Broken Blossoms

In Brief: While it's not as well known or as historically significant as Birth of a Nation (1915), D.W, Griffith's Broken Blossoms (1919) is one of the director's most eloquent and aesthetically beautiful films. Griffith had already been stung by accusations of racism surrounding Birth — extremely well founded accusations at that — and moved to the diametrically opposed end of the spectrum with the heavy-handed sermonizing of Intolerance (1916). So by the time he got to Blossoms, he had learned from his mistakes, gotten his long-winded rebuttal out of the way, and returned to the focus on narrative structure that made him so incomparably important to cinema history. That's not to say that Blossoms is devoid of problems to the modern eye, but it does represent the first on-screen interracial love affair (at least to my knowledge) and makes great strides toward humanizing the filmic representation of immigrants. Yes, Richard Barthelmess is a white guy playing an Asian character that amounts to little more than a collection of stereotypes, and yes, Lillian Gish was way too old for her role (a fact she pointed out to Griffith), but we still have those problems 100 years later. If you view Blossoms on its own terms and as a product of its time, you'll find a good-hearted film that's surprisingly progressive for its era, as well as one that's emotionally evocative and pretty nice to look at in the bargain.