Today's films dissect with the latest pseudotheories and experimental science every aspect of human relationships. Technology run wild turns the screen into an advertisement for a future we ought to be wary about. How refreshing it is to stop the clock and enjoy D.W. Griffith's "Way Down East." A friend who loves silent film lent me her tape last night and I've seen it twice, putting aside for four hours everything from nonsense at work to the grim reality of war in Iraq.
D. W. Griffith's name comes to the fore most frequently, and not necessarily in a complimentary light, with often polarized discussions of America's history as depicted in movies, especially with regard to race. "Way Down East" doesn't touch on historical themes but he does candidly and openly explore moral issues that in his time were either evaded or resolved with harsh condemnation of those who strayed from the path of religious dogma-inspired righteousness.
The wonderful Lillian Gish is Anna Moore, who loses her mother and seeks, being bereft of money, shelter from rich relatives. A very familiar story (most recently brought to the screen in the latest adaptation of Dickens's "Nicholas Nickleby"). Taken in, albeit grudgingly, by a rich aunt and treated with lighthearted contempt by two sisters, she meets Lennox Sanderson, played by Lowell Sherman. Sanderson is a cad, a seducer of innocent virgins. Rather than the sneering evildoer so familiar to devotees of silent films, Sherman invests his role with a mixture of cruel cunning and stupid incomprehension of the harm he causes to Anna. He stages a mock wedding to get her into bed and subsequently abandons the pregnant Anna. The depth of his acting starkly brings the shallowness of his character to life.
After losing her baby, Anna is taken in as a house servant by a sanctimonious farmer who blindly adheres to the literal letter of biblical law. Of course his wife is a near saint. What next? A love interest for Anna which she spurns, believing herself unworthy of a good man's attention. Richard Barthelmess, who brings a manly but compassionate character to life, chases Anna demurely and respectfully from parlor room to - ice flow adrift in a raging torrent of water approaching (music increases in tempo) a waterfall.
Anna's peril on the ice is one of the most famous silent film scenes and almost eighty-five years later it still works. Largely that's because no one - no one - could film a scene like that as did D.W. Griffith.
Incidentally, in a barnyard dance scene is a very young Norma Shearer.
A remarkable film that holds a viewer's rapt attention (mine, at least) and which proves both the sometimes superfluity of words to tell a story and the lasting legacy D.W. Griffith gave us.
10/10.
D. W. Griffith's name comes to the fore most frequently, and not necessarily in a complimentary light, with often polarized discussions of America's history as depicted in movies, especially with regard to race. "Way Down East" doesn't touch on historical themes but he does candidly and openly explore moral issues that in his time were either evaded or resolved with harsh condemnation of those who strayed from the path of religious dogma-inspired righteousness.
The wonderful Lillian Gish is Anna Moore, who loses her mother and seeks, being bereft of money, shelter from rich relatives. A very familiar story (most recently brought to the screen in the latest adaptation of Dickens's "Nicholas Nickleby"). Taken in, albeit grudgingly, by a rich aunt and treated with lighthearted contempt by two sisters, she meets Lennox Sanderson, played by Lowell Sherman. Sanderson is a cad, a seducer of innocent virgins. Rather than the sneering evildoer so familiar to devotees of silent films, Sherman invests his role with a mixture of cruel cunning and stupid incomprehension of the harm he causes to Anna. He stages a mock wedding to get her into bed and subsequently abandons the pregnant Anna. The depth of his acting starkly brings the shallowness of his character to life.
After losing her baby, Anna is taken in as a house servant by a sanctimonious farmer who blindly adheres to the literal letter of biblical law. Of course his wife is a near saint. What next? A love interest for Anna which she spurns, believing herself unworthy of a good man's attention. Richard Barthelmess, who brings a manly but compassionate character to life, chases Anna demurely and respectfully from parlor room to - ice flow adrift in a raging torrent of water approaching (music increases in tempo) a waterfall.
Anna's peril on the ice is one of the most famous silent film scenes and almost eighty-five years later it still works. Largely that's because no one - no one - could film a scene like that as did D.W. Griffith.
Incidentally, in a barnyard dance scene is a very young Norma Shearer.
A remarkable film that holds a viewer's rapt attention (mine, at least) and which proves both the sometimes superfluity of words to tell a story and the lasting legacy D.W. Griffith gave us.
10/10.