it was to be shot, Griffith ran Gish ragged until 2 a.m., trying to get her into an exhausted state conducive to losing herself in the moment. What he didn’t know was that she had been rehearsing the scene in private “almost without sleep” for three days and nights, striving to come up with the perfect pantomime for terror, some action or gesture that would pierce the audience like a knife in the heart:

I worked that out myself. I never told Griffith what I was going to do. You see, if I had told him, he’d have made me rehearse it over and over again; and that would have spoilt it. It had to be spontaneous, the hysterical terror of a child.

Well, when I came to play the scene in front of the camera, I did it as I planned — spinning and screaming terribly (I was a good screamer; Mr. Griffith used to encourage me to scream at the top of my voice). When we finished, Mr. Griffith was very pale.

It remains, for all the advances we’ve had in technology, an electrifying scene. “I have seen every actress of America and Europe during the last half-century,” the famous stage actor Rudolph Schildkraut said at the time. “Lillian Gish’s scene in the closet, where she is hiding in terror from her brutal father, is the finest work I have ever witnessed.”

Normally during a shoot, Griffith’s highest praise after a scene was to murmur with soft content, “That is very fine.” But on this night, after Lillian Gish had screamed for long minutes like a banshee and twirled around in the enclosed closet space like a feral animal, Griffith’s response was a shocked “My God — why didn’t you warn me you were going to do that?” One suspects that he said this with a huge smile, for cameraman Billy Bitzer reports that, while Gish was immersed in her throes of terror, he snuck a glance over at Griffith, who was “leaned forward in his director’s chair, relishing every moment of it.”

Broken Blossoms debuted at New York’s George M. Cohan Theatre on May 13, 1919, and the accolades for Lillian Gish were off the charts. The critic covering the premiere for The New York Evening Telegram wrote that, “Miss Lillian Gish, as the girl, is so sweet and charming, and withal so touching that the presentation actually moved spectators to tears.” The Tribune added that, “Her work is so tender, so convincing that there comes a time when you just can’t watch any longer.” The Morning Telegraph spoke for many when it declared that “She gives a performance so finished and so appealing and pitiful it will be recorded among the remembered characterizations in this uncertain art of the unspoken drama.”

It was a triumph, undoubtedly — but also a double-edged sword. “Life is just one long photograph and interview,” the private, retiring actress glumly complained about her post-Blossoms tidal-wave of publicity. Magazines heralded her as “The Madonna of the Shadows,” “Queen of the Silent Drama,” and “The Duse and Bernhardt of the Screen.” Within a few years D. W. Griffith was all but forced to shoo her out of his company, graciously encouraging her to make her fortune with other directors while she was still a hot property. This she reluctantly did, but other directors found her to be too settled in her Griffith-tutored ways and somewhat snobbish about it. What John Nolte calls the “self-consciously showy” School of Acting Affectation (think late Meryl Streep and Al Pacino) actually started ninety years ago with Gish — contemporary reviews from the 1920s frequently accuse her of “playing Lillian Gish” instead of the character, and of using “repetitious mannerisms.”

Everyone wanted her to repeat her Broken Blossoms formula, to the point where critic Herbert Howe wrote in Picture Play magazine that, “When Lillian Gish now appears you know she is due for a beating. . . A Society for the Prevention of Screen Cruelty to Lillian Gish should be organized. This fragile, spiritually illumined girl is a fine tragedienne, ever emotionally true. It is a mistake to let her droop, forever a broken blossom.” Another magazine’s editor joked that “an optimist is a person who will go to the theater expecting to see a D. W. Griffith production in which Lillian Gish is not attacked by the villain in the fifth reel.”

And then there were the changing times. Actress Colleen Moore remembers how “There was a tendency for people and critics during the 20s to believe that anything that came to prominence in the teens was hopelessly outdated and old-fashioned.” The Los Angeles Examiner noted in a review of a lesser Gish film that “People are sick of her in vine-clinging, tragic attitudes. They want something different. We are living in the twentieth century.” James R. Quirk, publisher and editor of Photoplay, put it even more cuttingly: “Even as Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, she proves conclusively that babies are brought by storks.”

She was approaching forty when the advent of sound soured her on acting in movies, and she turned to a successful stage career. Gish only did motion pictures intermittently after that, but worth mentioning is her standout performance as shotgun-wielding Rachel Cooper protecting God’s children from Robert Mitchum’s iniquitous preacher in Charles Laughton’s masterpiece Night of the Hunter (1955). She remained a staunch Republican her entire life, standing by actors like John Wayne in support of the House Un-American Activities Committee, publicly supporting Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan, and being on the right side of most issues. When once questioned about feminism she replied, “I’m not a feminist. I like to think I used common sense most of the time.” My kind of gal.

Lillian Gish died in her sleep in 1993, having lived for 99 years — from President Grover Cleveland to President Bill Clinton. Her first film was made in 1912, and her last seventy-five years later, in 1987. In her foreword to The Films of D. W. Griffith, Gish wrote of her generation that “We are the first to leave a living record of our people, life-style, and certainly our history.”

I give the last word on Lillian Gish to Albert Bigelow Paine, the notable Mark Twain scholar who, in 1932, penned the first full-length biography of the woman who made Broken Blossoms so unforgettable: “To say that [Gish’s acting] is spiritual only partly tells the story. It is that, but it is something more. It has a haunting, eerie quality that has to do with elfland, and lonely moors — the face that seen by the homing lad at evening leaves him forever undone. Scores of men and women, too, have written of it, have felt its strangeness. Some have tried to write of it lightly, but underneath you feel the magic working. They have glimpsed Diana’s silver horn, and they are forever changed.”

Next week, we conclude our study of Broken Blossoms with a cage-fight death match: the critical mores of past audiences versus those of modern deconstructionist academics.

Previous posts in the series “D. W. Griffith, Lillian Gish, and Broken Blossoms”

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Film Theater and Gallery at Bowling Green State University, Ohio. Bowling Green State has long been a friend of popular culture. They have what must be the biggest pop-culture library and archive in the world (housing, among much else, a complete collection of my own literary journal, The Cimmerian), and visitors to their campus can also check out the cool theater dedicated to the Gish sisters, complete with displays of historical artifacts from their lives and careers.

Lillian Gish fulfills a dream of ballet. An old video from May 13, 1984: “Legend of stage and screen, Lillian Gish, appears with Patrick Dupond and fulfills a lifelong dream at the Metropolitan Opera Gala, celebrating 100 years of performing arts at the Met.” She always wanted to be in a ballet, and at ninety she finally did it.

An excerpt from Albert Bigelow Paine’s 1932 book, Life and Lillian Gish. Other biographers criticize this early treatment of Gish’s life for its “enpurpled prose” and its slavish adherence to the Gish legend (with her assistance — unlike many stars, Gish rarely shied away with cooperating with projects concerning her life and work). Me, I like the graceful period language, grammar and sense of decorum that permeated much of that era’s writing. Here’s pages 79-99 from the book, covering Gish’s early career with Griffith, and transcribed and presented by CinemaWeb: The Independent Resource for Independent Film and Video.

Introduction:

In a sense, son-in-law Edward Cox was mistaken when he told President Nixon shortly before his 1974 resignation that doing so would not stop the onslaught.

You don’t know these people. I know them. Let me tell you something about them. I worked in the US Attorney’s Office in New York. And I went to school with some of these people. They’re tough. They’re smart. But, most of all, they hate you with a passion. Most because of the war, and some because of other reasons. And they and others like them, and the press, they’re going to hound you. They’re going to harass you for the rest of your life.

Nixon died in 1994, almost fifteen years ago, but even his death did not stop the onslaught from those radicalized by their opposition to the Vietnam War… The “Frost/Nixon” movie is the latest ad hominem attack.

Being the only President to have resigned, there is a gracious plenty of wrongdoing involved in Watergate that could still be explored—but the misrepresentations and sheer inventions from Producer Ron Howard, Playwright Peter Morgan and Consultant James Reston, Jr. reach a new low in political revisionism.

I call them ‘lies, damn lies, and dramatizations,’ but they raise the essential question of how much the truth can be shaved in film making without becoming outright propaganda.

Given Hollywood’s lingering hatred of Richard Nixon, such questions seem irrelevant—and it should come as no surprise that that “Frost/Nixon” has been nominated for five Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film Editing.

Background:

The movie is a dramatization about the taping of almost thirty hours of interviews done by British TV host David Frost with former President Richard Nixon, with the help of Frost’s two researchers, Bob Zelnick and James Reston, Jr. The edited version—four ninety minute segments–was broadcast in 1977 to great critical acclaim and drew the then-largest worldwide audience for a news interview—with an estimated forty-six million viewers in America alone.

The movie’s difficulty is that from Nixon’s furtive glance after giving the victory sign as he boarded the helicopter on the day of his resignation to the vignette about the Gucci loafers, its most dramatic moments bear little resemblance to what actually happened during the interviews themselves. How can we know this for sure? For those caring to look, there are three primary sources—all prepared by Frost or one of his researchers.

First, a DVD exists of the actual broadcasts, issued in Great Britain with an afterword by Sir David Frost. While readily available, apparently none of the movie’s reviewers saw fit to view the actual broadcast, since they show that time and again the movie version alters, omits or improperly edits what was actually said by Nixon and by Frost.

Second, there Frost’s own book, published in 1978 and entitled, “I Gave Them a Sword”: Behind the Scenes of the Nixon Interviews. As the inside scoop on ‘the story behind the story’, at least from Frost’s point of view, anything of significance not actually contained in the taped interviews themselves would surely have been mentioned in his 320 page book.

Finally, there is the 181 page booklet by James Reston, Jr. that was published in 2007. Entitled, “The Conviction of Richard Nixon, The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews,” it attempts—albeit some thirty years later—a rather audacious historical re-write designed to show how he (and he alone) brought Nixon down by discovering an unknown tape recording whose last minute use by Frost was not only the ‘gotcha moment’ in the interviews, but proves Nixon was at the center of the Watergate cover-up.

The booklet was hardly a critical success—and Reston’s claim so patently absurd as to be dismissed entirely– but for one reader: Peter Morgan, who based his stage play on Reston’s version of events. Reston—and not Frost—also is the one on whom Ron Howard relied for any historic accuracy in the movie. As we shall see, their reliance was entirely misplaced.

While the movie fairly portrays the Frost team’s extensive preparations and his two researchers’ massive disappointment in Frost’s seeming inability to nail Nixon on either foreign or domestic initiatives of his presidency, its portrayal of Nixon’s actions and statements is patently fraudulent.

Fortunately, while awaiting announcement of the Academy Awards, we can review what was actually filmed or written by the very people on Frost’s team that appear in the movie—and contrast that to the movie’s version of events. This is not a situation of being faced with competing claims from Nixon supporters; it is an exercise in comparing what Frost said happened then—and what people have been filmed as saying in the movie.

Specifics:

At least three participants are unfairly maligned in “Frost/Nixon”: David Frost, who is portrayed as a washed up, witless dandy; Jack Brennan, Nixon’s aide-de-camp, who is cast the heavyweight protecting Nixon from himself; and former President Nixon, who is portrayed by Frank Langella as doing and saying things Nixon simply did not do or say.

Let us begin with a simple example: The movie would have us believe that David Frost picked up Caroline Cushing on his flight to California by offering to include her in his first meeting with Nixon, scheduled for the very next day. In his book, Frost carefully details that first meeting, naming all participants–without any mention of Cushing. Yet he does mention her appearance and participation in several other events. A harmless dramatization? A little white lie just to show where Frost’s interests really lay? Perhaps, but factually incorrect and a substantial disservice to both Frost and Cushing.

Another dramatization has to do with the Gucci loafers worn by Frost and commented upon by Nixon. The movie ends with Frost giving Nixon a pair as a gift—apparently oblivious to the fact that Nixon disdained them as effeminate. Isn’t it intriguing that this little vignette—which provides such clear insight into the personalities of both Nixon and Frost–is nowhere mentioned in Frost’s own book? Oh, it could have happened—but it didn’t. The Gucci loafer scenes are a complete and knowing fabrication.

Aside from such dramatizations, there are far more serious breaches of historic accuracy, including:

• Interview Payment: Frost not only paid Nixon $600,000 for the interviews (as claimed), he also promised him twenty percent of the profits—an omitted fact that shows the project was more of a joint venture between Nixon and Frost. For the most part, they were not adversaries; they had a common interest in the interviews being acclaimed and widely distributed.

• Unsettling Pre-Interview Questions: The claimed pattern of Nixon asking Frost seemingly innocent but deliberately unsettling questions as each taping session was about to begin continues this deliberate misrepresentation: by and large, the interviews were not an adversarial proceeding.

• Opening Question: While the opening question (about why Nixon did not destroy the tapes) did indeed occur, Frost’s book notes that he had informed Jack Brennan of his intent and obtained Brennan’s concurrence before that morning’s filming began—so Nixon was hardly surprised at the question–and no doubt agreed it would heighten viewer interest.

• “Well, when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal”: Nixon actually made this statement during their interview, but it was in the context of why members of any administration should not have to worry about being indicted by a later administration based upon a differing legal interpretation. While others might disagree, this is precisely the point the outgoing Bush administration would make about their aggressive questioning of certain terrorists (i.e.: waterboarding): If done under presidential order after full legal review, those carrying out the instruction should not be subject to second-guessing—or government employees could never feel safe in carrying out presidential directives. The movie’s treatment is a deliberate and substantive misrepresentation.

• Brennan’s Threat to Ruin Frost: Brennan made the statement, but in the context of improper editing (where Nixon’s responses might be omitted) and not with regard to any questioning about Watergate. In fact, Frost characterizes their exchange as sort of an informal compact that he would fairly present Nixon’s accomplishments and they would not try to stonewall questions about Watergate.

• Midnight Phone Call: Among the most dramatic moments of the film is Nixon’s late night call to Frost, supposedly after having too much to drink—surely a poignant moment where Nixon reveals his inner torments. Since no mention whatsoever of this call is made in Frost’s book, we can only conclude it to be another complete and deliberate fabrication.

• Brennan Interruption: Another telling and dramatic movie moment occurs as Nixon (purportedly) is about to confess to the crimes of Watergate and Brennan deliberately invades the set to interrupt the proceedings. In truth—as written by Frost himself—Brennan merely held up a sign saying, “Let him talk”, and it was Frost himself who decided to call for a time out in the filming—by telling Nixon they needed time to change tapes–with the intent of enabling Nixon to collect his thoughts before proceeding. Frost details his following discussion with Brennan, but makes no mention whatever of Brennan then counseling Nixon in private.

• Nixon “Confession”: In the movie version, Nixon is caught by his own words on the tapes and confesses to being a part of the Watergate cover-up. But his words from those interviews were changed in the movie version. What Nixon did (which was most appropriate) was to apologize to the Nation for his mistakes during Watergate—rather a distinct difference. Frost’s book details how everyone—on both teams—seemed pleased with their Watergate exchange. Indeed, even the 1977 DVD cover blurb characterizes that part of the interview as, “culminating in the unprecedented sight of a president apologizing to his people.”

• Farewell Meeting: The movie ends with Frost calling upon Nixon in his San Clemente home following the broadcasts and that Nixon, dressed in shirt sleeves and musing about golfing in retirement, implies that he had been unmasked and undone. In contrast, Frost wrote that he had met with Nixon for their final time in his office just after the second program on foreign policy had been broadcast [i.e.: before any broadcast of their Watergate segment]–so no such observations by Nixon could have occurred. There is no mention of shirt sleeves, only an allusion to Nixon’s staff always being careful to wear coats and ties when entering his office. By then, Nixon was hard at work on his Memoirs, the second of the ten books he would write. While Frost doesn’t dare say so, it is even possible they congratulated each other on the apparent success of their venture.

Conclusion:

What are we to make of all this—a movie whose portrayal of Nixon is so biased and based on such sheer invention as to be meaningless? A conservative producer could make a movie about any of the last three Democratic presidents—and portray Bill Clinton as a philandering lightweight, Jimmy Carter as the most inept president of our lifetime, or Lyndon Johnson as a bullying, intemperate redneck. But if their film changed the words and actions of actual events to ‘prove’ their version of these leader’s souls, there would be adverse editorial comment and public reaction—as there was when this was tried with Ronald Reagan and the public outcry led to cancellation of the planned broadcast.

The Frost interviews were (and still are) mesmerizing—but they show something entirely different from the movie’s version: They show Frost probing and Nixon responding, defending his decisions and his administration. He is and remains the dominant foreign affairs president of our lifetime: Detente with Russia, the opening to China, ending the Vietnam War—all remain accomplishments of great magnitude. His domestic agenda, forged with a Congress dominated by the opposing party, shows a creativity and innovation unsurpassed by subsequent administrations. Watergate, of course, overshadows all else, but recent revelations about the true identity of Deep Throat, about the conduct of Judge John Sirica, and about the complex roles played by John Dean may yet lead to a different interpretation of those historic events.

But the Left’s residual hatred of Richard Nixon has no bounds and we are left with a movie based on the terrifically biased version by a junior researcher, basking in his fifteen minutes of fame. “Frost/Nixon” contains great acting to be sure, but the factual basis of its most telling moments is virtually non-existent.

Are Academy Awards given out on the basis of how evil some wish our thirty-seventh president to have been? We shall have to wait and see—but the American people have a right to ask how this movie could have been produced, promoted and reviewed without anyone pointing out how much of it is merely a fictionalized version of events.