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D.W. Griffith steering "the Barque of Fate" into the storm, Lillian Gish tied to the mast. The betrayed virgin is Hardy's "maiden no more," a New England naïf among high-society swells, catnip to the "occasional interloper" (Lowell Sherman). Seduced and abandoned, she endures the deaths of mother and child, her landlady's scorn, and a slew of florid intertitles: "Shadows across the time dial. The baby without a name." The big city is a haze of fancy balls and unfeeling conquests, rather Babylonian (at her relatives' mansion, the heroine's eyes are drawn to the topless figurines adorning the chandeliers) and populated by wan mannequins. By contrast, the farm where she seeks shelter is a sprawl of Scripture-dictated virtue, bashful courtships and barn hootenannies, where wrath, buffoonery, pettiness and compassion are embodied with Dickensian gusto. At the center is Gish's sublime frenzy, slicing through the mossy melodrama. Infatuated in the wolf's den, she's gauzy and girlish; stringy and terrified alongside her sickly newborn, she improvises a baptism with basin water and rocking chair in a charged, frontal composition. Fumbling with sewing needles while her rustic beau (Richard Barthelmess) declares his love, she pricks cinema's most expressive hands. Finally, she's a tiny figure splayed on a frozen river as it cracks into a jigsaw of floes, one of Griffith's most rousing visions of film as visual-emotional ebb and flow, rupture and connection. There's an air of Homer Winslow, and a rivalry with Sjöström. The plate furiously smashed at the dinner table reappears in Potemkin, Borzage never forgot the cut from the bogus marriage to Bathelmess jostled awake in bed. Into Ford and Pudovkin and Mizoguchi it goes, all the way to Breaking the Waves. With Mrs. David Landau, Burr McIntosh, Kate Bruce, Josephine Bernard, George Neville, Porter Strong, Vivia Ogden, Mary Hay, Creighton Hale, and Emily Fitzroy. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |