Broken Blossoms (1919, D.W. Griffith) (Patreon)

58/100

Second viewing, last seen 1992. Let's begin with a quick investigation: Have I ever been enthusiastic about a silent feature made prior to the '20s? I actually don't know the answer as I'm typing this, but suspect that it's No. Lemme check.

[...]

Yep: nope. Admittedly, we're talking about a very small sample size—17 films total*, as opposed to 100+ silents from that era's final decade—and I saw almost all of them long ago, before I allotted ratings to old movies, so I don't know with any certainty what my opinion of them was. But I'm fairly confident that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, from 1920, is the earliest picture exceeding two reels that knocks my socks off. And it's eye-poppingly unorthodox, resembling little if anything else made at that time. All of my other silent favorites date from 1922 on, with my current top ten, apart from Caligari, consisting of titles ca. 1924–29. I'm decidedly not someone who believes that cinema didn't achieve full maturity until the advent of sound, but it appears, to my slight discomfort, as if perhaps I am someone who finds the medium's first quarter-century of primarily historical interest, at least when it comes to feature-length narratives. 

Having more or less codified that particular form, pioneering techniques that are still employed, more than a century later, by virtually every movie that gets any sort of commercial release, Griffith could hardly be more historically interesting. Yet I'm rarely impressed by his work for its own sake, and Broken Blossoms, like Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, seems to me notable strictly in context—often fascinating, but not a film that I'd ever watch merely to relish its imagery, story or performances (whereas I'd happily sit down with The Last Laugh again right now, having just revisited it just a week ago). Its most intriguing aspect—a laudable effort to be progressive that's undermined by deeply ingrained racism—is to some degree extra-textual, more of a comment on the times than on the film per se. I chose to omit its alternate title above, since an ethnic slur in one's inbox would be jarring**, and Richard Barthelmess donning makeup to play a Chinese immigrant now can't help but repel; nonetheless, Cheng Huan is unmistakably our hero, not merely in his kindness to Lucy but in nationalistic conception—he travels to England with the express intention of reforming Western brutes (though it's unclear to me how opening a shop would help him to achieve that goal), and we're meant to recognize his quest's nobility. Even when Griffith shoots Cheng in threatening villainous close-up, it's clear that we're seeing him falsely, from Lucy's ignorant perspective (at least partially attributable to her having been physically abused by her father seemingly from birth). Challenging bigoted stereotypes like that must have been quite daring, even with the then-obligatory buffer of a white dude in the Chinese role. 

Again, though, that's all rather academic. As a melodrama, Broken Blossoms never stirs me much, relying as it does upon a pitiable waif and a hissable ogre (with Cheng caught in the middle). Lillian Gish gets a few extraordinary panicked close-ups, and you'd need to have a harder heart than mine not to be affected by Lucy's inability to smile except by physically pushing the corners of her mouth up with her fingers, but the character exists solely to be beaten, then tended, then [spoiler] beaten to death. She's actually too marginalized even to trigger my passive-victim allergy. And while Donald Crisp would win an Oscar decades later (one that should have gone to Sydney Greenstreet, but never mind), he can't do much with Lucy's irrationally violent father, who just seethes and pummels his way through the entire movie in stock-baddie mode. As The Last Laugh and many other subsequent silent masterpieces demonstrate, formal magnificence can transform simplistic into iconic; apart from some effective tinting and one gorgeously foggy exterior, however, Griffith shoots Blossoms in unexceptionally straightforward fashion, at one point cross-cutting at length between Cheng's bedside ministrations and Dad's boxing match in a way that starts to make both feel irrelevant by turns. (It's presumably meant to juxtapose violence with tenderness, but when one's frenetic and the other's static, and one has a built-in uncertain outcome while the other deliberately goes nowhere, the back and forth just produces whiplash.) Even the celebrated closet sequence just entails placing Gish in an enclosed space and having her freak out in a tight little circle. At no point do I get excited about this film as a film, rather than as an example of early technique and a document of social mores. That seems to be a minority opinion, though, so perhaps I'm not giving cinema's adolescence its due. 

* For the curious, those 17 are:

1911: The Treacherous Woman (Gad)
1915: Alias Jimmy Valentine (M. Tourneur); The Birth of a Nation (Griffith); The Case of Becky (Reicher); The Cheat (DeMille); Children of Eve (Collins); Regeneration (Walsh)
1916: Civilization (Ince et al.); The Devil's Needle (Withey); Intolerance (Griffith); The Queen of the Stock Exchange (Edel); Shoes (Weber)
1917: The Narrow Trail (Hart); The Poor Little Rich Girl (M. Tourneur)
1919: Broken Blossoms (Griffith); The Hoodlum (Franklin); When the Clouds Roll By (Fleming & Reed)

** Not sure what I'll do should I ever watch certain films starring Fred Williamson from the '70s. Truthfully, I may never watch them just to avoid that problem.