Classics of the silent screen (1959)

Orphans of the Storm 1921 Lillian and Dorothy Gish as Henriette and Louise, the two orphans. 38 When Orphans of the Storm had a grand-scale premiere at the Apollo Theatre in New York in January of 1922, the editor-in-chief of Moving Picture World went overboard with a full-page editorial rave, quite separate from the publication's equally enthusiastic review elsewhere. Headed "MR. GRIFFITH RISES TO A DIZZY HEIGHT," it read, in part . . . "It is a triumph for D. W. Griffith to eclipse his own great productions which led the screen into new and finer realms, but with this picture he has succeeded in doing it. No more gorgeous thing has ever been offered on the screen. It has motion within motion, action upon action, and it builds up to crashing climaxes with all that superb definition which makes Mr. Griffith first and always the showman. No man of the stage or screen understands so well the art of exquisite torture for his spectators. He takes their heart-strings, one by one, then stretches them out until they are about to snap, ties little bow-knots in them, and finally seizes them by handfuls and twists them until they quiver in agony. Then he applies myrrh and aloes and sweet unguents and sends the spectators away happy in the memory of attractive sufferings that they can never forget. His detail is perfection, and its grandeur is the sum total of many perfections . . . Miss Lillian and Miss Dorothy Gish are beyond praise ... its massed scenes surpass the greater of the European spectacles thus far on record." I quote the above at some length because it seems such an ideal summation of Griffith's approach, and because the comments are still very valid. Although not Griffith's greatest, Orphans of the Storm is very fine indeed, and, some forced comedy moments excepted, is as good today as it ever was. The story is of course based on the old stage success, The Two Orphans, which has seen yeoman service on the stages and screens of the world, in endless versions with little or no variety. It is a melodramatic and weepy tale, relying to a great degree on audience acceptance of rather improbable coincidences. Griffith, realizing this, and also realizing that it was pretty trivial stuff as originally conceived, re-shaped the story considerably— to the extent of dumping it boldly into the middle of the French Revolution (which figured not at all in the original play! ). Having made this decision, Griffith as usual pulled all the stops out, recreating many actual events, characters, and introducing his beloved "historical facsimiles" based on famous paintings. Carlyle's History of the French Revolution and Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities formed his "Bible" of research, and his version of the French Revolution is doubtless the most authentic and detailed ever to hit the screen, despite a certain romantic approach to Danton (played extremely well by Monte Blue). Incidentally, Griffith also shrewdly used the film to warn Americans of the Communist menace. His titles pointed out that "the tyranny of kings and nobles is hard to bear, but the tyranny of the maddened mob under blood-lusting rulers is intolerable," and that "we in the United States with a democratic government should beware lest we mistake traitors and fanatics for patriots, and replace law and "order with anarchy and bolshevism." But, of course, Griffith was more concerned with