Broken Blossoms
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"After such extravagant (albeit problematic) epics as Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, pioneering filmmaker D.W. Griffith stripped things back with this most lyrical of silent films. It boasts an astonishingly vulnerable performance by the ground-breaking actress of the silent screen, Lillian Gish."
— MUBI's take
Broken Blossoms
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1996.
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Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl, often referred to simply as Broken Blossoms, is a 1919 American silent drama film directed by D. W. Griffith. It was distributed by United Artists and premiered on May 13, 1919. It stars Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, and Donald Crisp, and tells the story of young girl, Lucy Burrows, who is abused by her alcoholic prizefighting father, Battling Burrows, and meets Cheng Huan, a kind-hearted Chinese man who falls in love with her. It was the first film distributed by United Artists. It is based on Thomas Burke's short story "The Chink and the Child" from the 1916 collection Limehouse Nights.
Why It Rocks
- In 1919, D.W. Griffith was one of the founders of United Artists, along with Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin. But due to contractual obligations, he and Chaplin were the only ones supplying films to the company at first; Broken Blossoms was his debut United Artists title. With the film based on a story “The Chink and the Child” by English author Thomas Burke, the story gave fair indication of racial sensitivity at the time. Narrated in a style similar to one Damon Runyon would later use, it detailed a perverse triangle. Battling Burrows, a welterweight, is guardian to his illegitimate daughter Lucy. The victim of relentless abuse, Lucy is rescued after Burrows beats her with a dog whip by Cheng Hong, a Chinese merchant and opium addict. Their chaste affair is betrayed by one of Burrows’ companions, leading to fatal consequences. The story’s bald emotions, downtrodden characters, and morbid plotting appealed to Griffith, who turned it into one of his more carefully prepared productions.
- While Griffith is primarily known for epics such as Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance, films like this showcase that he's just as capable of doing films on a smaller scale as well.
- Impressive acting from the lead actors. Both Gish and Barthelmess play weirdly presexual characters, adults with adolescent feelings and expressions.
- Lillian Gish had to be convinced to play Lucy Burrows, due to the role being meant for a 15-year old. Yet despite this, she still manages to make the role work, making her character come across as very vulnerable and sympathetic. Gish found that slouching helped her performance. Her shuffling gait, slumped shoulders, and perpetually widened eyes helped her overcome the age discrepancy.
- Richard Barthelmess provides one of his breakthrough roles in this film, in part because he sensed that the part called for rigid restraint. With his eyes taped, his face was almost immobile. To that he added a slight slouch, and a tendency to jut his head forward. It was not a polite or politically correct job, but it was just what Griffith wanted. This is especially noteworthy, because usually Griffith casts Asians as extras, and doesn't typically considering making one a lead character. (Primarily because there were very few Asian-Americans actors at the time)
- Griffith and his crew had refined their filmmaking techniques since the epics Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance. For one thing, the director paid a lot more attention to matching shots. Closeups were now lit in the same patterns and styles as the wide shots. Griffith tried to match the acting within shots as well, so that a performance would seem consistent throughout a scene. Set decorators had learned to dress views outside doors and windows instead of leaving them black. The goal was to extend the sets past what the camera filmed, building a world beyond the frame.
- Broken Blossoms is, as an early intertitle states, “a tale of tears,” and Griffith was unrepentant about pulling out all the emotional stops. If the film still works, it is because of his sense of the psychology of the main characters.
- Barthelmess, the “Yellow Man,” has fallen into drug addiction as a way to cope with his failure to achieve his goals. (It’s telling that Griffith filmed a ten-minute prologue set in China in order to show the Yellow Man’s background. Without this lost paradise, the Yellow Man would have seemed weak for falling prey to drugs.)
- In today’s terms, Gish is playing the victim of child abuse (Lucy Burrows), beaten by her father because he is incapable of dealing with the frustrations in his life—a scenario that Griffith seems to understand intuitively. Griffith set up the film’s premise so that Lucy does not seem masochistic (which means okay or content with her father's abuse): uneducated, penniless, she has no alternative to her father’s abuse.
- Crisp, an interesting director and an excellent performer who could sometimes overact, captures the nagging shame and self-loathing of the child abuser. (Battling Burrows) He is someone who confirms his own weaknesses (economic and masculine defeat) by lashing out at victims.
- In fact, all of the film's characters, including Yellow Man’s rival Evil Eye and Burrows’s manager and opponents, are suffering in one way or another in the Limehouse slums. Griffith’s compassion for characters compensates for his melodramatic excesses and Victorian sensibilities.
- Considering there was a lot of miscegenation at the time of the film's production and release, Griffith exploring an interracial love affair with Lucy Burrows and Cheng Huan was a bold move, and yet it's an earnest portraiture of an impossible love between the races. The love story at the film's center is deliberately overstuffed, but unmistakably colored with infinite shades of biting irony and social critique.
- Lucy is advised against marriage by a woman who washes clothes for a roomful of sweaty children and later bumps into a couple of prostitutes outside.