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.
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.
[youtube 4Ira6rA3Hzw — click here to watch in full-screen HD]
“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.”
[youtube KpQNpUCM7U4 — click here to watch in full-screen HD]
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“
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.
[youtube BstrKHbR2e4 — click here to watch in full-screen]
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.
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