D.W. Griffith's Broken Blossoms

A tale from one of cinema’s most complicated auteurs.

David Wark Griffith was one of the principal filmmaking pioneers that helped shape the identity of cinema. His contributions are often exaggerated, later being dubbed "The Father of Film", even though the artform had been developing for well over a decade before he got into the business in 1908. His publicists would credit him with a laundry list of innovations for which he wasn’t responsible, and these deceptions would persist in many textbooks long after.

He is remembered by many today as one of the most bigoted sons of bitches to ever step behind a camera, having made what may be the most blatantly and absurdly racist film in existence, the rallying cry for the Ku Klux Klan known as The Birth of a Nation.

It may be easy to totally disavow Griffith and his work, but his accomplishments should not be ignored. We should be able to separate the art from the artist, when possible, and celebrate the films of his that are worthy of praise, or simply a closer examination.

Films like his 1916 epic Intolerance, which depicts four stories of how man's ignorance and blind hatred have led to their demise. The film depicts Jesus Christ, the empire of Babylon, the French Huguenots, and a modern-day story, cutting back and forth between each of the stories to show the parallels between them. It may stand as the most complex and ambitious film yet made up to that point.

In February of 1919, Griffith joined forces with silent screen legends Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, and Mary Pickford to form United Artists. Around this time, likely the year before, Fairbanks & Pickford approached Griffith with a short story called (brace yourself) The Chink and the Child, that they thought would make a fine picture. Because 1919. Griffith agreed, and so he greenlit the project, which would become the film Broken Blossoms, released in May of that year.

The story is set in London, but it's built on a Hollywood soundstage. It concerns a young girl named Lucy, battered by her alcoholic father, a prizefighter named Battling Burrows.

One night, while wandering alone and helpless through the Limehouse district, she stumbles into a shop and falls asleep on the floor. The shop owner, a Chinese man named Cheng Huan, decides to give her shelter.

The original story by Thomas Burke was written as part of his anthology Limehouse Nights, published in 1916. For Griffith, it presented an opportunity to experiment more with parallel storylines, which converge at the halfway point. He expanded a little on Cheng's backstory, showing how he spent his formative years in a Buddhist temple. Cheng travels abroad in the hopes of spreading his non-violent teachings.

It is also another opportunity for Griffith to moralize and lecture the audience on compassion and human decency, as he did in Intolerance and other films. Quite rich coming from the man who made Birth of a Nation four years prior. Compare the title cards from Broken Blossoms, on the left, with the ones from Birth of a Nation, on the right.

You might say that Griffith was trying to reform himself after Birth of a Nation, but his insistence on continuing to coat the faces of white actors in soot to play black characters, even after that practice had gone out of fashion in Hollywood, tells me otherwise.

The two lead actors do not fit their characters' types in the slightest. The Chinese Cheng Huan is played by American actor Richard Barthelmess, with "yellowface" makeup around his eyes to make them appear smaller. Despite the caricature, his character is at least portrayed as sympathetic, and his culture is shown in a positive light, as having values that we can learn from. This is nearly the opposite of how Griffith portrayed certain other minorities.

The young girl Lucy is played by 25-year-old Lillian Gish, wearing a little girl's dress and walking hunched over to make herself look smaller. Her age isn't specified in the film, and her older appearance is explained as a "tear-aged face", due to the stress of her father's abuse.

Cheng Huan, from the goodness of his heart, takes Lucy in, gives her new clothes, and places her in his little bed upstairs. While he is purported to be a kind man, his actions are questionable, to put it lightly. He longingly leers at the girl on the street, and then watches her while she sleeps in his bed.

This may have been viewed as more innocent back then. A caring, fatherly relationship between an adult and a child not of his own wasn't viewed with the intense scrutiny of the modern lens.

However, this argument flies out the window when, later in the film, we see Cheng getting more and more intimate with Lucy, nuzzling into her hand, and leaning in with the urge to kiss her, before backing away, followed by this quote, taken from the short story…

I will also direct your attention to this poster for the film, which depicts an image of Cheng embracing Lucy and kissing her, which he never goes through with in the film…

Lucy's age isn't mentioned in the film, but in Burke's story, she is twelve years old, and if you still doubt the romantic angle, then you will hear Burke describe it in more explicit detail. Instead of meeting Lucy in his shop, Cheng meets her in an opium den, with an older woman who's presumed to be a Madam. Cheng is stricken by her beauty, calling her his "White Blossom". The way Lucy is described in the story is fairly nauseating, but you may read it yourself, if you so choose.

In the 1970s, PBS aired a program called The Silent Years, which would host silent films every week. It began in 1971, hosted by a drunken Orson Welles who would spout his off-the-cuff knowledge about the films and their stars. The producers must have thought that was far too entertaining, and so in 1975, Welles was replaced by someone more open to reading a script: Lillian Gish.

In her introduction to Broken Blossoms, she explained how she was hesitant to play the part of a little girl and, having worked as a director herself, suggested that she would recruit an 11 or 12-year-old girl and train her to act. By her account, Griffith responded…

"Don’t be ridiculous! You know no child could handle the tragedy of that story!"

Two years later, Griffith's colleague at United Artists, Charlie Chaplin, would cast 6-year-old Jackie Coogan in the title role of his film The Kid, and prove Griffith wrong on child actors.

It seems more likely to me that Griffith cast Gish in the role, and neglected to mention the character's age, in order to distract audiences from how unsettling this story is, which would be made clear if he had cast a young girl.

Another fascinating bit of information that Gish noted in her introduction is that the film was made during the Spanish flu pandemic, and that she had contracted the virus during filming. She even had to wear a mask when the camera wasn't rolling. I'm sure many of the same deceptions were employed on the public in 1918 and '19 as they would be employed a century later.

SPOILER ALERT. The most effective and tragic sequence in Broken Blossoms comes towards the end. When Battling Burrows discovers that his daughter has been spending time with a "chink", he grabs his bull whip and literally beats the life out of her. As Lucy lays on her bed dying, this is how her final moments are depicted…

Broken Blossoms is heralded as a classic of the silent screen, and is studied by film students to this day. Much has been said about the film's racial stereotyping, but the more troubling aspect of the narrative is often glossed over by scholars. I wonder how much of it is willful ignorance on their part.