Broken Blossoms

D. W. Griffith, 1919, for United Artists, after Thomas Burke's Limehouse story "The Chink and the Child." Lillian Gish is Lucy, a boxer's daughter; Richard Barthelmess is Cheng Huan, a Chinese shopkeeper in London fog; Donald Crisp plays Battling Burrows. Bitzer's soft focus and tinted night streets keep the film in a few rooms. Gish, boxed into a closet, turns on the wall in a piece of acting Griffith rehearsed until the gesture was small enough. The racial casting and Burke's title are of their moment; the film is a chamber piece after the scale of The Birth of a Nation.