Broken Blossoms (1919) - film review

The behaviour of westerners in his beloved China convinces Cheng Huan that he should travel to Anglo-Saxon lands and spread the gentle message of Buddha.  His missionary dreams soon evaporate when he arrives in the East End of London, where he is treated with suspicion and contempt by the locals.  Nevertheless, Cheng decides to stay and opens a small shop in Limehouse.  There is so little beauty in this part of London that he is entranced when, one day, he sees an attractive young woman in the street.  This is Lucy, the wretched daughter of the prizefighter Battling Burrows, a sadistic brute who continually taunts and punishes her.  After her father attacks her in a fit of anger one evening, Lucy runs away and collapses on Cheng’s doorstep.  The kindly Chinaman takes the unconscious girl to his room, where he cares for her and becomes the first friend she has ever known.  The idyll  is short-lived, however.  When he hears that his daughter is staying with a Chinaman, Burrows is sent into a murderous rage...

In Broken Blossoms, director D.W. Griffith sets out to convey the same humanist messages of his previous historical epic Intolerance (1916), but on a much more modest scale.  In contrast to the grand set-pieces of that previous film, Griffith now preaches his version of compassion and racial tolerance through an intimate melodrama which revolves around three main characters: the bully, the victim and the outsider.

Whilst the film has its failings - Griffith’s nauseating sentimentality and the contrived plot being its two most notable shortcomings - it is a superbly crafted piece of film drama that is ahead of its time in at least two respects: its realism and its sympathetic portrayal of a foreigner.  The latter is particularly laudable given that, at the time, non-whites and non-Anglo-Saxons were almost invariably portrayed negatively in American films, either as outright villains or as a contemptuous underclass.  

Griffith’s own The Birth of a Nation (1915) had been perceived as white supremacist propaganda and contributed to the widely held (but erroneous) view that Griffith was himself a racist.  Although the part of the Chinaman in Broken Blossoms is obviously played by an American, the film presents the Chinese not as a threat but as a noble and peace-loving race who have much to teach the West.  This was a pretty radical view at a time when many Americans were deeply fearful of the so-called Yellow Peril.

Much of the power of this film derives from how convincingly it portrays the grim life of its heroine, played to heart-breaking perfection by Lillian Gish.  The mist shrouded London setting, with its dismal narrow streets, provides a striking contrast with the opening sunlit vista in China.  The sense of oppression and misery are heightened by the wretched living quarters which Lucy tries to make her home and by the unspeakable cruelty of the thug who claims to be her father.  Some scenes in the film are abjectly stark in their brutality.  Who cannot be shocked by the sequences in which poor little Lucy is thrashed by her guardian?  

Despite the stylised performances and melodramatic staging, there is a startling reality to the characters in this film, which makes their plight all the more harrowing to watch.  Griffith himself admitted that he could hardly bear to look at the film, because he found it so depressing.   Yet whilst there is much sorrow and pain in this film, there is also a fair amount of uplifting poetry.  The relationship between Lucy and Cheng Huan is portrayed as a thing of wondrous beauty, and you almost believe the story will have a happy ending.  Unfortunately, inter-racial marriage was a definite no-no when the film was made and so the thing of beauty is destined to be short-lived, ripped to shreds by a mindless Neanderthal.  Powerfully moving through its lyrical simplicity, Broken Blossoms could well be silent cinema’s most effective indictment of racism.

© James Travers 2010

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