Classics of the silent screen (1959)

Way Down East 1920 Lillian Gish as Anna. Way Down East, undoubtedly one of the most commercially successful of all the D.W. Griffith films, was also one of the strangest. An old stage melodrama, Way Down East was outdated already in 1920, at least in story content. It was the tale of Anna, a poor and honest country girl tricked into marriage ( a fake marriage of course ) by a callous city playboy. After a few days of (for her) deliriously happy wedded life, he begins to neglect her. Then, when she announces that they are to have a baby, he tells her the truth about their "marriage" and deserts her. Anna has her baby shortly afterwards, and it dies. Ostracized by the community, she takes to the road, and finally finds refuge as a serving girl at the home of fairly prosperous but somewhat puritanical farmers, from whom she conceals her past. She finds herself falling in love with the son, but refuses to admit it to him. Then her former "husband" reappears as the local Squire, and ultimately her secret is revealed. For the play's climax, she was driven out into the snow, only to be rescued by the son after he had squared accounts with the Squire in a fistic battle. Nobody could quite understand why Griffith paid $175,000 for the film rights to this hoary old tale, but as usual, the old maestro knew just what he was doing. Probably out of misguided reverence for the original, and not wanting to have audiences find the expected ingredients missing, Griffith retained rather too much of the play's "cornball" comedy content. Comedy was never a Griffith strong point, and the yokel comedy here was the film's weakest single ingredient. But in other respects the material seemed surprisingly fresh, due largely to Griffith's imaginative direction and Lillian Gish's flawless performance, and also to an unusually good cast and some breathtakingly beautiful camerawork. And, of course, Griffith's traditional "lastminute-rescue," a sequence devised entirely by Griffith, and not to be found in the original at all. Griffith's "Simple Story of Plain People," as the film's subtitle put it, was set in New England of the 20's— but actually Griffith deliberately gave it a timeless quality, and overcame much of the Victorianism of the story by using that story as an attack on bigotry and prejudice. In his hands, the characters became much more three-dimensional than they had been on the stage. Even Lowell Sherman's wonderfully lecherous villain wasn't too bad really; just before the seduction scene, he has a twinge of conscience which almost holds him back. And in the end he does, belatedly, offer to marry Anna. As for Lillian Gish, her performance is so moving and dynamic ( it prompted John Barrymore to remark that she quite surpassed Duse and Bernhardt) that any thoughts of stereotype in her role are instantly dispelled. As the fluttering, happy country girl in the early scenes, pleasantly bemused by the wonders of the big city, as the ecstatically rapturous wife, and then as the suddenly matured, tragically bereaved mother, 30