Way Down East (1920)

Originally posted to Facebook on 2/18/2017

Way Down East was our fifth and final film from 1920, our fourth feature directed by D.W. Griffith, and our second starring Lillian Gish. As with his other features Griffith is at least as interested in hammering you over the head with a moral lesson as he is in making a movie, but at least this time his moral lesson is not perversely wrong-headed. The story concerns Gish, who is seduced by a womanizer, and gives birth out of wedlock. Needless to say, this is scandalous, and calamitously impacts her life, whereas her seducer suffers no immediate consequences at all. She eventually ends up as a servant for a family which includes the male lead, played by Richard Barthelmess. The moralizing -- even in a good cause -- is still annoying, but the more serious flaw with this film is that its two-and-a-half-hour running time is needlessly padded with superfluous sequences, including not just a secondary but a tertiary romantic couple. The scenes with the other two couples are intended to be comic relief, but comedy, like so much else, is not Griffith’s strong suit. The early scenes, too, could have been trimmed to focus more exclusively on the circumstances that result in Gish being conned, rather than introducing a raft of other characters whom we never see again. (Lowell Sherman, by the way, who plays the seducer, went on to direct Mae West’s first starring role in She Done Him Wrong, and Katherine Hepburn’s first Oscar winning role in Morning Glory.) Despite its various flaws, it is probably fair to say that this is the most polished and cohesive feature we’ve seen by Griffith, but of his four features that we’ve seen 1916’s Intolerance is still the only one with a non-negligible chance that I might someday watch it again.

So that ends 1920. Next week we begin 1921 with The Kid, our third Charlie Chaplin feature. I’ve also added the films planned for 1922 to our list, which, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT