"Broken Blossoms"
Lillian Gish told D.W. Griffith she was too old to play the girl in "Broken Blossoms," and perhaps she was. Born in 1896, she was 23 as Griffith prepared the production in 1919, and not as waiflike as audiences remembered her from "The Birth of a Nation," filmed five years earlier. But Griffith wanted a star, and Gish was that: Incredibly, in an age when silent actors never stopped working, this was her 64th film.
It is not as important as "Birth of a Nation," but neither is it as flawed; stung by criticisms that the second half of his masterpiece was racist in its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan and its brutal images of blacks, Griffith tried to make amends in "Intolerance" (1916), which criticized prejudice. And in "Broken Blossoms" he told perhaps the first interracial love story in the movies--even though, to be sure, it's an idealized love with no touching.
Gish plays Lucy, the daughter of a brutal London prizefighter named Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp); the titles tell us she was "thrust into his hands by one of his girls." A drunken "gorilla," he lives in a hovel in Limehouse, and when his manager berates him for drinking and carousing, he takes it out on Lucy. Their story is intercut with the story of Cheng Haun (Richard Barthelmess), called "The Yellow Man" in the titles, a Buddhist who journeys from China to bring "a message of peace to the barbarous Anglo-Saxons." Instead, he turns to opium, and "Limehouse knows him only as the Chink storekeeper."
Griffith shot the movie almost entirely on sets, creating a foggy riverside atmosphere to suggest hidden lives. Cheng's room is a refuge upstairs over his shop. Lucy and Battling live in a room without windows, where he sits at a table, wolfing his meals and drinking, while she cowers in a corner. When he orders her to smile, she uses her fingers to push up the corners of her mouth. He gives Lucy money for groceries and goes out to drink more, and she timidly ventures out to do the shopping, clutching a precious hoard of tinfoil, which she hopes she can trade for a flower to brighten her grim existence. On the streets, weary housewives warn her against matrimony, and women of the night against prostitution; thus her only two possible escapes seem closed. Through the window of his shop, the Yellow Man sees her, and "the beauty which all Limehouse missed smote him to the heart."
That evening, Lucy spills hot food on Battling's hand, and he whips her almost to death before going out to drink. She stumbles into the Chinese man's store, and he gives her refuge, with "the first gentleness she has ever known." She is able to smile at him without using her fingers. When Battling Burrows finds out where she is, there's a violent showdown, including a striking shot where Lucy, locked in a room with Battling splintering the door with an ax, turns in a helpless circle, screaming.
Gish was one of the great vulnerable screamers of the silent era, although she also had a good line in pluck and independence. In a long career that ended with "The Whales of August" (1987), she played many strong women. Here she is essentially the passive object of male fantasy--of Battling, who sees her as servant and victim, and Cheng, who idealizes her as his "White Blossom." Griffith emphasizes both her angelic face and her weakness by often lighting and photographing her from above, and many years later, on the set of Robert Altman's "A Wedding" (1978), I heard her rebuke a photographer who was trying for a low-angle shot: "Get up from there! Get up! If God had wanted you to shoot me from that angle, he would have given you a camera in your belly button. Mr. Griffith always said, `Shoot from above for an angel; shoot from below for a devil.' "
If the attitudes about race in "Broken Blossoms" are more well-meaning and positive than in "Birth of a Nation," they are nevertheless painfully dated for today's eyes. But of course they are. Marriage between the races was a crime in 1919, and so we see Cheng's face in closeup, looming closer to Lucy as if he wishes to kiss her, and then pulling away as the subtitles assure us of his pure intentions. Battling, of course, thinks the Yellow Man has had his way, but the girl cries out, "T'ain't nothing wrong!" Griffith intrigues his audience with the possibility of exotic sex, and then cuts to moralizing titles.
The stereotyping of the Chinese character begins with the choice of a Caucasian to play him. There were many Asian actors in silent films, but only one, Sessue Hayakawa, played leading roles, and the most famous of the early Asian characters, like Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu, were played by whites. The character of Cheng is an anthology of stereotypes: He is a peaceful Buddhist, opium addict, shopkeeper. But Griffith's film was nevertheless open-minded and even liberal in the context of his time and audiences, and we sense the good intentions behind patronizing titles like this one describing the advice Cheng gets from a Buddhist priest before his journey: "word for word, such as a fond parent of our own land might give."
Although the best silent comedy remains timeless and many silent films remain undated, melodrama such as "Broken Blossoms" seems old-fashioned to many viewers. Watching it involves an act of cooperation with the film--even active sympathy. You have to imagine how exotic such stories once seemed, how the foggy streets of Limehouse and the broadly drawn characters once held audiences enthralled.
In trying to imagine the film's original impact, it might help to look at Fellini's "La Strada" (1954). Pauline Kael finds many of Fellini's inspirations in "Broken Blossoms," including Zampano the strongman (Anthony Quinn), whose costume even resembles Battling Burrows'. Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), his much-abused companion, is obviously drawn from Lucy, and Richard Basehart's Matto, who gives her shelter from the brute, fills the same function as the Yellow Man.
Griffith in 1919 was the unchallenged king of serious American movies (only C.B. DeMille rivaled him in fame), and "Broken Blossoms" was seen as brave and controversial. What remains today is the artistry of the production, the ethereal quality of Lillian Gish, the broad appeal of the melodrama, and the atmosphere of the elaborate sets (the film's budget was actually larger than that of "Birth of a Nation").
And its social impact. Films like this, naive as they seem today, helped nudge a xenophobic nation toward racial tolerance.
There is all of that, and then there is Lillian Gish's face. Was she the greatest actress of silent films? Perhaps; her face is the first I think of among the silent actresses, just as Chaplin and Keaton stand side by side among the men. When she was filming "The Whales of August" in 1987, her co-star was another legend, Bette Davis. The film's director, Lindsay Anderson, told me this story. One day after finishing a shot, he said, "Miss Gish, you have just given me the most marvelous closeup!" "She should," Bette Davis observed dryly. "She invented them."
No dialectic approach to film form would be complete without discussing the innovations being cultivated by D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein in the early 1900s. Just as Eisenstein's radical principles of montage would forever inform the way films were cut and consumed, Griffith's equally essential narrative innovations would be overshadowed by the controversy surrounding his epic Civil War reconstruction epic The Birth of a Nation. Coincidentally, Griffith's propagandistic Intolerance would irrevocably inspire budding Soviet filmmakers like Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Kuleshov when the film was shown in the USSR in 1919. If it's impossible to fathom the state of modern cinema without Eisenstein and Pudovkin honing their principles of montage by cutting radically into Griffith's text, it'd be equally impossible without the dichotomous Griffith having refined such techniques as the iris shot, the mask or the simple flashback.
Between 1908 and 1913, Griffith made over 450 films for the New York-based Biograph Company, perhaps none more memorable than the 17-minute one-reel The Lonedale Operator, about a substitute telegraph operator (Blanch Sweet) who must fend off a group of bandits. The film's technical innovations were then unheard of, and upon its release the film was considered by some to be the most thrilling picture ever produced. Griffith was no stranger to populating his films with quick-witted, independent women, which explains why the director is well regarded in some feminist circles. Though Griffith is remembered mostly for Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, many rightfully consider 1919's Broken Blossoms (also known as The Yellow Man and the Girl) to be his towering achievement. The film starred Griffith regular Lillian Gish as a poor girl from the seedy Limehouse district of London who is brutally abused her father and later falls in love with a Chinese man.
Broken Blossoms is often regarded and dismissed as Griffith's apology for his alleged celebration of the Klu Klux Klan in Birth of the Nation. Political correctness may have forever damaged Griffith's memory but there are plenty of critics and film connoisseurs who recognize the radiance of Birth of a Nation despite being the creation of a man who was very much a product of his time. Because Broken Blossoms is so earnest a portraiture of an impossible love between the races, it's easy to accept Griffith's claims that he didn't mean any harm with Birth of the Nation. Griffith, of course, was too smart to allow a film like Broken Blossoms to be taken as a simple blanket apology. Via the film's poetic inter-titles, Griffith not only addresses the complicated love between Lucy Burrows (Gish) and Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess) but the critics who accused him of racism with "the whip of unkind words and deeds."
Though they weren't financially successful, films like The Musketeers of Pig Alley and The Mother and the Law were largely concerned with the plights of poor working people. The love story at the center of Broken Blossoms is deliberately overstuffed but unmistakably colored with infinite shades of biting irony and social critique. Griffith painstakingly evokes China as a serene Buddhist paradise, but Cheng's philosophy of life is really no different than that of any good Christian. (Cheng tells a group of skylarking sailors: "What thou dost not want others to do to thee, do thou not to others.") Cheng arrives in the godless streets of London and is soon seen as just another "Chink storekeeper." He is handed a book about the perils of hell from a group of missionaries leaving for China on their way to convert so-called heathens though they are clearly oblivious to the horrors that reside within their own "scarlet house of sin".
The film's feminist appeal lies in Griffith's photojournalistic evocation of the Limehouse district as a deathtrap for women. 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. Just as Griffith felt he was falsely accused of racism, the film's heroine constantly suffers the scorn of her vicious father. Battling Burrows (Oscar-winner Donald Crisp) is a monster, but Griffith understands the man's frustrated desire to lash out against something (here, his own daughter) in the face of economic and masculine defeat. So horrible is Lucy's torture at the hands of her father that she has to literally sculpt a smile from her perpetually downtrodden expression using the tips of her fingers. Beaten to a pulp by Battling, Lucy seeks refuge inside Cheng's shop. She faints on the rug like a broken flower and awakens as his White Blossom.
"Her beauty so long hidden shines out like a poem," declares one the film's inter-titles, and Griffith recognizes the simple yet incredible power of an unforced smile. Cheng feeds this beauty with the rays he steals from the lyric moon. Because cinematic convention forbade physical contact between the actors, Griffith had to settle for grand poetic gestures and dramatic artifice to evoke the rapturous, nurturing love between Lucy and Cheng. For Griffith, Broken Blossoms was intended in part as a supreme act of reconciliation, but the film works less self-consciously as an ode to misdirected contempt, selfless love and various modes of worship. Just as the film's extended boxing sequence is an act of brutal masculine reverence, Griffith recognizes Cheng's love for Lucy as an act of holy worship. Because social convention forbids their love, Lucy and Cheng persevere in death. Griffith lovingly evokes this transcendence via a shot of a man worshipping in a Buddhist temple and ships dancing in the distant horizon.
Broken Blossoms is Griffith's most intricate film, a delicate mood piece that is set within a sharply confined space and delimited amount of time. The film opened to critical acclaim in this country with reviewers responding particularly to Lillian Gish's bravura performance and Henrick Sartov's soft-focus photography. Its most profound effect, however, was felt by European filmmakers. In France, where the film premiered in 1921, it became something of a cult object. French impressionist directors like Louis Delluc, Marcel L'Herbier, and Germaine Dullac tried consciously to emulate its stylized lighting and atmospheric effects. As Vance Kepley stated, " Broken Blossoms may have been to the early French experimenters what Intolerance was to the Soviets." Louis Moussinac summed up the admiration French filmmakers felt for Griffith's film: "C'est le chef-d'oeuvre du cinema dramatique."
Broken Blossoms came as something of a surprise to critics who knew Griffith only through The Birth of a Nation , Intolerance , or his World War I extravaganza, Hearts of the World. In fact, this modest film shot in 18 days on a shoe-string budget, was at first considered box office poison. When Griffith approached Paramount to distribute the film as a special, Adolph Zukor unhesitatingly turned him down. "Everybody in it dies," he wrote. Mindful of the recent failure of Nazimova's The Red Lantern and Sessue Hayakawa's waning popularity, Zukor concluded that the brief vogue for film chinoiserie had passed and was eager to let Griffith distribute it himself. Griffith paid Zukor $250,000 for it, and eventually released it through the newly formed United Artists; dressed up with an elaborate live prologue, three separate orchestras and choirs, and a specially tinted screen, the film garnered a small fortune.
Today, the film's critical stock is soaring: Broken Blossoms is widely regarded as Griffith's masterpiece, eclipsing even his better known epics. Lillian Gish's masterful performance aside, critics have been especially impressed by the formal sophistication and narrative complexity of Griffith's film. It is, above all, a film marked by terrific compression. The concentration of time and space gives characters, objects, and decor sustained metaphorical power that is never dissipated. Just as skillful is the dramatic structure which gives the impression of simple straightforwardness while camouflaging an intricate intertwining of expository and narrative sequences.
Thematically, the film is perhaps Griffith's most adventurous work. Susan Sontag has called Griffith "an intellect of supreme vulgarity and even inanity," whose work ordinarily reeks of fervid moralizing about sexuality and violence. But in Broken Blossoms he lowers his guard, nearly breaching his cherished Victorian convictions. Activities obviously taboo in The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance —a racially mixed love affair, auto-eroticism, opium eating, sado-masochism, revenge killing—are transformed here into sensually satisfying pastimes that resonate in dangerously nonconformist ways. For once in Griffith's work, racial bigotry is a target for reproach. The few citations to post-war 1919 American culture, far from catering to the rampant xenophobia and mood of self-congratulation, hint at the dark side of American provincialism. The glancing references to munition workers, American sailors, and First World War battles illustrate the west's penchant for self-destructiveness and violence.
http://books.google.com/books?id=CF0pQHLD-6gC&pg=PA228&lpg=PA228&dq=Broken+Blossoms+review+paper&source=bl&ots=D50WgAaSlx&sig=KNrD8X0I1F-84D_azdMQ5r9i3b0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=vK6oUsvFOdOnsQSgxIGQBw&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q=Broken%20Blossoms%20review%20paper&f=true
It is not as important as "Birth of a Nation," but neither is it as flawed; stung by criticisms that the second half of his masterpiece was racist in its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan and its brutal images of blacks, Griffith tried to make amends in "Intolerance" (1916), which criticized prejudice. And in "Broken Blossoms" he told perhaps the first interracial love story in the movies--even though, to be sure, it's an idealized love with no touching.
Gish plays Lucy, the daughter of a brutal London prizefighter named Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp); the titles tell us she was "thrust into his hands by one of his girls." A drunken "gorilla," he lives in a hovel in Limehouse, and when his manager berates him for drinking and carousing, he takes it out on Lucy. Their story is intercut with the story of Cheng Haun (Richard Barthelmess), called "The Yellow Man" in the titles, a Buddhist who journeys from China to bring "a message of peace to the barbarous Anglo-Saxons." Instead, he turns to opium, and "Limehouse knows him only as the Chink storekeeper."
Griffith shot the movie almost entirely on sets, creating a foggy riverside atmosphere to suggest hidden lives. Cheng's room is a refuge upstairs over his shop. Lucy and Battling live in a room without windows, where he sits at a table, wolfing his meals and drinking, while she cowers in a corner. When he orders her to smile, she uses her fingers to push up the corners of her mouth. He gives Lucy money for groceries and goes out to drink more, and she timidly ventures out to do the shopping, clutching a precious hoard of tinfoil, which she hopes she can trade for a flower to brighten her grim existence. On the streets, weary housewives warn her against matrimony, and women of the night against prostitution; thus her only two possible escapes seem closed. Through the window of his shop, the Yellow Man sees her, and "the beauty which all Limehouse missed smote him to the heart."
That evening, Lucy spills hot food on Battling's hand, and he whips her almost to death before going out to drink. She stumbles into the Chinese man's store, and he gives her refuge, with "the first gentleness she has ever known." She is able to smile at him without using her fingers. When Battling Burrows finds out where she is, there's a violent showdown, including a striking shot where Lucy, locked in a room with Battling splintering the door with an ax, turns in a helpless circle, screaming.
Gish was one of the great vulnerable screamers of the silent era, although she also had a good line in pluck and independence. In a long career that ended with "The Whales of August" (1987), she played many strong women. Here she is essentially the passive object of male fantasy--of Battling, who sees her as servant and victim, and Cheng, who idealizes her as his "White Blossom." Griffith emphasizes both her angelic face and her weakness by often lighting and photographing her from above, and many years later, on the set of Robert Altman's "A Wedding" (1978), I heard her rebuke a photographer who was trying for a low-angle shot: "Get up from there! Get up! If God had wanted you to shoot me from that angle, he would have given you a camera in your belly button. Mr. Griffith always said, `Shoot from above for an angel; shoot from below for a devil.' "
If the attitudes about race in "Broken Blossoms" are more well-meaning and positive than in "Birth of a Nation," they are nevertheless painfully dated for today's eyes. But of course they are. Marriage between the races was a crime in 1919, and so we see Cheng's face in closeup, looming closer to Lucy as if he wishes to kiss her, and then pulling away as the subtitles assure us of his pure intentions. Battling, of course, thinks the Yellow Man has had his way, but the girl cries out, "T'ain't nothing wrong!" Griffith intrigues his audience with the possibility of exotic sex, and then cuts to moralizing titles.
The stereotyping of the Chinese character begins with the choice of a Caucasian to play him. There were many Asian actors in silent films, but only one, Sessue Hayakawa, played leading roles, and the most famous of the early Asian characters, like Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu, were played by whites. The character of Cheng is an anthology of stereotypes: He is a peaceful Buddhist, opium addict, shopkeeper. But Griffith's film was nevertheless open-minded and even liberal in the context of his time and audiences, and we sense the good intentions behind patronizing titles like this one describing the advice Cheng gets from a Buddhist priest before his journey: "word for word, such as a fond parent of our own land might give."
Although the best silent comedy remains timeless and many silent films remain undated, melodrama such as "Broken Blossoms" seems old-fashioned to many viewers. Watching it involves an act of cooperation with the film--even active sympathy. You have to imagine how exotic such stories once seemed, how the foggy streets of Limehouse and the broadly drawn characters once held audiences enthralled.
In trying to imagine the film's original impact, it might help to look at Fellini's "La Strada" (1954). Pauline Kael finds many of Fellini's inspirations in "Broken Blossoms," including Zampano the strongman (Anthony Quinn), whose costume even resembles Battling Burrows'. Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina), his much-abused companion, is obviously drawn from Lucy, and Richard Basehart's Matto, who gives her shelter from the brute, fills the same function as the Yellow Man.
Griffith in 1919 was the unchallenged king of serious American movies (only C.B. DeMille rivaled him in fame), and "Broken Blossoms" was seen as brave and controversial. What remains today is the artistry of the production, the ethereal quality of Lillian Gish, the broad appeal of the melodrama, and the atmosphere of the elaborate sets (the film's budget was actually larger than that of "Birth of a Nation").
And its social impact. Films like this, naive as they seem today, helped nudge a xenophobic nation toward racial tolerance.
There is all of that, and then there is Lillian Gish's face. Was she the greatest actress of silent films? Perhaps; her face is the first I think of among the silent actresses, just as Chaplin and Keaton stand side by side among the men. When she was filming "The Whales of August" in 1987, her co-star was another legend, Bette Davis. The film's director, Lindsay Anderson, told me this story. One day after finishing a shot, he said, "Miss Gish, you have just given me the most marvelous closeup!" "She should," Bette Davis observed dryly. "She invented them."
No dialectic approach to film form would be complete without discussing the innovations being cultivated by D.W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein in the early 1900s. Just as Eisenstein's radical principles of montage would forever inform the way films were cut and consumed, Griffith's equally essential narrative innovations would be overshadowed by the controversy surrounding his epic Civil War reconstruction epic The Birth of a Nation. Coincidentally, Griffith's propagandistic Intolerance would irrevocably inspire budding Soviet filmmakers like Eisenstein, Pudovkin and Kuleshov when the film was shown in the USSR in 1919. If it's impossible to fathom the state of modern cinema without Eisenstein and Pudovkin honing their principles of montage by cutting radically into Griffith's text, it'd be equally impossible without the dichotomous Griffith having refined such techniques as the iris shot, the mask or the simple flashback.
Between 1908 and 1913, Griffith made over 450 films for the New York-based Biograph Company, perhaps none more memorable than the 17-minute one-reel The Lonedale Operator, about a substitute telegraph operator (Blanch Sweet) who must fend off a group of bandits. The film's technical innovations were then unheard of, and upon its release the film was considered by some to be the most thrilling picture ever produced. Griffith was no stranger to populating his films with quick-witted, independent women, which explains why the director is well regarded in some feminist circles. Though Griffith is remembered mostly for Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, many rightfully consider 1919's Broken Blossoms (also known as The Yellow Man and the Girl) to be his towering achievement. The film starred Griffith regular Lillian Gish as a poor girl from the seedy Limehouse district of London who is brutally abused her father and later falls in love with a Chinese man.
Broken Blossoms is often regarded and dismissed as Griffith's apology for his alleged celebration of the Klu Klux Klan in Birth of the Nation. Political correctness may have forever damaged Griffith's memory but there are plenty of critics and film connoisseurs who recognize the radiance of Birth of a Nation despite being the creation of a man who was very much a product of his time. Because Broken Blossoms is so earnest a portraiture of an impossible love between the races, it's easy to accept Griffith's claims that he didn't mean any harm with Birth of the Nation. Griffith, of course, was too smart to allow a film like Broken Blossoms to be taken as a simple blanket apology. Via the film's poetic inter-titles, Griffith not only addresses the complicated love between Lucy Burrows (Gish) and Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess) but the critics who accused him of racism with "the whip of unkind words and deeds."
Though they weren't financially successful, films like The Musketeers of Pig Alley and The Mother and the Law were largely concerned with the plights of poor working people. The love story at the center of Broken Blossoms is deliberately overstuffed but unmistakably colored with infinite shades of biting irony and social critique. Griffith painstakingly evokes China as a serene Buddhist paradise, but Cheng's philosophy of life is really no different than that of any good Christian. (Cheng tells a group of skylarking sailors: "What thou dost not want others to do to thee, do thou not to others.") Cheng arrives in the godless streets of London and is soon seen as just another "Chink storekeeper." He is handed a book about the perils of hell from a group of missionaries leaving for China on their way to convert so-called heathens though they are clearly oblivious to the horrors that reside within their own "scarlet house of sin".
The film's feminist appeal lies in Griffith's photojournalistic evocation of the Limehouse district as a deathtrap for women. 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. Just as Griffith felt he was falsely accused of racism, the film's heroine constantly suffers the scorn of her vicious father. Battling Burrows (Oscar-winner Donald Crisp) is a monster, but Griffith understands the man's frustrated desire to lash out against something (here, his own daughter) in the face of economic and masculine defeat. So horrible is Lucy's torture at the hands of her father that she has to literally sculpt a smile from her perpetually downtrodden expression using the tips of her fingers. Beaten to a pulp by Battling, Lucy seeks refuge inside Cheng's shop. She faints on the rug like a broken flower and awakens as his White Blossom.
"Her beauty so long hidden shines out like a poem," declares one the film's inter-titles, and Griffith recognizes the simple yet incredible power of an unforced smile. Cheng feeds this beauty with the rays he steals from the lyric moon. Because cinematic convention forbade physical contact between the actors, Griffith had to settle for grand poetic gestures and dramatic artifice to evoke the rapturous, nurturing love between Lucy and Cheng. For Griffith, Broken Blossoms was intended in part as a supreme act of reconciliation, but the film works less self-consciously as an ode to misdirected contempt, selfless love and various modes of worship. Just as the film's extended boxing sequence is an act of brutal masculine reverence, Griffith recognizes Cheng's love for Lucy as an act of holy worship. Because social convention forbids their love, Lucy and Cheng persevere in death. Griffith lovingly evokes this transcendence via a shot of a man worshipping in a Buddhist temple and ships dancing in the distant horizon.
Broken Blossoms is Griffith's most intricate film, a delicate mood piece that is set within a sharply confined space and delimited amount of time. The film opened to critical acclaim in this country with reviewers responding particularly to Lillian Gish's bravura performance and Henrick Sartov's soft-focus photography. Its most profound effect, however, was felt by European filmmakers. In France, where the film premiered in 1921, it became something of a cult object. French impressionist directors like Louis Delluc, Marcel L'Herbier, and Germaine Dullac tried consciously to emulate its stylized lighting and atmospheric effects. As Vance Kepley stated, " Broken Blossoms may have been to the early French experimenters what Intolerance was to the Soviets." Louis Moussinac summed up the admiration French filmmakers felt for Griffith's film: "C'est le chef-d'oeuvre du cinema dramatique."
Broken Blossoms came as something of a surprise to critics who knew Griffith only through The Birth of a Nation , Intolerance , or his World War I extravaganza, Hearts of the World. In fact, this modest film shot in 18 days on a shoe-string budget, was at first considered box office poison. When Griffith approached Paramount to distribute the film as a special, Adolph Zukor unhesitatingly turned him down. "Everybody in it dies," he wrote. Mindful of the recent failure of Nazimova's The Red Lantern and Sessue Hayakawa's waning popularity, Zukor concluded that the brief vogue for film chinoiserie had passed and was eager to let Griffith distribute it himself. Griffith paid Zukor $250,000 for it, and eventually released it through the newly formed United Artists; dressed up with an elaborate live prologue, three separate orchestras and choirs, and a specially tinted screen, the film garnered a small fortune.
Today, the film's critical stock is soaring: Broken Blossoms is widely regarded as Griffith's masterpiece, eclipsing even his better known epics. Lillian Gish's masterful performance aside, critics have been especially impressed by the formal sophistication and narrative complexity of Griffith's film. It is, above all, a film marked by terrific compression. The concentration of time and space gives characters, objects, and decor sustained metaphorical power that is never dissipated. Just as skillful is the dramatic structure which gives the impression of simple straightforwardness while camouflaging an intricate intertwining of expository and narrative sequences.
Thematically, the film is perhaps Griffith's most adventurous work. Susan Sontag has called Griffith "an intellect of supreme vulgarity and even inanity," whose work ordinarily reeks of fervid moralizing about sexuality and violence. But in Broken Blossoms he lowers his guard, nearly breaching his cherished Victorian convictions. Activities obviously taboo in The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance —a racially mixed love affair, auto-eroticism, opium eating, sado-masochism, revenge killing—are transformed here into sensually satisfying pastimes that resonate in dangerously nonconformist ways. For once in Griffith's work, racial bigotry is a target for reproach. The few citations to post-war 1919 American culture, far from catering to the rampant xenophobia and mood of self-congratulation, hint at the dark side of American provincialism. The glancing references to munition workers, American sailors, and First World War battles illustrate the west's penchant for self-destructiveness and violence.
http://books.google.com/books?id=CF0pQHLD-6gC&pg=PA228&lpg=PA228&dq=Broken+Blossoms+review+paper&source=bl&ots=D50WgAaSlx&sig=KNrD8X0I1F-84D_azdMQ5r9i3b0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=vK6oUsvFOdOnsQSgxIGQBw&ved=0CDcQ6AEwAjgK#v=onepage&q=Broken%20Blossoms%20review%20paper&f=true
