True Heart Susie

"True Heart Susie" is one of my top five or four favorite silent films -a timeless masterpiece of simple beauty and innocence. Set in small rural town in America, it is about a simple and devoted young woman "True Heart Susie" (Lillian Gish, in what is perhaps her finest performance) who makes painful sacrifices to promote her next door neighbor and ignorant love William Jenkins (Robert Harron) to college. This is D.W. Griffith at his peak. There isn't a scene in the this marvellously lyrical film that never attains emotional beauty and resonance. It may not have the technical invention and epic sprawl of "Birth of a Nation" or "Intolerance" or "Way Down East" but it remains one of the most honest and beautiful films I have ever seen.

A work of art you don't want to miss.

First, let's understand what kind of film this is. It is a movie about old fashioned values and the people who held them. You will not see much action, sex or blood in this film. It is silent, not of the best quality (it is old) and in black and white. However, if none of that bothers you particularly, you will find that it is a sincere film, exciting in its own way, and one that rings deep and true in a way that films seldom do.

The acting is particularly good. One reviewer here said to watch it for the stars, and that is certainly a good reason to watch it. Bobby Harron, does a wonderful job of playing a sincere and naive young man who is fooled by a week and superficial woman. He has an extremely sensitive face and when you look at him you seem to be able to see into his very soul.

Lillian Gish plays the shy, plain and simple girl who loves him. In her scenes with Harron, they had a chemistry which fills the screen. She starts out as plain girl, but about half way through the film she starts to look pretty. It is a gradual transformation and she pulls it off remarkably well, gradually accenting her better features and holding her body more gracefully. She also seems to grow as a person in the film. She starts out as an awkward child living in a fantasy world where she imagines that she is loved more than she actually is. As the film progresses, she learns to face reality, to learn how to look pretty and act gracefully without changing who she is. None of this is accomplished in any great dramatic way. It is accomplished the way these things are often done in real life, quietly, by small incidents which are important to the person but not that important to anyone else. But when these incidents occur, you see a slight physical change on the surface, but somehow she also shows you a dramatic change deep inside her whole being. How she accomplishes this is a mystery to me and one of the miracles of acting.

At one time Lillian remarked that "Virgins are the hardest roles to play. those dear little girls - to make them interesting takes great vitality, but a fallen woman or a vamp!-75 per cent of your work is already done." Lilian played all three, virgins, vamps and fallen women - and played them well. Here she plays perhaps her most difficult virgin. A girl who has nothing extraordinary to distinguish her except her quiet love for Robert. Well, remarkably enough, she makes the role interesting and sympathetic. I don't know an actress today who could do it.

As good a Lilian is, she nearly has the film stolen from her by Clarine Seymour who plays the the "vamp" in this film. Well, perhaps 75% of her work is already done, but she supplies the other 25% with great enthusiasm. She never makes the mistake of making her character hateful. That would make the character too one dimensional. She shows us, instead, a charming woman who is too week to resist temptation and too cowardly to tell the truth. Thus, she ruins her own life and nearly all the lives around her. You hate her for her weakness but you love her for her charm and beauty. She walks that tightrope between charm and evil perfectly.

Aside from the acting there are other things to like about this forgotten gem. The camera work by Bitzer is almost beyond belief, when you consider when it was done. He could create moods with the camera that make you think he was inside the actors thoughts.

Let us also remember the director. Griffith was a director that worked in concepts. In a film like this, where he was using his best actors and crew, he would not tell them how to play it. He would give them the concept he wanted and let them create it. If he didn't like what they did, he would go over it again and they would try again. By doing this he filled the set with the atmosphere of the film and everyone was attune to it. This shows in the film and the way the tension builds between characters as their lives play out. A palpable universe is created here.

If what Lillian said about virgins is true, the same can be said about a film that tries to portray simple, honest values. The film succeeds in doing this very well. If you enjoy this kind of film then I would seek this one out, it is really remarkable.

When I first wrote this comment, there were no commercially available copies of this film on DVD. Since then it has been issued in an excellent version. Highly recommended for film buffs and people who appreciate real things.

This is a gem among the smaller productions from D.W. Griffith's oeuvre. It's similar to "A Romance of Happy Valley", also a coming-of-age romance set in the countryside, which Griffith made with the same costars and released earlier in 1919. Griffith often turned to rural romance and such sentimental melodramas for his films. In this one, Lillian Gish is again self-sacrificing, pitiful and supposedly plain in appearance, while Robert Harron goes to the city to make good--this time to college to become his hometown's preacher. Gish and Harron had these roles down pat, and their translations from awkward teenagers to adulthood is especially impressive here, accomplished with costume changes and a mustache for Harron, but mostly just by their convincing performances. The film doesn't specifically address how much time the narrative covers, but it seems to be years, so there is considerable character development. In addition to Gish and Harron, Clarine Seymour is good in the part of a flapper, who steals Harron away from Gish.

Thanks to the quality Image Entertainment / Film Preservation Associates release, G.W. Bitzer's lovely photography is now more apparent. One slight criticism here that I have is the odd use of soft focus in a few places, such as in a couple long shots and for one close-up of Harron, which blur his image; otherwise, it's a fine technique, which Bitzer and camera operator Karl Brown had learned from Hendrik Sartov in making "Broken Blossoms", another Griffith-Gish film made and released earlier in 1919 (clearly, 1919 was a great year for this team artistically). Similarly, the film's pace and editing are commendable, including interloping the various paths of the characters and one particularly good match cut where Gish walks from her field cut to her walking in her house. Yet, some of the editing appears jumpy in places, although some of that could be due to missing frames, and there's a brief continuity error during the shot where Seymour is trying to get inside her house during a rainstorm--the door is locked, yet we briefly see her push the door open. Such slight sloppiness in film-making doesn't distract much, though. Title cards are a bit too much here, in frequency and storytelling (e.g. why call the characters idiots?), something that's a problem in other Griffith films, too. To finish my listing on the technical aspects of "True Heart Susie", it also features a well-constructed rainstorm, which seems to be an early and good example of one created artificially, with heavy rain, lightning effects and good continuity.

"True Heart Susie" is one of Griffith's better films; it treads familiar territory, but is better constructed and developed narratively and technically. Its real genius, however, is the acting, which makes this one especially sentimentally affecting. Gish is exceptionally brilliant; it seems that any film she's in will be worth watching at least just for her part.

Lillian Gish (as True Heart Susie) is an ordinary country girl; she is in love with typical "boy-next-door" Robert Harron (as William Roberts). The film begins with a series of seemingly silly, sentimental, and hopelessly old-fashioned observations about the relationships between men and women like "True Heart Susie" and "William Roberts". Director D.W. Griffith astutely notes, "Of course they don't know what poor simple idiots they are -- and, we, who have never been so foolish, an hardly hope to understand…"

You can tell, early on, that minister-to-be Harron is not really interested, romantically, in Gish. Harron prefers the "kind" of woman later idealized by Clarine Seymour (as Bettina). Ms. Seymour leads a fine supporting cast, as the painted and partying "other woman". Gish tries "power and stockings", but it is not in her character. When she accidentally chances upon Harron and Seymour kissing, Gish realizes circumstances are beyond her control, and Harron is lost to her -- this is followed by an incredible close-up of Gish, which defies description.

With "True Heart Susie", director Griffith and company achieve "non-epic" perfection. In its own way, the film is as "epic" as the director's "Intolerance" (1916). Ms. Gish and Mr. Harron are superb, as usual; though they are young adults, they are thoroughly convincing as opening-scene schoolchildren. The performances are almost outerworldly; especially, after Harron expresses discontent, and Gish reacts. Gish's reactions are particularly amazing; in fact, this may be her most supreme silent-era achievement, besting her own performance in the recently released "Broken Blossoms" (1919). If "Best Actress" awards were given out in 1919, Lillian Gish's "True Heart Susie" might have won over her own lead performance in "Broken Blossoms".

Truly classic.

********** True Heart Susie (6/1/19) D.W. Griffith ~ Lillian Gish, Robert Harron, Clarine Seymour, Loyola O'Connor

True, there are no big set pieces. We don't see Richard Barthelmess leaping from ice floe to ice floe, we don't see the Little Colonel ramming a Confederate battle flag down a cannon's mouth. What we see are faces: a small boy watching a church elder eat ice cream; Robert Harron, exultant at getting a scholarship; and, of course, Lilian Gish. She walks funny. Her outfits are ridiculous and True Heart Susie is, let's face it, not very bright, but she feels deeply and we feel with her.

What more, really, can you ask for in a movie? You get beautifully composed pictures, a fluid story, fine acting.... two years later Henry King would tread the same ground with TOL'ABLE David and produce a masterpiece that is not as funny and warm as this.

Minor Griffith? If so, there are few major directors besides Griffith.