Racial ideas stand out in silent film ‘Broken Blossoms,’ to be screened at Wilton Town Hall Theatre

Thursday, January 26, 2012

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Richard Barthelmess comforts Lillian Gish in "Broken Blossoms" (1919), a silent drama from director D.W. Griffith. "Broken Blossoms" will be screened with live music on Sunday at 4:30 p.m. at the Wilton Town Hall Theatre in Wilton. Free admission. For more information, call 654-3456 or visit www.wiltontownhalltheatre.com.

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WILTON – It was a different age, when the idea of a Chinese man falling in love with an English woman was enough to inspire a full-length feature film. But the taboo of interracial romance was just one element of “Broken Blossoms” (1919), an intense drama about beauty and violence from acclaimed silent-era director D.W. Griffith.

“Broken Blossoms” will be screened at 4:30 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 29, at the Wilton Town Hall Theatre. The screening, which is free to the public, will feature live music by New Hampshire composer and silent film musician Jeff Rapsis.

The film’s cast includes silent-era megastar Richard Barthelmess as Cheng Huan, a young idealist who leaves his native China to teach nonviolence to the people of the West, and Lillian Gish as Lucy Barrows, an abused young English girl for whom he develops strong feelings.

“Broken Blossoms,” set in a poor London neighborhood of a century ago but filmed in Hollywood, also was noted for the gritty realism of its settings. According to film critic Richard Schickel, the film’s look inspired later directors to experiment with dark lighting and shadows that eventually led to the ‘film noir’ school of cinematography.

Gish’s performance as the daughter of violence-prone prizefighter Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp) is regarded as one the best in a long career that spanned the silent and sound film era. The most-discussed scene in “Broken Blossoms” is Gish’s “closet” scene, in which she communicates Lucy’s horror by writhing in the claustrophobic space like a tortured animal who knows escape is impossible.

The film, an intimate drama involving only a handful of key characters, marked a change of pace for Griffith, whose reputation had been established as one of early Hollywood’s top directors with large-scale sweeping epics such as “Birth of a Nation” (1915) and” Intolerance” (1916).

Today, critics say the film’s dated racial ideas help illustrate the challenges faced by a nation on the verge of great social change.

“The character of Cheng is an anthology of stereotypes,” critic Roger Ebert wrote in a recent appraisal. “He is a peaceful Buddhist, opium addict, shopkeeper. But Griffith’s film was nevertheless open-minded and even liberal in the context of his time and audiences, and we sense the good intentions behind patronizing titles. … Films like this, naive as they seem today, helped nudge a xenophobic nation toward racial tolerance.”

Other critics say “Broken Blossoms” stands on its own merits, despite the dated racial notions.

The film “perfectly fuses all the elements of Griffith’s style: tender drama played off against scenes of violence; a rich, operatic sense of character and emotion; and a dreamlike acting style, given particular force by the subtlety of Gish’s performance and the strength of Barthelmess’s,” wrote critic Don Druker of the Chicago Reader.

In 1996, “Broken Blossoms” was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

“Broken Blossoms” and silent short subjects will be screened at the Wilton Town Hall Theatre, 40 Main St. Admission is free, but donations are accepted to help defray costs. For more information, visit www.wiltontownhalltheatre.com or call 654-3456. The Wilton Town Hall Theatre runs silent film programs with live music the last Sunday of every month. For more information about the music, visit www.jeffrapsis.com.