Broken Blossoms (1919)
Plays here · source: Internet Archive
In London's fog-bound Limehouse district, a gentle Chinese shopkeeper takes in a waifish girl battered by her brutal prizefighter father, offering her a tenderness that curdles into tragedy once the father discovers where she has taken refuge.
D. W. Griffith’s follow-up to The Birth of a Nation trades that film’s ugliest instincts for something gentler but hardly less troubled — Broken Blossoms cast a white actor, Richard Barthelmess, in “yellowface” for a role meant as a rebuke to racism, and the resulting tangle of sincerity and stereotype is now as much a subject of study as Griffith’s soft-focus, Lillian Gish-centered visual innovations.
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