:
Lillian Gish,
Lillian Gish,
Richard Barthelmess,
more...
:
D.W. Griffith,
D.W. Griffith
see all cast/crew...
: Not Rated
: Image Entertainment
: Classics, Drama, Classic Drama, Silent, Silent Dramas, Classic Drama, Silent Drama
: 146 min.
: English
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"I'm not a bad businessman", filmmaker D.W. Griffith once protested, "Honestly I'm not!" Yet industryites were certain that Griffith had taken leave of his financial senses when he paid $175,000 for the screen rights to the old Lottie Blair Parker stage play Way Down East. Considered out of date even in 1920, the play told the story of Anna (Lillian Gish), the efficient yet secretive serving girl for a large farm family. Anna falls in love with David Bartlett (Richard Barthelmess), the family's son, but feels unworthy of him due to her checkered past. It seems that, years earlier, Anna had been duped into a sham marriage by city slicker Lenox Sanderson (Lowell Sherman). When she became pregnant, Sandson walked out on her. Shortly afterwards, her newborn child died, and Anna was shunned by her home community. These facts come to surface when Sanderson returns to Anna's life as the local squire. David's prudish father orders Anna out of the house and into a blinding snowstorm, but David, after settling accounts with the duplicitious Sanderson, goes after Anna and claims her as his bride. In adapting Way Down East for the screen, Griffith fleshes out the characters of Anna and Sanderson by adding a prologue, which included one of those poignant scenes ever filmed: Anna's tearful insistence that her dying baby be baptized. He also injected the weary old property with a jolt of sheer showmanship, added a "last minute rescue" sequences wherein Anna, lying exhausted on an ice floe, is rescued by David seconds before plunging over a precipitous waterfall. Even today's audiences, armed with the foreknowledge that Lillian Gish enjoyed 73 hale and hearty years after the completion of Way Down East, invariably gasp in fright and urge Richard Barthelmess to "hurry! hurry!"during the climactic scene. Far from becoming Griffith's Folly as predicted, Way Down East was a huge moneymaker. There is no better of Griffith's artistry than the fact that the 1930 talkie remake of Way Down East, though directed by the formidable Henry King, failed to match the pathos and power of the 1920 version. Our own quibble: why did Griffith retain so much of the original play's wheezy comedy relief, and why did he put that relief in the hands of the relentlessly unfunny Creighton Hale? ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide
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| The real deal
by fred3f
February 5, 2009 - 10:41 PM PST
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3 out of 3 members found this review helpful
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| The professional review here by Hal Erickson rightly talks about how Griffith took a tired, worn-out property and turned it into a masterpiece, almost in spite of itself. One of the things that helped this is the remarkable way he used nature. It cost him an enormous amount of money, for that time, to film (around $700,000). This is because he would keep the whole cast and crew waiting for weeks - waiting for just the right storm or just the right degree of ice on the river or just the right weather to match the scene that he had in mind. The result was when our heroine is going through her worst moments the weather compliments it with a terrific storm. When she is trapped on an ice flow she really is on an ice flow on a river that is breaking up and really is about to go over a falls. The reality of the scenes is palpable and the danger to the actors was in fact real. Lillian Gish had the idea of letting her hand trail in the icy water as she lay collapsed on the ice flow. That hand got frost bite and it bothered her for the rest of her life. Richard Barthelmess tells the story that he nearly didn't reach her before she went over the falls. When she wanders in the storm she is, in fact, in her thin nightgown - in a real New England nor'easter. She had to be revived with hot tea between takes. Several members of the cast caught pneumonia due to exposure. The cast was not forced or cajoled to do this - they suggested it and wanted to do it. The result is that the weather is a very tangible element that echos the drama and the mood of the film like a symphonic score. It wasn't only the weather that gave the film it's symphonic feel. The cast rehersed for 10 hours a day for eight weeks before they started filming. This gave the film a smooth flow and timing that is almost unknown today. The commitment of the cast gives a reality and intensity to this film that is very seldom seen. Today, as I watch the CGI enhanced epics that roll out of Hollywood, I sometimes think of this film, and I know that I will never see anything quite this good again. |
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GreenCine Member Rating
(Average 7.33)
9 Votes
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