December 3: Way Down East (1920 -- D.W. Griffith)

★★★★★

The first whiff of sentimentality or melodrama can take me out of a movie fast; I moaned aloud at the big reveal in Gravity, which broke the spell of even those effects.  But when Lillian Gish learns she isn't actually married in Way Down East, I’m hurt and angry.  And when she’s wandering homeless and sees the happy Bartlett family in their home, I long for her to join them just like she does.  Gish’s performance in this film is a master class in silent acting, in understanding and collaborating with the camera in a way that sucks a viewer in.  Her posture, her timing, her facial expressions, her gestures – all these are hugely emotive.  For an audience that can suspend current cinematic values enough to allow the silent’s, Way Down East is a remarkably affective film.

An easy way for a modern audience to engage Way Down East is through the character of Gish’s Anna.  She’s a little simpler and far more innocent than we can believe today, but her wisdom and power grow dramatically in the film.  After learning she’s been deceived about her marriage, she vows to marshal on as a single mother, and when her newborn is ill and she fears for the unbaptized child’s eternal soul, Anna usurps clerical prerogative and baptizes her child herself, an act that would bring a good deal of condemnation even in today’s cinema.  Not long afterwards, Anna defies class conventions and refuses to leave her home with the Bartletts despite being ordered to do so by the upper-class Sanderson.  And she takes a feminist stance when she complains that an unwed mother is ostracized but the father of the child is embraced.  Way Down East may be approaching the century mark, but Anna is a common-sense feminist that can inspire us today.

Several Griffith film techniques are on clear display here, too.  Early in the film, we’re already seeing sentimental symbolism as we watch the young Bartlett longing for love while surrounded by baby birds and blossoms.  As Bartlett later courts Anna, Griffith sets the couple in the lower left of a pastoral scene.  The scene of Bartlett’s longing also points to another technique that Griffith uses often, the close-up.  Griffith mastered the art of filling the frame with actors’ faces to bring viewers into the action and into the personal struggles of the characters.  In this scene, Richard Barthelmess overplays Bartlett’s longing, but Griffith’s use of close-up for effect remains a good decision.  The director also uses the tracking shot on Way Down East that he’d found so worthwhile in his two previous features.  At one point, for example, his camera tracks Martha as she rushes back to the Bartlett’s bringing news of Anna’s deceit.

While all of these elements are familiar, the tried-and-true Griffith technique that gets the most attention here is cross-cutting.  Like in his other films, Griffith uses this technique to build suspense.  Much of the suspense in the famous ice floe scene come from the film alternating between showing us the rescuer and cutting to the heroine.  More suspense is created as Martha is rushing home to denounce Anna and Griffith cuts back and forth between Martha and Bartlett’s effort to propose.  As this scene also implies, Griffith’s cross-cutting can elicit irony.  While Bartlett is at home longing for a mate, the film cuts back and forth from him to the false marriage that Sanderson has set up.  Way Down East shows Griffith refining the number of things he can do with cross-cutting.

Like many silents, Way Down East also uses the vocabulary of melodrama.  Anna trials are textbook examples of the extreme situations and heightened emotions that govern this style.  Anna is deceived by the evil Sanderson and bears an illegitimate child.  Her mother dies, and the new mother is cast out penniless.  The child then dies.  And just when Anna is beginning to recover, her secret past is revealed, and she finds herself cast out yet again.  The film’s story uses such heightened exaggeration to engage its audience.  And in addition to the melodrama, Way Down East relies on stereotypical characters like the spinster gossip and the comic, plain-faced country people.  Elements such as these are no better or worse that those found in other films of the era, though Gish’s ability to play to the camera hooks us into this melodrama.

Of course, the ending of the film is rightly famous.  Attention is generally focused on the ice floe rescue during which actor Richard Barthelmess actually leaps from ice sheet to ice sheet to get to Lilian Gish, herself floating down the river towards a waterfall on a piece of ice.  However, the prior scenes of Anna running through the winter storm in anguish at this final reversal in her life are equally gripping.  During this segment, we see images of bare branches that are intercut with Anna’s bent, clutching hands and arms in the air, and the film then cuts to a ghoulish image of the devastated woman’s face, eyelashes tinged with frost.  And all of these on film stock tinted purple.  It’s as creepy a sequence as anything Murnau would create.

In Way Down East, Griffith tells a straightforward melodramatic story using the cinematic language he had played such a key role in developing.  His collaboration with Lillian Gish gives this film the lift that puts it at the top of silent drama.