Independent Films, Drama
Broken Blossoms
by CharlieChaplin
Based on "The Chink and the Child", a story by Thomas Burke, Broken Blossoms is one of D.W. Griffith's most poetic films. Richard Barthelmess plays a young Chinese aristocrat who hopes to spread the gospel of his Eastern religion to the grimy corners of London's Limehouse district. Rapidly disillusioned, Barthelmess opens a curio shop and takes to smoking opium. One evening, Lillian Gish, the waif-like daughter of drunken prizefighter Donald Crisp, collapses on Barthelmess' doorstep after enduring one more of her father's brutal beatings. Barthelmess shelters the girl, providing her with the love and kindness that she has never known. Crisp, offended that his daughter is living with a "heathen," forces the girl to return home with him. In a terrible drunken rage, Crisp beats Lillian to death. Barthelmess arrives on the scene, kills Crisp, then kneels beside Lillian's body and takes his own life.
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Details
Language: Silent
Year of production: 1918
Length: 1 hr 35 min
Country: United States
Suggested by:
Baxter Martin
Directors:
D.W Griffith
Producers:
United Artists
Actors:
Lillian Gish
- Lucy Burrows
Richard Barthelmess
- Cheng Haun, the Yellow Man
Donald Crisp
- Battling Burrows
Edward Peil Sr.
- Evil Eye
Arthur Howard
- Burrow's Manager
George Andre Beranger
- The Spying One
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Film reviews for Broken Blossoms
-
Baxter Martin
Broken Blossoms (1919, USA, DW Griffith)
Broken Blossoms involves a trio of bleak individuals in a bleak time and in a bleak part of a bleak town. Or as the title may suggest, it is the story of idealistic individuals with promise that are beaten down by their respective realities; blossoms broken before they could bloom. This aptly describes the Yellow Man (as is his name in the film) and Lucy (played superbly by Lillian Gish). The third character is Lucy’s brutish father whose only interest is in maintaining his status as a top prize fighter, drinking and carousing, and keeping his daughter as his live-in cook/maid/all-purpose house slave.
In the opening scenes of the film, we are introduced to the Yellow Man who is a young Buddhist student who wants “to bring peace to the Anglo-Saxons,” but some years later, “he is known only as a Chink shopkeeper” in the Limehouse area of London. The Yellow Man admires Lucy from afar and when given the chance in the end, he dotes on her and defends her honor. There is a scene in the beginning where he seems physically repulsed by even a playful fighting scene between soldiers and at the end, he seems to have come full circle. The title is really quite perfect and easternly so, for here we are presented with 2 people who seem quite lovely but are beaten down by their own respective realities. Lucy can catch glimpses of a life outside being beaten for not having tea earlier than the preset time or a life outside of stitching holey socks for her asshole father. The Yellow Man goes from the serene Buddhist environment of a Chinese temple to a foggy, shadowy city where he whittles time away in an all-things Chinese shop and smoking opium on the side.
The atmosphere of the film is perfectly adapted to the story and its inhabitants. It is a city on the water that seems to be perpetually filled with fog. Somewhere beneath the dense shadows is that flowing elixir of life and hope. Somewhere in the shadows are people hiding from good and bad forces. And like every great tragic love story, we get a glimpse of that love before it is shattered. The Yellow Man takes in a severely beaten Lucy and dresses her in the store’s fine silks and gives her one of the dolls she has been eyeing in the store window. The Yellow Man gets to dote on the object of his affection and Lucy gets some well-deserved loving attention to which she can only ask “What makes you so nice to me Chinky?”
Seen through late 20th century eyes (let’s leave out the 21st), this story is littered with racial stereotypes, a blackface here and a slanty-eyed actor here and there. “The Yellow Man” is a main character who is also referred to as “the Chink” and “Chinky.” And however we may think of all this today and given DW Griffith’s history, Broken Blossoms deals with a subject of interracial love that surely must have been taboo in 1919. Miscegenation was against the law here! So some props must be given for endeavoring to tell this particular love story. The film is well paced, nicely decorated, well shot and above all, it is given a feeling of honesty. Shitty stories may deserve good endings but they usually don’t go hand in hand and the same should go for the world of films.
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