Griffith’s Limehouse melodrama is small, patient and beautifully photographed, and Lillian Gish gives one of the great silent performances in it. It is also a film about a Chinese man played by Richard Barthelmess in make-up, and no amount of fog softens that.
D.W. Griffith had spent the previous few years on The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, films with armies in them. Broken Blossoms has three people and a fog machine. It runs 88 minutes, it takes place in a few rooms and one street in Limehouse, and Griffith adapted it himself from a short story by Thomas Burke. It is worth your evening if silent melodrama is a genre you can sit inside. Its two problems are large, and we will name them, but its best half hour is as fine as anything Griffith made.
The film belongs to Lillian Gish. Lucy Burrows has never been given a reason to smile, so when her father demands one she pushes the corners of her mouth up with two fingers and holds them there. Gish does this several times, and each time it is worse, because by then we know exactly how much fear is behind the fingers. Donald Crisp’s Battling Burrows is a prizefighter who comes home from the ring and carries on the work on his daughter with a whip, and we were horrified by him in a way we had not expected from a film this old. Crisp does not play him as a monster. He plays him as a man in a good mood who has found something to do with it.
Billy Bitzer photographs Limehouse as a place where the lamps never quite reach the ground. The street is narrow and wet and the dock behind it is a blur of masts. For Gish’s close-ups he softens the focus until her face seems lit from inside, and he shoots Crisp hard and flat. The two rooms are dressed to match: Cheng Huan’s lodging above his shop is silk hangings, a small Buddha and a bowl of incense; the Burrows room is a table, a bed and the whip on a hook. The moment most people remember comes when Cheng looks at the sleeping girl and imagines scattering moonbeams over her, and Griffith lets the picture do it without a title card. We were moved, and slightly surprised to be.
Now the first problem. Cheng Huan is played by Richard Barthelmess, who is white, in make-up, with his eyes narrowed and his hands folded into his sleeves, and the intertitles call him “the Yellow Man” from start to finish. The full title on the print is Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl. Barthelmess is gentle and still, and the film plainly loves the character, but it loves him the way it loves Lucy: as something small and helpless that needs looking after. The other Chinese man of any size in the film is Edward Peil’s Evil Eye, a lecher who trails Lucy down the street. The kindest Chinese man in London and the worst come out of the same make-up box, and the film does not notice. We winced, more than once, and the wince does not go away.
The second problem is the middle. Griffith cuts between Burrows’s bout in the ring and what is happening at home, an old trick of his that still works, and James Smith’s editing there is tight. Elsewhere it is not. Arthur Howard’s manager and Norman Selby’s prizefighter get scenes that exist to give Crisp a reason to leave the house, and George Beranger’s Spying One is a plot device in a hat. For a film of 88 minutes it drags for a good ten of them. The second half takes a turn we will not describe, except to say that Griffith handles it with more restraint than his reputation suggests.
Against Griffith’s own standard it is his most concentrated film, and the one in which he seems least interested in telling us what to think. That is a relief after Intolerance. Gish went on to work with directors who gave her more room, but we have not seen her do anything stronger than the smile.
There is no fixed score; the music you hear will depend on the print you find, and it will make more difference than you expect. Choose one with a piano rather than an orchestra. The film is small and it should sound small.
