The final feature we watched from 1919 was True Heart Susie, the third feature we’ve seen directed by D. W. Griffith. It’s also the first we’ve seen starring Lillian Gish, though we’ve seen her previously in smaller parts, including in the unrewarding role of endless cradle-rocker in Intolerance. Her co-star is Robert Harron, who played the male lead in the modern section of Intolerance. Gish plays the title character, who lives in a small town with Harron, and has, since grade school, been in love with him. Harron fitfully reciprocates, but ends up marrying another woman, played by Clarine Seymour. Interestingly Harron and Seymour would both be dead by the following year; Harron via a self-inflicted gunshot, and Seymour of pneumonia following intestinal surgery. Gish on the other hand lived for seventy-three more years, dying in 1993, and appearing in movies well into the eighties.
In this movie Gish is portrayed as basically angelic, while Seymour, if not quite demonic, is certainly portrayed as selfish and unreliable. In the most amusingly anachronistic bit of disparagement, Seymour is described as the type of woman who wears paint, while Gish, of course, doesn’t. And this is part of a larger pattern -- all of Gish’s choices are presented as virtuous, including misleading Harron on several occasions, and generally not making her feelings known to him. Perhaps this is the model Griffith had of appropriate female behavior, but it appears ludicrous today, and I imagine to many audiences of the time as well -- since this was not the attitude shown in the other films of the period that we’ve seen (or at least not to this pronounced degree.) Basically this is the same flaw that polluted Intolerance; Griffith’s tendency to be at least as interested in espousing his strange and retrograde moral ideas as in making an entertaining movie. Another irritating trope in this film, which continues to crop up in films even now, is that Gish is described in title cards as being plain, despite clearly being a movie star. Notwithstanding all of the above, this movie may be the most conventionally entertaining of the three Griffith features that we’ve seen, but that only means that it is more entertaining than the uneven and muddled Judith of Bethulia, and more conventional than the sprawling and sui generis Intolerance.
So, with this film, we’ve wrapped up the teens, at least as far as features go. During the next two weeks we’ll watch a selection of shorts before moving on to the twenties. The list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT
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