7. Broken Blossoms (1919)

Directed by D.W. Griffith

Synopsis

A Chinese Buddhist (called either Yellow Man or Chink throughout the film, but we know through the shop's name that he's called Chang Heng) decides to go to the UK to teach the barbarous Brits about living in peace and tranquility. When he arrives he falls into a dissolute life of opium parlors and so on. He falls in love with a girl, Lucy, who is brutally abused by her father. After one of the nights when she is whipped, she takes refuge in the Chinese's shop where she find the first kindness of her life. When her father discovers that she is living with a Chinese man, he goes to his shop while he is out and drags her back home. When the Chinese man finds this, he takes his gun and goes find Lucy. By the times he arrives at her house, her father has killed her with an extreme whipping, and the Chinese man kills him. He then carries Lucy's dead body back to his house, where he commits suicide.

Review

Here's another of Griffiths "Hey, look I'm not racist!" films. He fails badly in that respect by making the "Yellow Man" stooped, while always looking shifty. Also he doesn't even use a Chinese actor, but a "yellowed-up" actor. Otherwise, he does make a non-white the hero of his story for once. Chinese culture is portrayed with respect, particularly Buddhism, and although the "Yellow Man" is often tempted to make a sexual pass at Lucy he always controls himself.

Going now to the film itself, it is a very pretty melodrama more than anything. This is something that Griffith has used us to, his set design is impeccable, the chinese shops and temples are a brilliant exercise in Orientalism, while the London streets look adequatly dismal. Lucy, as the object of desire of the film is made-up and lit-up in a way that most of the light in the screen comes from her iridiscently white face. Again very appropriately, if we take the idea that we are seeing her through the eyes of the Chinese man.

The scenes of violence in the film are actually quite brutal, although you never actually see Lucy getting whipped as the camera tastefully cuts away, in the scene where her father takes her from the Chinese shop there is one of the scariest close ups in film history. Her father is fucking scary.

So yeah, I'd still say that Intolerance is the better Griffith film up until now, but this one isn't far behind (also helped by the fact that it is shorter). Definitely not to be missed. You can get it at MovieFlix or at Amazon, either in the US or UK.

Final Rating

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia

The most-discussed scene in Broken Blossoms is Lillian Gish’s “closet” scene. Here Gish performs Lucy's horror by writhing in the claustrophobic space like a tortured animal who knows there is no escape (Schickel 392). There is more then one anecdote about the filming of the “closet” scene, Richard Schickel writes:

“It is heartbreaking – yet for the most part quite delicately controlled by the actress. Barthelmess reports that her hysteria was induced by Griffith’s taunting of her. Gish, on her part, claims that she improvised the child’s tortured movements on the spot and that when she finished the scene there was a hush on stage, broken finally by Griffith’s exclamation, ‘My god, why didn’t you warn me you were going to do that?’” (392).

The scene is also used to demonstrate Griffith’s uncanny ability to create an aural effect with only an image (O’Dell, 125). Gish’s screams apparently attracted such a crowd outside the studio that people needed to be held back (Williams, 114).






Yeah, it's fucking freaky shit.