Horizonte Sombrio

Lillian Gish and fellow co-stars really bring home this great drama. It's interesting and exciting and wonderful to watch. Surely a legend of the 20th Century, Mr Griffith outdid himself with this successful film and Gish can only be praised for a great performance. Her pain and despair can be felt in the scene's where she realises she's been 'betrayed' and she nurses her child while he slips from this world. It's acting at it's finest for no words were necessary, it's all in 'the look'. Certainly 10 out of 10, but if I were to make one comment about this film in the negative, it would be it's length. Perhaps 15 to 20 minutes too long. Otherwise it's majestic.

DW Griffith's ideal was that dreams can come true or should be shown to, and that cinema should work to that effect. He carried all the other Victorian values with him, the edifying fable, usually a big sappy story, grandiose love, austere morals, the struggle against forces of darkness. These are old and mouldy relics now, and must have even seemed so at the time to young more radical cineastes abroad.

But he was our first master of technique and many learned from him, Abel Gance in France, Sjostrom in Sweden, of course Chaplin, Kuleshov and his film workshop. Here he perfects the business with layers he was still struggling with in Intolerance.

Intolerance always cut back and forth to very concrete moments in time, every intertitle announcing so in advance, as a result we got forced, simple metaphysics. Simple physics in fact, exhaustively so. You did not have to do any work, merely be swept as part of one or the other mob. It was clean linear history, movement in one direction.

I want to direct your attention to two instances here. One is where we have just followed another segment of the misadventures of the naive country girl betrayed by the rich playboy, the film suddenly cuts away to the handsome country boy - her true love interest we presume - being jostled awake in bed as though from a bad dream and himself the dreamer of our story. This has saturated so ubiquitously in film culture, it is now considered in bad taste to signify a dream scene in this way.

The other is the awesomely mounted ice-breaker finale, impressive for just the selection of cascading imagery but now parting to reveal soul, the whole fabric of the world being torn beneath the feet of our heroine to reveal a liquid universe below, stories written in waters and swept away and forgotten. In all the years of film since then we have only managed to invent a third layer on top of Griffith's two, adding in the equation the veracity of the author supplying the fabric and imagery, and have mostly spent that time transferring the whole more directly to the eye and perfecting links and arrangements.

More erudite filmmakers would envision complex worlds with more clarity, but as far as nuts and bolts film mechanics are concerned a lot of it is patented here.

You can't keep a good story down. DW Griffith's film of Way Down East was an adaptation of a popular play of the late 19th century, but that play was itself a rather flagrant rip-off of the Robert Hardy novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles. True, the ending was substantially altered, and Way Down East's conclusions were fustily moralist compared with Hardy's bold progressiveness, but this in a way just goes to show how almost identical situations and characters can be adapted to suit a variety of means. Griffith keeps the moral sentiments of the play, but for this "elaboration" (the word used in the picture's publicity material at the time) he craftily sheers it of its staginess to produce a work of pure cinema.

Technically Griffith may by now have been overtaken by his peers, but he has lost none of his ability to show character and intention through meaningful staging and encouragement of naturalistic acting. For example, when Lillian Gish turns up at her rich relatives' home, no title card reveals her sense of being out of her depth, but Griffith often keeps her in long shot, emphasising the isolating vastness of the house, and this has an impact on how we view the scene. We then realise Mrs Tremont's embarrassment at having this poor cousin walk into her life by the distance the woman keeps from Gish and her awkward attempts to avoid eye contact. One of the most nicely done scenes is the one of Gish's wedding to Lowell Sherman. Unconventionally, he keeps the camera behind the pastor, obscuring the couple, and keeping a cold empty space in the foreground. This really gives us the impression that something is not right here, even though we haven't been explicitly told so yet.

What really impresses about Way Down East is its beauty, which suffuses almost every frame – exquisite countryside vistas, painterly shot compositions, not to mention many radiant close-ups of Ms Gish. Griffith always liked to make his pictures pleasing to the eye, but there is method in all this gorgeousness. Griffith uses natural beauty to emphasise the idyll of the Bartlett farm, and it's no coincidence that this is at its most striking in the shots when Gish first arrives there. And Griffith continually flatters Gish with the camera, framing her tenderly and often in soft focus, creating a visual metaphor for her delicacy and purity.

Gish's acting is of top standard, far better than the hysterical hamming she displayed in the previous year's Broken Blossoms. It's also nice to see her in a proper adult role rather than the disturbingly odd little girl figure she was in that earlier picture. Richard Barthelmess is also excellent, and like Gish he is capable of expressing a lot by doing very little. Together Gish and Barthelmess give what are probably the best lead performances of any of Griffith's features. No-one else in this cast makes an exceptional impact, but none of them is outstandingly bad either.

A fair few of those supporting players appear mainly for comic relief, and there are by Griffith's standards an unusually large number of comedic interludes in Way Down East. This unfortunately was one of Griffith's biggest weak spots. Some of these gags look like they might be fairly funny in themselves, but they don't look it because Griffith keeps hammering them home with close-ups, making them seem forced and predictable. He should have taken a leaf from his pal Chaplin's book, and shown a series of jokes in a continuous shot, giving them a more natural flow and getting more laughs as a result.

Watching Way Down East also makes me wish Griffith the writer had more confidence in Griffith the director, as well as in his cast and his audience. This picture has far more intertitles than it really needs. There are several which reveal Lennox to be a bounder, but these are superfluous because there are enough clues in the way he scenes are staged and the way Lowell Sherman plays him. It would be far more satisfying for the audience if they were allowed to figure out for themselves that he is up to no good. Still, this is a comparatively small blight on what is one of DW Griffith's most visually lovely, deeply engaging and marvellously acted pictures.

This enormously successful film lives up to its legendary reputation. But it's also disappointing.

The atmospheric splendor of the cinematography and the melancholy mood set by the original musical score (on the Kino Video release) lull the viewer into the sense of reverie essential to appreciating this charming representation of countrified America facing the encroachment of big city evils.

The story is well-told by director D.W. Griffith, and the moral message of Woman's spiritual virtuosity is exploited without the sermonizing of some of his other pictures. There is a sensitivity and naturalness exhibited in the unfolding narrative of Way Down East and a graceful style seen in none of his other epic-scale ventures. In bringing the sweetness of his famous one-reelers to a major feature film, Griffith captured an almost magical tone and ambiance that distinguishes Way Down East as a masterful piece of intimate storytelling, rivaling Broken Blossoms (1919) in its intensity and sheer beauty.

However, it must be said that Griffith's sideline excesses in plot development are many and varied, hindering the progression of the central tale of Anna Moore's struggle to escape her past and search out a new life. Annoying bits of slapstick humor, totally at odds with the romance and tragedy of the main story, are indulged in while overly sentimental touches, like long, wistful close-ups, are equally aggravating.

Though otherwise superbly acted by Lillian Gish (Anna), her role is marred by the fact that some of her more emotional scenes are unnecessarily drawn out by Griffith. This is particularly true in the sequence of the death of Anna's illegitimate newborn.

Richard Barthelmess, as David Bartlett, Anna's sweetheart and savior, is outstandingly effective, as is Lowell Sherman as the decadent cad Lennox Sanderson who deceives Anna. Not all of the supporting cast was as competent or convincing, due largely to out-of-place comedic impersonations.

One huge stand out is Mary Hay who leaps onto the screen with a refreshing vivacity. The wit she imparts to her small role is the only really clever humor in the movie.

Long-forgotten today, but much discussed at the time, was the cameo appearance in the movie's prologue of popular New York society girl Mrs. Morgan Belmont, who played Diana Tremont, one of Anna's snooty Boston cousins. To do justice to her part, as well as to form an exciting contrast to the pastoral images to follow, Griffith went all out in the costume department, hiring top fashion designer Lucile (Lady Duff Gordon) to design glitzy gowns for the garden party and ball scenes.

Despite some errors in continuity, Way Down East's celebrated climax of Anna's rescue from an ice-flow as it drifts toward a roaring waterfall, is perfectly paced and as thrilling as it must have been to audiences in 1920. Considering the limited special effects of the day, the scenes are amazingly realistic. Gish lying unconscious on an ice cake as it zooms to destruction, her arm trailing in the current, is one of the most familiar silent film shots, even to people who know next to nothing about the genre, and although it has become almost cliché, its power is undiminished.

As a story, Way Down East is both fabulous and frustrating but its photographic beauty and emotional resonance are almost unparalleled in the Griffith oeuvre.

WAY DOWN EAST was an old-fashioned melodrama even in 1920 when D.W. Griffith decided to film it. It's the kind of story that leaves itself open for spoofing, but Griffith approaches the story of a "mock marriage" and its aftermath with earnestness and a great eye for detail.

Aiding Griffith in bringing this story to life are three great stars: Lillian Gish as Anna, Richard Barthelmess as David, and Lowell Sherman as caddish Lennox. The supporting cast includes New England "types" that almost parody Dickens. Kate Bruce is the staunch mother, Creighton Hale the ditzy professor, Vivia Ogden the town gossip, Burr McIntosh the intolerant squire, Emily Fitzroy runs the hotel, etc.

The story of love, betrayal, tolerance, and redemption is slow moving and has (as usual in a Griffith film) subplots, but like the very river, all the actions and events slowly come together for the finale that left 1920 audiences in a frenzy. Indeed the ending is among the most famous in all silent films.

Gish is quite beautiful here. In her opening scene she is in her parlor with her mother making a broom, holding up the straw so that we see only her white cap and large expressive eyes. She's stunning. As Anna she goes through the gamut of shy maiden, young lover, wronged woman, timid servant, and town jezebel. Barthelmess is solid as the young and innocent David who falls in love with the servant girl.

Their final scenes in the blizzard (filmed on Long Island in a real storm) on the icy river (filmed in White River Junction, VT) are totally amazing. And they did not use stunt doubles. As Gish lies exhausted on the piece of ice she may or may not know that it's heading for the falls. There are scenes were her hand and hair trail in the icy river. Just amazing. Barthelmess uses the breaking ice as a trail so that he can reach Gish before it's too late. There are several shots where he falls off the ice or the ice breaks under him and he plunges into that wintry river. The entire sequence is as thrilling today as it was in 1920.

Gish once wrote that her long hair froze solid from being in the river water and snapped off with the ice.

WAY DOWN EAST is a great film.