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.

Both major stars in 1919, this bucolic tale by D.W. Griffith was old-fashioned even when it was made, but its simple charms and top stars make it worth a look. The girl loves the boy, helps him thru college without his knowledge, but he marries another. But because she has a true heart, she prevails. Gish has a few nice scenes, and Harron is good as the confused boy. Clarine Seymour is good as the bad girl (powder and paint!). Not much action but the scenes carry you along and Gish is watchable in anything. Harron was exceptional in Intolerance a few years earlier, and died soon after this film (gun shot wounds)as did Clarine Seymour--both in 1920!. Kate Bruce, Loyola O'Connor, and Carold Dempster co-star.

Susie is in love with William Jenkins, although he doesn't seem to notice. When William decides he wants to go to college, Susie sells the family cow and sends the money to William, making him believe it is from another benefactor. When William finishes college, he returns and takes up the position of minister. Susie believes she will marry William, but he takes up with a girl named Bettina and eventually marries her. Bettina is no good. Yet, Susie does nothing to break them up, and even lies to protect Bettina. Will William finally learn the truth about his wife, and will Susie finally land him?

This is a solid film, helped along tremendously by the fine performances turned in by Gish and Harron. The pair had previously teamed together in several Griffith films, and this is another opportunity for the two to shine. Gish is lovely, Harron very handsome as the boy with no clue.

Griffith uses the same trick he used in earlier films, making Harron age later in the movie by giving him a moustache. It is hackneyed, but it works. The close-ups of Gish are remarkable. In one scene, she keeps opening and closing her eyes when she spies William and Bettina together, not wanting to see what happens, but still curious enough to take a slight peek.

Clarine Seymour, as Bettina, is also very good. For Harron and Seymour, they each had only two films left in their careers before their premature deaths.

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