D. W. Griffith | Broken Blossoms / 1919

the girl without a smile

by Douglas Messerli

 

D. W. Griffith (screenwriter, based on “The Chink and the Child” by Thomas Burke, and director) Broken Blossoms / 1919

 

Extraordinarily popular the year it was released—redeeming, in part, along with his 1916 epic Intolerance criticism of his racism apparent in his The Birth of the Nation—Broken Blossoms today might seem incredibly outdated given its highly melodramatic narrative and yet again racist content inherent in the story by Thomas Burke titled “The Chink and the Child” upon which it was based, along with the fact that its central character, performed by a non-Asian Richard Barthelmess, regularly visits an opium den and behaves in stereotypical notions of Chinese demeanor.

       Yet given the fact the film appeared basically as a positive and fairly sensitive portrait of a Chinese character at the very height of a period of some of the strongest anti-Chinese sentiments in the US generally referred to as “the Yellow Peril,” and that this picture has the audacity of feature a Chinese man who has fallen in love with a young Caucasian girl, we need perceive it today as daring work. Even were this film to sanitize all of its racist nicknames and rid itself of stereotypes, I should imagine that it would not be possible to make such a film today, particularly given the age difference between Cheng Huan (Barthelmess) and Lucy Burrows (Lillian Gish). Gish was 23 at the time, but resisted playing the role feeling that she was far too old to do it justice. So we might imagine the girl to be 14 or 15 if not even younger. In the story she is still very attracted to dolls.

     The film, however, presumes the love of Cheng Huan for the abused child not only natural but admirable, particularly in comparison to the beatings and whippings she receives from the hands of her father, Battling Burrow (Donald Crisp), a winning prize-fighter, who ends up in the final scenes in actually beating her to death.

      Cheng’s love for her, despite obvious temptation at two moments when he bends close to kiss her, is represented as being quite pure. And it is the only love Lucy knows in the Dickensian world in which she lives in London’s Limehouse district.

      Although Griffith’s work may be described as highly sentimental, with intertitles that sound as if they’ve plucked from a best-selling woman’s romance intermixed with some pious religious statements, the film also manages to take us into an opium den filled with not only Asians, but white women and men; introduces us some of the local street prostitutes; and takes us into the naturalistically presented world of the slum room in which Lucy and her father live. The streets are filled with workers, slackers, sailors, voyeurs, and spies (with names such as Evil Eye and The Spying One).

      And the girl’s father is nothing except a brute child-beater, who forces his child to cook for him without even allowing her to enjoy the meal; she feeding on his leftover scraps.

       The story is a model of simplicity but the events are of a profound nature presented in a cinematic style that is argued by film critic Richard Schickel and others as having influenced the gritty realism of G. W. Pabst, Mauritz Stiller, and Josef von Sternberg to name only a few.

   Cheng Huan leaves his Chinese homeland to preach Buddhist thought to the violent Westerners, but when we discover him a few years later, he has suffered such hostility and unkindness that, running a small import store in the Limehouse, he is known only as “the Chink” and in despair has turned to opium and other methods of blinding himself to intense xenophobia he daily faces.

       Meanwhile, the boxer Battling Burrows, after the death of his wife, has moved with his child to the Limehouse district where he lives between fights. When in final training, he crosses the water leaving his daughter alone. He leaves her alone most of every day, as she wonders the streets, a melancholy orphan having suffered through her role of something like a servant to her father who regularly beats her when he gets drunk.

       Within the structure of the story, she is threatened constantly, but is whipped finally when, while serving from a hot pan, he accidentally touches it, slightly burning himself. Brutally beating her, he leaves, as she finally comes, staggering into the street and dizzily wandering until she falls into the open door of Cheng Huan’s shop.

      Having seen her pass many a day, the Chinese shopkeeper has fallen in love with the forlorn child. And now seeing her on the floor of his own workspace, he carries upstairs to his bedroom, dresses her in an ancient Chinese robe, tends her wounds, awards her flowers and a doll, and finally evokes the only smile of Gish is able to genuinely register through the film. She is overwhelmed by his acts of kindness, and he is awed by her innocence and beauty. Still in pain, she decides to stay on a second night before returning home, particularly given the fact that her father is away in training. As I have suggested, despite the temptation, Cheng does not molest her and her stay is simply one of adoration and restraint.

      A friend of the Battler, however, spots her in Cheng Huan’s bed and reports it to her father, who swears revenge, returning after winning the fight, to bring her home. There he threatens to beat her as she hides in a cupboard in one of the most painful episodes of horror ever portrayed on film, even today. He finally takes up an axe, breaks down the door, drags her out and beats her to death, Cheng Huan arriving to find her already dead.

      He shoots the father and carries her back to his room, where after laying the robe over her again, and engaging in a brief Buddhist ceremony, he takes up a knife and stabs himself to death.

       Even Griffith had difficulty in editing the movie after it finished shooting, reporting “I can’t look at the damn thing; it depresses me so.”

       Yet it is precisely those aspects of the film that most startled and disturbed the audiences of the day—Gish’s totally convincing acting, the plot’s focus on a Chinese man’s unflinching love for a girl no one else could even imagine worthy of attention, and Griffith’s astonishing narrative and pictorial editing—that has helped to make this film one of the most memorable works in cinema history, obtaining a place in the National Film Registry in 1996.

 

Los Angeles, July 19, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).