Broken Blossoms (1919)

Now considered a classic of silent cinema, this film pushed many envelopes for its time in its deprecations of child abuse and inter-racial love. The story concerns an immigrant Chinese shop keeper (Richard Barthelmess), who takes in an abused 15 year old (Lillian Gish) in then contemporary London. The film has a maturity and subtlety you don’t always associate with American silent cinema, particularly this early in the art forms history. Knowing what I know about its director D.W. Griffith, and his Victorianism and Confederate sympathy in politics, I was surprised by the handling of a number of elements in the film. Take Bartholomew’s affections for Gish, I think its strongly implied that he’s sexually attracted to her, but despite his disillusionment and opium addiction, the character still posses a very strict moral code and is unable to act on his baser desires. This is set up well in the short prolog to the film, where we see that Bartholomew’s character was a very committed Buddhist back in China, and in fact left that country for Europe in the hopes of being something of a ‘missionary’ to the ‘savage Anglo-Saxons’, a delightful inversion of period expectations, and one that I’d be very curious to know what Griffith meant to convey by. Grade: B+.