Loading
Silent 101Film 3 of 20
Broken Blossoms
Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl
- Year
- Country
- Sound
- Director
Your rating
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.
In three programmes
The camera moves in close and stays there. After the scale of Birth of a Nation, Griffith makes a film that fits in three rooms and a fog, and puts Gish in a closet with the door coming down. It is here for what she does with her hands and her face in that closet, and for the argument it starts about who Griffith was.
Wanting without touching. Cheng Huan dresses a beaten girl in silk and does not lay a hand on her, and the film spends its tenderness on a room. Gish in the closet is the price. Watch who pays: she does, and then he does.
Lucy learning to smile with her fingers. A boxer's daughter who has forgotten how, pushing the corners of her mouth up because she is told to. Then the closet, rehearsed until the gesture was small enough. Gish in a chamber piece after the scale of Birth. This is the face the close-up was invented for.
Cast & crew
Further reading
Also streaming
Loading films
