Broken Blossoms (1919)
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.
Background
Broken Blossoms was D. W. Griffith’s next major feature after the controversy surrounding The Birth of a Nation, and in some ways it was conceived as a gentler, more sympathetic film, centered on a relationship between a Chinese immigrant shopkeeper and a young woman he shelters from her abusive father. Griffith cast the white actor Richard Barthelmess in the role of the Chinese character, using makeup and styling common to the “yellowface” practice of the period, even though the film’s intent was to criticize racism and cruelty rather than mock its Asian character.
What to watch for
Watch for Lillian Gish’s performance, often singled out as one of her most affecting, and for Griffith’s use of soft, diffused lighting to give the film’s fog-bound London setting a dreamlike quality distinct from the harder visual style of his earlier work. The film is worth approaching with an awareness of this tension: its sympathetic intentions toward its central relationship sit uneasily alongside the casting and stereotyping choices common to Hollywood at the time, and that contradiction is now as much a part of its historical interest as its visual innovations.
