Way Down East (D.W. Griffith; 1920)

“He has three specialties:
ladies-- ladies--
and LADIES.”

It’s easy to knock a good deal of silent films for their obviously dated intertitles (such as the above) or melodramatic acting. Personally, such things have never bothered me, as they’re just a product of the time, rather than any real flaws in production. It also hardly helps that many techniques that silent films pioneered are standard practice today, so that when we see them in their original context, they seem unremarkable – or moreover, we don’t even notice them (think of the Kuleshov effect, cross-cutting, etc.).

And if these were problems for most silent film directors, they are certainly problems for Griffith – or at least the modern perception of Griffith. Universally regarded as one of the first true film pioneers and innovators, his films are also credited as moving film technique forward more than any other director. And that is to say: he was among the first to employ such things as the Kuleshov effect and cross-cutting. As mentioned earlier, the problem is that we now take these things for granted. As for me, when I watch old(er) films, I don’t think of any sort of specific technique (“oh, Griffith’s employing cross-cutting now to amplify the suspense”), but watching Griffith, it is undeniably clear that he was miles ahead of his peers in a visual sense. I lack the specific film grammar to be able to say why, but his films have better rhythym than his contemporaries, better visual flow, a better sense of editing and framing, and so on. Even going ten to twenty years later into the 20s and 30s, he still knew better what he was doing with the camera than anyone else. At least in the 40s, we got Welles who – shall we say – shook things up a bit.

Griffith’s filmic intelligence is most clear in The Birth of a Nation – which sadly, of course, is his most morally…dubious. I find Intolerance a boring piece of intelligent construction, and I love Broken Blossoms, despite some…dubious…stereotypes. Orphans of the Storm is…well, it’s there. Way Down East falls somewhere between The Birth of a Nation and Broken Blossoms. Except for Broken Blossoms, it may be Griffith’s most consistently engaging and interesting, though I don’t feel all of the cinematic craft present in The Birth of a Nation or Intolerance. I suppose that could be seen as a good thing, in that it feels more naturalistic.

As seems usual for Griffith, it’s a Victorian morality play with some social commentary to boot (which is actually more engaging than that sounds). There’s the foppish rich dandy (described by the quote preceding this review) who takes advantage of the simple country girl (Gish, of course) who fools her into thinking they’re married, throws her away when she’s pregnant,tries to come back to her when the baby’s dead, and so on. Then there’s a real You know, the usual stuff. It works just about as well as such stuff has the potential to work.

I’m not feeling the desire to write too much more, so I won’t. In short: worth seeing if you have the patience for silent films. #3 on my list of 5 Griffith features.