For Conservative Movie Lovers: D. W. Griffith, Lillian Gish, and 'Broken Blossoms' Part 1

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.”

To average 1978 filmgoers drunk on Star Wars, all this was doubtless of little significance. To others, the announcement carried momentous power. Broken Blossoms had been hailed in its time as a film of startling beauty, a virtual kaleidoscope of color and light and emotional resonance. But in the decades since, the only way to see it had been through degraded 16mm black-and-white dupe prints, with all of the film’s tinted luminance — and thus much of what made it so beautiful — lost. The chance to see the only remaining 35mm print with the original tints intact, accompanied by a full orchestra, and with the film’s sole surviving star in attendance — well, one’s twentieth viewing of Star Wars could wait.

New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) was justifiably proud of bringing this rare print to Los Angeles. Their Department of Film was established in 1935, at a time when movies — powerful and popular as they were — were nevertheless seen as disposable. Most of the original silent studios were long gone, their archives sold off or destroyed. Any copies that remained were left moldering in ill-kept warehouses and collections scattered across the globe. Countless thousands of prints were tossed into the trash. Even those films lovingly collected and preserved by fans degenerated with each viewing until most became pale shadows of their former glory.

Iris Barry, a popular writer and movie critic from Great Britain, became the first curator of MoMA’s film department. It was her assertion that film was much more than entertainment, it was Art — the first utterly new art to come along in centuries. As such, it was important to preserve old motion pictures so that they could be “studied and enjoyed as any other one of the arts.” To that end, she embarked on an ambitious goal of saving as many old films as she could before it was too late.

To jumpstart the MoMA archive, Barry traveled to Hollywood and begged for cooperation from studios and filmmakers in preserving their own heritage. To her delight, most people proved only too happy to help. Silent-era stars, directors, and production wizards were still in town, and many kept old prints of their work squirreled away in garages and storage sheds.

There were setbacks, of course. Early nitrate prints easily decomposed in poor conditions, rotting away like unembalmed bodies, and many times MoMA’s archivists would open a prized film can only to find a rust-like powder caked within. But by the end of Barry’s stint at MoMA in 1951, she had saved thousands of titles, and her department was using new triacetate stock to make copies tough enough to survive into our modern era of computers and digitization.

For most of the movies that made up America’s early cinematic heritage, however, it was too late. Over 80% of all films from the silent era, some of them quite famous and revered in their day, have now vanished forever. We owe it to Iris Barry and the good people at MoMA that Broken Blossoms did not become one of those grim casualties.

Even so, celluloid is more durable than flesh, and by 1978 that fragile print of Broken Blossoms had outlasted almost all of its creators. The picture’s pioneering cinematographer, Billy Bitzer, was felled by a heart attack way back in 1944. Thomas Burke, author of the short story on which the film was based, followed Bitzer into Hades a year later. The movie’s legendary director, D. W. Griffith, succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage in 1948. One of the three stars, actor Richard Barthelmess, died in 1963. Another, Academy Award-winner Donald Crisp, lasted to the ripe old age of 91 in 1974. And between these last two came the death of Hendrik Sartov in 1970, the man whose experiments with diffusion glass popularized glamorous, soft-focus photography in Hollywood fare via Broken Blossoms.

Only the third star of the film, actress Lillian Gish, was left to represent the original filmmakers at the historic 1978 occasion.

On the day of the screening, almost 1400 people showed up. The issue of Variety for May 3, 1978 reports that the aged film only snapped a single time, necessitating a quick-splice repair job, and that at the end Lillian Gish received a standing ovation. “I am deeply moved by your applause,” she said to the assembly. “just as I was deeply moved by this film. It’s as if it had nothing to do with me. This film really had everything to do with a man named D. W. Griffith.” As usual, Gish was the essence of graciousness when thanking her long-dead mentor, a man for whose reputation and legacy she proselytized via books, interviews, and events such as this.

I wonder what that audience was thinking as it viewed that film in the dark, the print covered in scratches and the grime of decades, the actors engaged in a forgotten language of pantomime as frustrating to modern eyes as Shakespeare’s English is to modern ears. Actor James Mason aptly describes the typical silent movie effect in his narration for the epic 1980 documentary series Hollywood: A Celebration of the American Silent Film: “Jerky, flickering, a little absurd. Moving at the wrong speed, with that tinkling piano.”

Audiences of the distant past, though, saw the best silent movies as the height of entertainment and emotional engagement. Our great-grandparents experienced Broken Blossoms in opulent movie palaces glittering with gold fixtures and crystal chandeliers, and manned by armies of fresh-faced, well-trained ushers. In the best cases, a full orchestra was on hand to play along with the action, giving these pictures a splendorous sonic accompaniment rivaling today’s THX-certified digital systems. It was a major event and spectacle, the equivalent of getting dressed up today and attending the latest Andrew Lloyd Weber musical at a tony Broadway theater.

For most of us today, on the other hand, silent movies are too often chores to be slogged through, distant and old and more than a bit weird. And then there’s the distorting lens of political correctness to consider. A February 2, 2009 piece in The New Yorker by Anthony Lane announced a MoMA screening of Broken Blossoms this way:

D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms, which screens at MoMA on Jan. 29, is ninety years old, and in some respects the film is looking its age. . . As for the printed titles, you don’t know whether to snicker at the late-Victorian moralizing or wince at the racial nomenclature. Yet there is something in the tenderness of the telling, and the grace of the compositions, that stills the urge to jeer.

Snicker? Wince? Jeer? Back in 1919, Broken Blossoms was hailed by critics writing for another big-city publication, The New York Tribune, as

The most beautiful motion picture we have ever seen or ever expect to see. . . For the last two years we have seen at least one picture a day, yet with Broken Blossoms we sat on the edge of our seat, one hand grasping the arm, the other crushing a wet handkerchief, and trembled and grew hysterical over what we saw before us.

This was hardly an isolated reaction. Audiences of the time describe being swept away by the cinematography, the music, the tragic Romeo and Juliet cast of the tale, the poetry of the title cards. Even a decade later, movie magazines were still calling it the “highest example of screen realism” the pictures had yet seen.

The disconnect between this view of the film and the one expressed in that 2009 issue of The New Yorker is enormous. Have we really changed so much? Are the overwhelmingly positive and heartfelt emotional reactions elicited by Broken Blossoms in 1919 impossible for us to ever experience or understand today? Is our only recourse to declare it racist/sexist/dated (“painfully dated,” according to Roger Ebert) and join critics in their “snickers,” “winces,” and “jeers”?

To find answers to these questions, we must hop into Big Hollywood’s Hot Tub Time Machine and journey with Lillian Gish way back to the year 1919, when the father of filmmaking was pushing this nascent craft as far as it would go, lifting “flickers” out of the crowded doldrums of cheap Saturday afternoon entertainment and into the realm of true art.

Next week in For Conservative Movie Lovers, the genesis of Broken Blossoms.

FURTHER READING and VIEWING