Broken Blossoms - A Century of Film

This is an ongoing series looking at 100 years of feature films, from 1917 to today. The film from 1919 is Broken Blossoms.

How do I select the movie I pick each week? It’s not particularly scientific, I look through what I can easily find – which is very easy in the silent era, since everything is old enough to be in the public domain at this point, provided that it wasn’t lost completely, like The Miracle Man, which had the biggest box office of 1919 but no longer exists – and pick something that seems interesting in some way. In the case of Broken Blossoms, I picked it entirely because of the man who made it, D. W. Griffith.

It’s impossible to talk about the silent era without talking about Griffith, who was one of the major directors of the time. His films contributed to the way movies looked, and how movies still look - his use of close-ups is still a basic part of film grammar today, but was revolutionary at the time. But the problem with Griffith is that while he was technically brilliant, he also made Birth of a Nation, which was incredibly racist. Not just racist in a modern context, which is the most common case when we look at old art. It was considered incredibly racist in 1915, there were boycotts and protests even as the film made millions of dollars. And that made sense, it was a film celebrating the founding of the Ku Klux Klan, it presented anyone African-American as a violent rapist who was obsessed with fried chicken. It was a huge financial success and it pushed the boundaries of how film could look, but it’s so racist that it’s almost unwatchable for a modern audience. I watched it as part of a film class, and we were not fully prepared for the descent into ugliness that defines the last half.

Griffith, in spite of making the film, did not appreciate any accusations of being a racist. That lead to Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Through the Ages, an epic, multi-million dollar production that went three and a half hours, cutting together stories from several time periods to make a story about how bad the idea of intolerance is. Unfortunately, unlike Birth of a Nation, I have not watched Intolerance. But Griffith was still reacting to accusations of being racist with Broken Blossoms.

Yet he did something racist anyway. Instead of casting an actor of Chinese descent in the lead role of Cheng, he cast Richard Barthelmess under a heavy-lidded mask of makeup. That choice can be chalked up to the times, when there was a strong anti-China sentiment in America. In spite of some choices that would make some of us turn it off immediately, Griffith’s heart is in the right place, as he is trying to tell people we have something to learn from the Chinese, which in this case means building a character out of common stereotypes - he's a shopkeeper and also an opium addict - and bad makeup in order to sneak a hero onto the screen.

He also sneaks in criticism of western culture. Cheng goes to the west in the first place because he views western culture as too violent, effectively wanting to be a Buddhist missionary. His point is immediately proven by a gang of violent sailors. There is also a scene where Christian ministers explain their plan to “convert the heathens” mostly by giving a pamphlet with only “hell” written on it to a bemused Cheng. The main conflict of the film comes in the form of Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp), a violent boxer who spends most of his time drinking and abusing his daughter Lucy (Lillian Gish). Lucy eventually finds herself in Cheng's store, where he protects her, heals her and falls in love. For her part, he makes her smile for the first time without the aid of her fingers pushing up the ends of her mouth, a nice little detail. Battling is everything wrong with the west, while Cheng is everything good from the east, their treatment of Lucy in the middle - an embodiment of the idea that how one treats the weakest is a defining aspect of their character.

Griffith happens to be the man who subtlety forgot, and his instinct to play to the fences is not to be restrained by the relatively intimate confines of the story. Actors still overact, whether it’s Crisp’s wild-eyed violent intensity or Gish’s twitchy panic. The strangest performance comes from Barthelmess, who spends most of the time crouched over and attempting to peer through the caked on layers of makeup. The intensity of the performance does lead to memorable scenes - a late-film sequence where Gish panics in the closet is both one of the reasons the film is remembered today and a likely inspiration for a famous scene from The Shining. There are no small moments, even a minor character complaining about her marriage has the background filled with children in varied states of distress to underline the point.

In spite of it committing every single sin that a film in 1919 could possibly do, it can still be enjoyed. It still looks good, the use of hand-tinting is very effective in setting the mood and it has some great shots mixed in. As much as I accuse the entire cast of over-acting, they still can get some really solid moments in the mix, especially from Gish, who makes a meal out of a tiny mannerism - holding up the corners of her mouth to fake a smile.

It’s also unnerving how relevant it remains, even if many of the choices made would never be made in a film today. People are still aggressively anti-immigration, even if the target of their ire has changed. People still abuse children, to the same degree as the Gish character is abused in this film - and it’s still covered up as a title card opening the film laments. The passage of 98 years means we would never make a film that looks like Broken Blossoms again, nor would it be cast the same way. The details have aged uncomfortably, but the broad strokes prove we haven’t advanced nearly as much as we would like to tell ourselves we have.