Do not watch this movie on Netflix! I settled in for what I thought was an 83-minute movie and as it neared the end I thought to myself, "hmm....they have a lot of loose ends to tie up in a very short amount of time." Turns out Netflix only has part 1. The full movie is actually 145 minutes long. Luckily the whole thing is posted on YouTube, so I finished it there.
This film is based on a play that premiered in the late 1800s. It was popular through the first decade of the 20th century, but by the time Griffith released his film version, the Victorian plot seemed tired and outdated. It is old-fashioned and trifling even for 1920.
Griffith's reliable heroine Lillian Gish stars again as an innocent young woman who is wronged at the hands of society's less savory characters. Gish plays a poor country girl (Anna) who goes to visit her rich relatives in the big city and gets swept off her feet by a big city playboy who lures her into a sham marriage. After he abandons her, she goes through the traumatic experience of giving birth to an out-of-wedlock baby and being kicked out of a boarding house because of it. After the baby dies, she wanders until finding work on a prosperous farm. Things seem to be looking up until her ex-quasi-husband appears and starts wooing another girl, and the town gossips expose Anna's past and get her kicked off the farm. Reeling from the humiliation, she wanders out into a violent winter storm and eventually collapses on an ice floe headed for a waterfall. Luckily the farmer's son who has fallen in love with her saves her just in time and the film ends with a triple wedding (did those ever really happen in real life, or just in movies?)
The scenes on the ice floes are by far the most interesting part of the movie. Like I said, the rest of it is kind of corny and melodramatic, but it's notable for being the first Griffith movie on the list that has a lot of comedy in it. There are a lot of moments of slapstick comedy involving the minor characters in the film.
This movie was way too long. I don't mind long movies as a general rule, but the length of this one did not feel justified or satisfying. I didn't enjoy this movie nearly as much as the previous Griffith film I watched, and I'm convinced that what made that one good was the fact that Griffith really reined himself in on the length, didn't waste time on a million supporting characters and subplots, and chose a story that didn't have a cliched happy ending.
The ice floe scenes are pretty impressive for 1920, but that's really the only interesting thing about this movie. And filming those scenes had a lasting impact on some of the people involved: Lillian Gish's right hand was in the icy water for so long during the shoot that she had problems with it for the rest of her life (she lived until 1993) and D.W. Griffith also suffered long-term problems from getting frostbite on one side of his face.
This is the 4th of the 5 D.W. Griffith movies on the 1001 list. I wonder if the last one will be a melodrama like this one, or a more satisfying tragedy like Broken Blossoms.
This film is based on a play that premiered in the late 1800s. It was popular through the first decade of the 20th century, but by the time Griffith released his film version, the Victorian plot seemed tired and outdated. It is old-fashioned and trifling even for 1920.
Griffith's reliable heroine Lillian Gish stars again as an innocent young woman who is wronged at the hands of society's less savory characters. Gish plays a poor country girl (Anna) who goes to visit her rich relatives in the big city and gets swept off her feet by a big city playboy who lures her into a sham marriage. After he abandons her, she goes through the traumatic experience of giving birth to an out-of-wedlock baby and being kicked out of a boarding house because of it. After the baby dies, she wanders until finding work on a prosperous farm. Things seem to be looking up until her ex-quasi-husband appears and starts wooing another girl, and the town gossips expose Anna's past and get her kicked off the farm. Reeling from the humiliation, she wanders out into a violent winter storm and eventually collapses on an ice floe headed for a waterfall. Luckily the farmer's son who has fallen in love with her saves her just in time and the film ends with a triple wedding (did those ever really happen in real life, or just in movies?)
The scenes on the ice floes are by far the most interesting part of the movie. Like I said, the rest of it is kind of corny and melodramatic, but it's notable for being the first Griffith movie on the list that has a lot of comedy in it. There are a lot of moments of slapstick comedy involving the minor characters in the film.
This movie was way too long. I don't mind long movies as a general rule, but the length of this one did not feel justified or satisfying. I didn't enjoy this movie nearly as much as the previous Griffith film I watched, and I'm convinced that what made that one good was the fact that Griffith really reined himself in on the length, didn't waste time on a million supporting characters and subplots, and chose a story that didn't have a cliched happy ending.
The ice floe scenes are pretty impressive for 1920, but that's really the only interesting thing about this movie. And filming those scenes had a lasting impact on some of the people involved: Lillian Gish's right hand was in the icy water for so long during the shoot that she had problems with it for the rest of her life (she lived until 1993) and D.W. Griffith also suffered long-term problems from getting frostbite on one side of his face.
This is the 4th of the 5 D.W. Griffith movies on the 1001 list. I wonder if the last one will be a melodrama like this one, or a more satisfying tragedy like Broken Blossoms.
I agree that this is not as good as Yellow Blossoms, but I still liked it better than Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. I agree the ice flow scene is quite something.
ReplyDelete