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Cinema's lyricism and cruelty side by side, "a tale of tears." China recreated in a studio is for the benefit of Sternberg, Richard Barthelmess as the tender Buddhist missionary is a model for Jean-Louis Barrault, off to enlighten "barbarous Anglo-Saxons" he goes. (Roughhousing Yank seamen provide his first brush with the Western temperament, sails on the horizon signal his departure.) Idealism withers in London's slums, just another émigré merchant on the Limehouse district, reformist morals are a distant temple bell no longer heard in the opium den. The kindred soul is the fearful waif (Lillian Gish) scrounging squalid streets for tin foil, stooped from beatings from her prizefighting father (Donald Crisp). The battered figure stumbles into his shop and he nurses her in the sanctuary upstairs, "the first gentleness she has ever known," a fleeting balm. D.W. Griffith fully understands the need to gaze into the image for the emotional realms within, no movie was ever more like a poem. Hausfrau and demimondaine both warn the heroine off their respective trades, the smile demanded by the ogre can only be achieved by forcing the corners of her mouth upward with her fingers. (The gesture is repeated one last time as the light goes out of her eyes, just as the brute instinctively puts up his dukes when shot full of lead.) A mise en scène of luminous purity with silks and dolls and pools of shadow in the private shrine, an astounding pictorial rhythm interrupted by the crudity of intertitles: "What makes you so good to me, Chinky?" The boxing arena by comparison is a harshly lit rectangle, the snarling ape suddenly remembers his "parental rights" and conducts a harrowing punishment, it all builds to Gish in the closet for an unforgettable frenzy that Dickens' pen could not have bettered. As vital a vision to German expressionism as Intolerance is to Soviet montage, and an invaluable bedrock for Borzage and Nicholas Ray. Cinematography by Billy Bitzer. With Arhur Howard, Edward Peil Sr., George Beranger, and Norman Selby. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |