Broken Blossoms

Image credit: Kino Lorber

Most modern audiences don’t hold for black and white movies –let alone the silent films of the 1900s that now seem so grainy and hard to watch. While I can understand where these tastes and intolerances stem from, I’m here to say that it’s ok to be wrong. 

Silent movies can be just as humorous, dramatic, or suspenseful as any modern romance, thriller, or comedy. In fact some even hold up better with age. A cinematic exploration into the silent era is more than a mere peek at an age gone by: watching such films as those of D. W. Griffith or Buster Keaton give us a great sense of the fundamental building blocks of cinema that shape the ones we see today. Not to mention most of the stories are so beautifully timeless. One such movie is Broken Blossoms.

The film tells the tragic story of a Chinaman (Richard Barthelmess) that travels to London to teach the barbarous Anglo-Saxons the gentle ways of Buddha. Sadly his dreams are never recognised and he lives as a lonely shopkeeper. His singular joy is his hidden love of a young woman (Lillian Gish) that occasionally marvels at his shop window. One night –after escaping from her abusive father- the girl collapses in his doorway and a forbidden love blossoms between them as he nurses her back to the health. Meanwhile, her father gets wind of her whereabouts and sees fit to exercise some parental rights.

The forbidden romance is a tale as timeless as the hills, but what makes it so incredibly beautiful in Broken Blossoms is the way the film is put together. W. D. Griffiths had a famous reputation for film studies and this movie really shows why. The cinematography is simple but breathtaking with every inventive trick available from powdered makeup to special lighting to oil smeared over the camera lens. Such beautiful moments as close-ups of the love-struck hero through an unfocused lens or the rose tints that characterize the bedroom his prepares for the girl still inspire the heart to flutter and tears to spring to the eyes making it a film that is an experience rather than just something to watch.

Image credit: AllPosters

While a visually gorgeous film it’s also beautifully poetic. The titular ‘broken blossoms’ can refer to anything: the broken dreams of the Chinaman, Lucy’s broken spirit, or even the sizeable fracture between the two cultures. While the sets are limited to the squalid house of Lucy and her father and the oriental opium dens and shop interior there is a wonderful balance between the two worlds the film travels through as well as this gorgeous and continual shift between the mundane and brutal and the ethereal.

This is a truly beautiful film!

Starring: Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, Donald Crisp, Arthur Howard, Edward Pell Sr., George Beranger, and Norman Selby