Way Down East : Gushing Over Gish and Learning to Forgive Griffith

D.W. Griffith – you've finally redeemed yourself. Mostly anyway. It’s too bad we can’t just simply wipe away the fact that Birth of a Nation exists as it certainly wouldn’t have served to be the inspiration necessary for film to thrive, but damn if this film doesn’t deserve the type of praise I’ve long heard people give Griffith’s films. Having now perfected a craft that he once boldly shaped in 1915 – finally softening all those rugged edges of editing, pacing, shot-framing, and narrative in general – Way Down East demonstrates at last what Griffith has essentially been working hard toward for the past five years or so. Yes, I’m aware Intolerance and Broken Blossoms exist, but I’ve yet to get there, so maybe he figured it out even sooner. Regardless, it still shows how far he had come in those five years to finally perfect a style that many would come to borrow throughout the generations of filmmaking.

In one of the greatest performances I’ve seen from early cinema, Lillian Gish (pictured below) stars as a naïve young woman who is tricked into a sham marriage by a wealthy womanizer and then has to start her life from scratch, attempting to leave her past behind. To talk purely about Griffith’s expertise with the filmmaking is to dismiss the piece of emotional glue that holds the film together and makes it as incredible an experience as it is – and that is quite easily Gish’s performance.

From the beginning of the film, she plays the naivety of a penniless country girl who has never known real love with conviction and delight, but as the film progresses, her performance naturally does as well. Many criticize the film’s melodrama, but that was kind of the type of acting prevalent throughout the 1920s (and probably late into the 1930s as well). However, Gish still commands the screen with all the subtle sadness in her eyes – doing much more with so much less than people give her credit. How she isn’t talked about in the same breath as some of the best actresses of the 1920s, let alone all-time, is beyond comprehension for me as she was one of the greatest aspects of Birth of a Nation in 1915 as well, but here she excels more than I could’ve expected and I know there are many praised performances of hers I’ve yet to see as well.

Gish is not the only performer in the film making an effort, though. Her male counterpart – Lowell Sherman (pictured left with Gish) – who plays the slimy womanizer, plays him to a tee. From his initial appearance on screen, I could almost feel his sleaze seep out of the film reels. He’s very much charming, but quite easily disgusting in his actions and he holds no punches through his performance as well. The rest of the cast all makes an effort, even if some are quite over-the-top (like Vivia Ogden who plays the town gossiper, Martha) that can shift the tone of the film out of place.

The biggest downfall of the film has to be its unnecessary and atmospherically inappropriate subplots that focus on the townsfolk and their daily lives which involve far more slapstick and goofball behavior than really fits the tone of Gish’s heavy dramatic work. For a film that already feels quite long (clocking in nearly two-and-a-half hours) in a decade filled with a ton of very short films compared to films of today, over half an hour could’ve easily been cut out because of these subplots and the entire story would’ve still been as impactful. In fact, maybe even more so, that way we as an audience could feel the depth of Gish’s pain and emotional turmoil rather than be interrupted every fifteen minutes by some peculiar, Patton Oswalt-looking screwballs and their slapstick humor.

Altogether, this is certainly quite an admirable accomplishment from a director who once filled me with such rage due to his completely ignorant ideals on display in his influential “masterpiece.” In fact, he actually goes the extra mile and uses this film as a method of battling the ignorance and intolerance of many of his day (and yes, I’m aware he already combatted the public’s backlash with 1916’s Intolerance, but as I haven’t seen that yet and the fact that this is still quite relevant to the unfortunate inferior roles of women back in the day, I’m not exactly counting that). As one user on IMDB mentioned to me, while DeMille was one to focus on gender roles or issues facing women in a forward-thinking way, Griffith was always focused on the past and looking to perfectly reflect life through his art rather than send a message about the way things could be. Regardless of which director better raises the issues, it’s still interesting at least that Griffith ever bothered to address such issues faced by women considering how intolerant I once believed him to be. Here’s hoping that his Birth of a Nation days were left back in 1915 and each film of his I’ll see from here on out will show the same type of humanism displayed in Way Down East. Maybe using Gish in nearly all of his films will certainly help; I know it would get me to watch them again, that’s for sure.


8.5/10