After the two tropical island ‘quickies’ I wrote about in my last post, D.W. Griffith took his next project far more seriously. In making Way Down East he returned to the high level of care and effort he usually bestowed upon his productions. He was prepared to spend the time and money required to make a ‘serious film’, and began with the purchase of a hit play.
Way Down East was a melodrama about small town life that had been successful on Broadway for many years. It tells the story of an innocent country girl who is deceived and abandoned by a rich playboy. She finds a new life and a new love, but her past threatens to ruin all chance at happiness.
It was exactly the kind of moralistic melodrama that movie studios had been churning out since their earliest days.
While it had been very popular, Way Down East premiered in 1898. By 1920 it was regarded as an old-fashioned relic of a bygone era, and a poor choice for a motion picture. Griffith, however, was an old-fashioned guy.
He was drawn to this plot, filled as it was with many of his favourite elements: innocent girls, heartless men, saintly mothers, the clash of urban and rural morality, the harm caused by uncharitable piety, the repercussions of bad life choices, and the double standard that exists between men and women regarding sex and marriage. Throw in a suspenseful, perilous climax and you have all the makings of a classic D.W. Griffith film.
What sealed the deal for Griffith was that Way Down East featured Griffith’s favourite kind of heroine: a delicate, dainty, innocent young girl under threat, which was a ‘type’ that his biggest star – Lillian Gish – could play to absolute perfection. In fact, she was put in jeopardy so frequently that one newspaper critic proposed the creation of a ‘Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Lillian Gish’.
I’d like to give you the plot of Way Down East in more detail, as a quintessential melodrama but also a time capsule of an era that was coming to a close in 1920.
The story: Anna, a poor country girl, visits her wealthy (and snooty) city cousins.
Attending her first party, Anna comes to the attention of rich womanizer Lennox Sanderson. She falls hard for his flattery, but is far too proper to meet him alone.
Unable to seduce her, Sanderson resorts to a sham wedding ceremony, insisting their marriage be kept secret. Anna believes herself legally wed until he admits the truth, abandoning her when she becomes pregnant.
Penniless and alone, Anna endures the heartbreak of her baby’s illness and death, only to be evicted by her scandalized landlady for being unwed.
Anna wanders the countryside, finally finding domestic work on the farm of a wealthy country squire.
The squire’s son David (Richard Barthelmess) falls in love with her, and while she loves him in return, she will not marry him because of her past shame. (They were different times, folks.) She can’t even tell him her reason for turning him down because she fears losing her job.
To further complicate matters, Sanderson’s country estate is nearby and he now appears on the scene, courting the squire’s niece. Finding the situation just too awkward, he demands that Anna leave but she’s got nowhere to go. He threatens to reveal her history. She threatens to reveal his, but he just laughs, pointing out she has more to lose than he does, reputation-wise:
“Oh, it’s different with a MAN! He’s supposed to sow his wild oats.”
The local gossip chances to meet a woman from the next village – Anna’s former landlady – and learns about Anna’s baby. She makes a beeline to tell the squire, who in a fit of righteous indignation throws Anna out of his home into a raging blizzard…
Anna denounces Sanderson before dashing out into the snow. David goes in pursuit but has trouble locating her in the storm.
Distraught, Anna wanders out onto the frozen river, collapsing just as the ice starts breaking up and floating downstream toward the falls.
David finds her in the nick of time and performs a dangerous rescue, jumping from ice floe to ice floe to carry her safely back to the shore.
Anna is weak but still alive. Everyone gathers round and all is put right. Cue the happy ending.
The famous sequence on the ice was added to the story by Griffith, and is very effective – even though the falls were in an entirely different location, and for some shots the ‘ice floes’ were actually made of wood.
Cheats aside, the winter weather was still a huge challenge. Billy Bitzer had to light small fires under his camera to keep it from freezing up, and poor Lillian Gish trailed her hand in the cold water for so many takes that it pained her for the rest of her life.
It is due to fine acting all around that this creaky old plot turned out so well. Even the hokiest yarn can be elevated if it feels real. In a true melodrama the sensational plot takes precedence over detailed characterization. Griffith’s Way Down East is unusual in that, though the plot is classic melodrama, the characters are for the most part well-developed and complex.
The villain of the piece, played effectively by Lowell Sherman, is despicable but still has pangs of doubt and remorse, and is surprisingly decent at the end.
The squire, who acts so heartlessly in the last act, is also kind and loving, and later regrets and makes up for his mistakes.
The town gossip is cruel and petty, but she’s like a member of the family and even has her own romantic subplot.
The virtuous characters are less fully developed but still ring true. The squire’s merciful wife is played by Kate Bruce, who knew what she was doing, having played hundreds of saintly mothers in Biograph shorts over the years. (Yes, I mean hundreds. They made three flickers a week in those days!)
The squire’s son David is another simplistic character, but Richard Barthelmess was always exceptional at playing well-meaning, intense sincerity (even in those island pictures), and his David is totally believable.
In the end, however, it is Lillian Gish who carries this film. Only 26 but already a master of silent film craft, she conveys a full range of nuanced emotion and thought through every expression and gesture. Anna is a fully rounded and real character every step of the way, growing wiser and more mature with every trial she undergoes. The scenes with her baby are especially heartbreaking.
(An aside here: This weekend I happened to rewatch the 1955 thriller ‘The Night of the Hunter’, in which Lillian Gish out-badasses Robert Mitchum. It’s a fantastically beautiful, chilling and weird film I highly recommend. Plus: Lillian Gish!)
Griffith was famous for his massive historical epics, but he also had a quieter talent for portraying early century rural American life. His old-fashioned moral sense fit his small town stories best. Simple, steadfast heroes and heroines in simple narratives of longing and heartbreak, supported by eccentric townsfolk, and all played out through the changing seasons of beautifully shot landscapes. Way Down East revels in all of this, from old men snoozing on the porch to the chatty sewing circle, to wintry carriage rides and a very rowdy barn dance. There’s still a fair bit of outrageous mugging from the comic sidekicks, but in general the humour is more character-driven and less forced than in Griffith’s island pictures. And thankfully there are no characters in blackface! (See previous post.)
As dated as it was, the film was still too racy for Pensylvania. The Film Board there insisted many scenes be cut, including the mock wedding and honeymoon, with the result that the baby appears out of nowhere, and the storyline no longer makes sense. They also asked that the intertitle about ‘sowing wild oats’ be removed, as well as shots of women smoking. (City women, naturally.)
Griffith was certainly old-fashioned, but then so was a large portion of the movie-going public. Way Down East was a massive success, the number one box office hit of 1920.
Unfortunately, the production and release of Way Down East also coincided with two tragic deaths in Griffith’s production company.
Clarine Seymour 
Robert Harron
Clarine Seymour, just 22 years old, had recently starred in The Idol Dancer, and was to play the squire’s niece in Way Down East, when she fell ill and died after an emergency operation for an intestinal blockage.
Robert Harron, 27, was the Biograph prop boy when D.W. Griffith joined the company in 1908. Harron acted in many of his films, graduating from messenger boy parts to romantic leads by 1916. He was extremely good in Intolerance as the young husband in the modern story, playing opposite Mae Marsh. He also starred in two World War I films, and two small-town romances opposite Lillian Gish, one of which also featured Clarine Seymour. In 1920 Griffith had loaned him out to Metro Pictures in a four-picture deal, and it is likely that his star would have continued to rise.
Unfortunately, however, on the day that Way Down East had its premiere, Bobby Harron was admitted to hospital with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. He died four days later. Because of the nature of his death there were rumours of suicide, though he himself, a staunch Catholic, insisted on his deathbed that the shooting was an accident.
A memorial service was held in the fall of 1920 for Clarine Seymour, Robert Harron, and two other young film stars who met tragic ends that year. (More about them in a future post.)
Whether or not it was suicide, Griffith’s cameraman Billy Bitzer later said the tragedy was a turning point for Griffith’s close-knit troupe:
“With Bobby’s passing, some thread of unity seemed to leave us. A feeling of guilt lay heavy on all of us. It was a falling away and a breaking up of our former trust and friendship … it was never the same again.”
As successful as it was, Way Down East was in many ways the end of an era for D.W. Griffith.
SOURCES:
Gish, Lillian. The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me. (Englewood, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1969)
Schickel, Richard. D.W. Griffith: An American Life. (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1984)
Wagenknecht, Edward and Slide, Anthony. The Films of D.W. Griffith. (New York: Crown, 1975)