Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl
About Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl
Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess) leaves China to carry a Buddhist message to the West and ends in Limehouse, his plan gone. Lucy Burrows (Lillian Gish) lives with her father, the boxer Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp), who beats her. After one beating she reaches Cheng's room above his shop. He takes her in. Burrows finds her, drags her home, and beats her again. She dies in a locked closet. Cheng shoots Burrows and then kills himself beside a small Buddha shrine.
Cast & crew
More about Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl
D. W. Griffith produced, wrote, and directed it from Thomas Burke's story "The Chink and the Child" in the 1916 book Limehouse Nights. G. W. Bitzer photographed it and James Smith edited it. It premiered on 13 May 1919 at George M. Cohan's Theatre in New York and opened across the United States on 20 October 1919. United Artists distributed it. Griffith sold the film to the new company for $250,000. Another published budget is $115,000, and another box-office total is $1.25 million. The U.S. figure attached to the $88,000 budget is $600,000.
Themes
Background
Griffith made it after The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, as a smaller story set in London's Chinese district, and gave it to United Artists, the company he had just formed with Chaplin, Pickford, and Fairbanks.
In film history
The National Film Registry citation in 1996 kept it as a Griffith feature built on a Limehouse story and on Gish's performance as a beaten child.
Making
Gish later described the smile: during the take she lifted her hand and forced her lips into a fixed grin with her index and middle fingers. Griffith stopped the camera and had the gesture repeated. Bitzer said Griffith walked her through the part until she would not vary it by a flicker.
Reviews
Trade and later accounts say the 1919 reviewers talked about Gish's smile, the way she turned like an animal in a trap, and Barthelmess's restraint. A Variety reporter wrote that the beating scenes made him sick. Richard Schickel later tied the bare room and the harsh light to pictures by Pabst, Stiller, and von Sternberg. Roger Ebert included the film in his Great Movies series.
Audiences
Backers were shaken by the child-beating scenes. The picture still did the business reflected in the published rentals, and it opened United Artists' release list.
Look
G. W. Bitzer shot the Limehouse room and the closet. The shop is lit more softly than the bare Burrows room.
Music
Silent, with English intertitles. Griffith is credited on some records with the music used at the premiere.
Preservation
Selected for the United States National Film Registry in 1996. Prints circulate, including the copy on the Internet Archive under brokenblossoms1919.
Notes
- Richard Barthelmess, a white actor, plays Cheng Huan.
- Lillian Gish said she invented Lucy's smile on the set: she pushed the corners of her mouth up with two fingers.
- Kid McCoy, the former prizefighter Norman Selby, appears as a fighter. Edward Peil plays Evil Eye.
- It was the first film United Artists distributed.
- The Library of Congress placed it on the National Film Registry in 1996.
- In the 2012 Sight & Sound poll it received five critics' votes and one director's vote.
Awards
- National Film Registry, 1996
Scenes
- Lucy forces a smile by pushing up the corners of her mouth with two fingers.
- Cheng lays her in the room above the shop.
- Burrows beats her in the locked closet.
- Cheng shoots Burrows and then kills himself by the shrine.
Influenced by
- Thomas Burke's Limehouse Nights (1916)
Also available
- Internet Archive (brokenblossoms1919)
- Library of Congress
Quotes
I lifted my hand, spread my index and second fingers, and pushed up the corners of my lips.
