Friday, April 18, 2014

Movie – Broken Blossoms (1919)

Director D.W. Griffith is nothing if not schizophrenic.  Just four years after making the epic The Birth of a Nation (about how the Ku Klux Klan supposedly saved America from uppity black people) he comes back with the small character study Broken Blossoms which features a very sympathetic portrayal of an Asian man and his relationship with a white girl.  Even more surprising is that this film was made right in the middle of the “Yellow Peril” scare in the U.S.  The studio wanted nothing to do with this movie.  Griffith bought the rights to it from them and Broken Blossoms became the very first film ever released by United Artists, the company Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks founded to give artists a way to get their movies released without having to bow to the powers at the big studios.  Despite what the studio thought would happen Broken Blossoms became a huge hit.

People watching this film nowadays can sometimes forget how far ahead of its time it was.  Instead they judge it by modern standards of political correctness and find it lacking.  First and foremost, the Asian character is played by a white man – a very common practice in entertainment then.  He’s not in “yellow face”, though, nor was he given any exaggerated features or mannerisms that would be denigrating to the race.  Second, a few times in the film the word “chink” appears in the intertitles.  It was a common term in use at the time.  In fact, this film is based on the short story The Chink and the Child from the 1915 Limehouse Nights collection by Thomas Burke.  An alternate title for Broken Blossoms was The Yellow Man and the Girl.  In addition to making the title a little nicer, Griffith also makes the character much nicer than in the story.

Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess) is a Buddhist monk in China when he observes boorish behavior from some white sailors.  He decides that he needs to bring the word of peaceful Buddhism to the western world.  In the very next scene we see him years later a broken man.  He’s running a shop in the Limehouse district of London – a very seedy section of town.  In addition, he smokes opium.

About the only glimmer of light in his life is a teenage girl named Lucy (Lillian Gish) that he sees sometimes looking in the windows of his shop.  Huan admires Lucy’s pure beauty amidst all the ugliness.  What he doesn’t know is that she is just as damaged as he is.  She lives with her father, a boxer named Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp).  Burrows drinks too much and often takes a whip to his daughter.  Reportedly, audiences at the time were shocked at the film’s negative commentary on child abuse and the prevalence of it.

One day Burrows beats Lucy so badly that she ends up collapsing at the door of Huan’s shop.  He carries her upstairs and tends to her injuries.  When she wakes up he has brought her something to eat, drink, and wear.  She is overwhelmed by what to her appears to be an extravagant amount of generosity.  It’s easy to tell that she has never seen a moment of kindness in her life.

As she recovers the two of them start to bond.  They are the “broken blossoms” of the title – two damaged people who are far better than the circumstances in which they live.  For Lucy the bond is just kind thoughts towards her benefactor.  For Huan it’s obviously more.  He makes as if to kiss her a couple of times, but each time remembers that he’s a good man who would not take advantage of the situation and so he stops himself.  There’s no “lusting after the white woman” over the top racism like in The Birth of a Nation.  Instead, this is an emotional relationship where each person finds something in the other that makes them more whole.

Naturally Lucy’s father finds out that she is staying with Huan.  He heads over there and forcibly drags her home while Huan is away.  What follows is the most talked about scene in the film – Lucy scared out of her mind, barricaded in a closet trying to stay away from her father’s wrath.  Gish reportedly even scared Griffith with her performance in this scene.

Like the movies made at this time the characters are all very black and white.  Lucy is an abused innocent.  Huan is a saintly man who has fallen on hard times.  Burrows is pure evil.  Griffith’s regular leading lady Lillian Gish couldn’t really pass for a teenager anymore when she made this film at 26, but you could say the same about most any film about teenagers made even today.  Barthelmess plays Huan with respect – a far different approach than most any other film made then or for decades to come.

If you’ve only seen Griffith’s big budget, epic films then you might want to seek this one out to see what he could do when he went small and intimate.  If you hate silent movies then Broken Blossoms will probably not change your mind.  For everyone else, if it sounds interesting then I recommend you give this film a try.

Chip’s Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

8 comments:

  1. This is the Griffith movie I like the best, though that does not say much since I dislike several of them. However this one hits a lot of the right notes and I much agree with your assessment of it. It is also peculiar that a man that made the bigotting Birth of a Nation would a few years later make a sensitive and compasionate film like Broken Blossoms. It is also Lillian Gish at her best.
    And yes, this was the movie I figured you would pick for 1919.

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    1. I acknowledge The Birth of a Nation's place in movie history, and I'm impressed by the sheer scale of Intolerance, but I like this little film better than both of them.

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  2. I watched Broken Blossoms maybe 10 years ago, and I wasn't a big fan. I think that it felt overly melodramatic, and it was hard for me to get over that side of it. I also had a tough time with the Asian stereotype of the "yellow man". Even though I say all of this, I'm thinking that I need to revisit it. I know that a lot of smart people like this movie, so it's possible that I didn't give it a fair shot.

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    1. "Overly melodramatic" is pretty much a requirement for silent film dramas, as is acting to the back seat of the theater. This has both in spades. And I think on your rewatch you may find that this portrayal actually avoids most stereotypes, with the use of opium perhaps being the exception.

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  3. This is one of those films that really needs to be viewed from the perspective of the time in which it was made. Hard to believe now, but in many ways, it was racially ahead of its time, even if it feels so backwards now.

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    1. I agree on judging films by when they were made. Judging them by modern standards of acceptability would be like judging a child by adult standards of conduct.

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  4. I can only echo what Ted said. This is my favorite of Griffith's feature films. It is less sprawling than the epics and has no "comic" relief such as in something like Way Down East. I adore Gish. The moment when she holds the corners of her mouth up when asked to smile encapsulates all that was great about her.

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    1. I didn't include it in my post, but apparently Griffith saw Gish doing the bit with her fingers and mouth and put it in the film.

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