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16 out of 16 people found the following comment useful :- Slow, Stately, and Magnificent, 2 January 2008 Author: drednm
WAY DOWN EAST was an old-fashioned melodrama even in 1920 when D.W. Griffith decided to film it. It's the kind of story that leaves itself open for spoofing, but Griffith approaches the story of a "mock marriage" and its aftermath with earnestness and a great eye for detail.Aiding Griffith in bringing this story to life are three great stars: Lillian Gish as Anna, Richard Barthelmess as David, and Lowell Sherman as caddish Lennox. The supporting cast includes New England "types" that almost parody Dickens. Kate Bruce is the staunch mother, Creighton Hale the ditzy professor, Vivia Ogden the town gossip, Burr McIntosh the intolerant squire, Emily Fitzroy runs the hotel, etc.The story of love, betrayal, tolerance, and redemption is slow moving and has (as usual in a Griffith film) subplots, but like the very river, all the actions and events slowly come together for the finale that left 1920 audiences in a frenzy. Indeed the ending is among the most famous in all silent films.Gish is quite beautiful here. In her opening scene she is in her parlor with her mother making a broom, holding up the straw so that we see only her white cap and large expressive eyes. She's stunning. As Anna she goes through the gamut of shy maiden, young lover, wronged woman, timid servant, and town jezebel. Barthelmess is solid as the young and innocent David who falls in love with the servant girl.Their final scenes in the blizzard (filmed on Long Island in a real storm) on the icy river (filmed in White River Junction, VT) are totally amazing. And they did not use stunt doubles. As Gish lies exhausted on the piece of ice she may or may not know that it's heading for the falls. There are scenes were her hand and hair trail in the icy river. Just amazing. Barthelmess uses the breaking ice as a trail so that he can reach Gish before it's too late. There are several shots where he falls off the ice or the ice breaks under him and he plunges into that wintry river. The entire sequence is as thrilling today as it was in 1920.Gish once wrote that her long hair froze solid from being in the river water and snapped off with the ice.WAY DOWN EAST is a great film.
10 out of 12 people found the following comment useful :- Fabulous and Frustrating, 17 January 2005 Author: Randy Bigham (lucileltd@aol.com) from Texas
This enormously successful film lives up to its legendary reputation. But it's also disappointing. The atmospheric splendor of the cinematography and the melancholy mood set by the original musical score (on the Kino Video release) lull the viewer into the sense of reverie essential to appreciating this charming representation of countrified America facing the encroachment of big city evils.The story is well-told by director D.W. Griffith, and the moral message of Woman's spiritual virtuosity is exploited without the sermonizing of some of his other pictures. There is a sensitivity and naturalness exhibited in the unfolding narrative of Way Down East and a graceful style seen in none of his other epic-scale ventures. In bringing the sweetness of his famous one-reelers to a major feature film, Griffith captured an almost magical tone and ambiance that distinguishes Way Down East as a masterful piece of intimate storytelling, rivaling Broken Blossoms (1919) in its intensity and sheer beauty.However, it must be said that Griffith's sideline excesses in plot development are many and varied, hindering the progression of the central tale of Anna Moore's struggle to escape her past and search out a new life. Annoying bits of slapstick humor, totally at odds with the romance and tragedy of the main story, are indulged in while overly sentimental touches, like long, wistful close-ups, are equally aggravating. Though otherwise superbly acted by Lillian Gish (Anna), her role is marred by the fact that some of her more emotional scenes are unnecessarily drawn out by Griffith. This is particularly true in the sequence of the death of Anna's illegitimate newborn.Richard Barthelmess, as David Bartlett, Anna's sweetheart and savior, is outstandingly effective, as is Lowell Sherman as the decadent cad Lennox Sanderson who deceives Anna. Not all of the supporting cast was as competent or convincing, due largely to out-of-place comedic impersonations. One huge stand out is Mary Hay who leaps onto the screen with a refreshing vivacity. The wit she imparts to her small role is the only really clever humor in the movie.Long-forgotten today, but much discussed at the time, was the cameo appearance in the movie's prologue of popular New York society girl Mrs. Morgan Belmont, who played Diana Tremont, one of Anna's snooty Boston cousins. To do justice to her part, as well as to form an exciting contrast to the pastoral images to follow, Griffith went all out in the costume department, hiring top fashion designer Lucile (Lady Duff Gordon) to design glitzy gowns for the garden party and ball scenes.Despite some errors in continuity, Way Down East's celebrated climax of Anna's rescue from an ice-flow as it drifts toward a roaring waterfall, is perfectly paced and as thrilling as it must have been to audiences in 1920. Considering the limited special effects of the day, the scenes are amazingly realistic. Gish lying unconscious on an ice cake as it zooms to destruction, her arm trailing in the current, is one of the most familiar silent film shots, even to people who know next to nothing about the genre, and although it has become almost cliché, its power is undiminished. As a story, Way Down East is both fabulous and frustrating but its photographic beauty and emotional resonance are almost unparalleled in the Griffith oeuvre.
7 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :- Still a Gripping, Absorbingly Real Drama After 80 Plus Years, 28 March 2003 Author: Ralph Michael Stein (riglltesobxs@mailinator.com) from New York, N.Y.
Today's films dissect with the latest pseudotheories and experimental science every aspect of human relationships. Technology run wild turns the screen into an advertisement for a future we ought to be wary about. How refreshing it is to stop the clock and enjoy D.W. Griffith's "Way Down East." A friend who loves silent film lent me her tape last night and I've seen it twice, putting aside for four hours everything from nonsense at work to the grim reality of war in Iraq.D. W. Griffith's name comes to the fore most frequently, and not necessarily in a complimentary light, with often polarized discussions of America's history as depicted in movies, especially with regard to race. "Way Down East" doesn't touch on historical themes but he does candidly and openly explore moral issues that in his time were either evaded or resolved with harsh condemnation of those who strayed from the path of religious dogma-inspired righteousness.The wonderful Lillian Gish is Anna Moore, who loses her mother and seeks, being bereft of money, shelter from rich relatives. A very familiar story (most recently brought to the screen in the latest adaptation of Dickens's "Nicholas Nickleby"). Taken in, albeit grudgingly, by a rich aunt and treated with lighthearted contempt by two sisters, she meets Lennox Sanderson, played by Lowell Sherman. Sanderson is a cad, a seducer of innocent virgins. Rather than the sneering evildoer so familiar to devotees of silent films, Sherman invests his role with a mixture of cruel cunning and stupid incomprehension of the harm he causes to Anna. He stages a mock wedding to get her into bed and subsequently abandons the pregnant Anna. The depth of his acting starkly brings the shallowness of his character to life.After losing her baby, Anna is taken in as a house servant by a sanctimonious farmer who blindly adheres to the literal letter of biblical law. Of course his wife is a near saint. What next? A love interest for Anna which she spurns, believing herself unworthy of a good man's attention. Richard Barthelmess, who brings a manly but compassionate character to life, chases Anna demurely and respectfully from parlor room to - ice flow adrift in a raging torrent of water approaching (music increases in tempo) a waterfall.Anna's peril on the ice is one of the most famous silent film scenes and almost eighty-five years later it still works. Largely that's because no one - no one - could film a scene like that as did D.W. Griffith.Incidentally, in a barnyard dance scene is a very young Norma Shearer.A remarkable film that holds a viewer's rapt attention (mine, at least) and which proves both the sometimes superfluity of words to tell a story and the lasting legacy D.W. Griffith gave us.10/10.
6 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :- Griffith knew his stuff, 4 December 2006 Author: rensamuels from United States
I just finished watching Way Down East. It was extremely powerful and moving. Gish is at her best, and while she may take getting used to if you've never seen her before, because she is a bit twittery, she is also a unique beauty with enormously expressive eyes and nervous mannerisms that make her perfect in this role as the poor innocent done wrong by the sophisticated older man. Like they say, the story's as old as the hills, and I was surprised but pleased at the happy ending, considering she had a baby out of wedlock--usually women were punished in the old films, even if it wasn't their fault. Little things like Richard Barthelmess petting a pigeon on the head, blossoms bouncing gently in the breeze, the play of light at sunset through Gish's hair as she stands by the river.... There's an appreciation of the beauty of nature and the gentle aspects of the human soul that's not much seen anymore. Just watching the men haying in the fields, the old barn dance, a horse and sled heading down a long avenue of tall trees is a pleasure, a record of days gone by that we don't get much chance to see anywhere else. Of course Gish floating down the river on the ice in the denouement is a classic. I highly recommend this film to any sensitive movie-lover.
6 out of 6 people found the following comment useful :- Gish brings it home, 12 October 2001 Author: Rainsford55 from Melbourne, Australia
Lillian Gish and fellow co-stars really bring home this great drama. It's interesting and exciting and wonderful to watch. Surely a legend of the 20th Century, Mr Griffith outdid himself with this successful film and Gish can only be praised for a great performance. Her pain and despair can be felt in the scene's where she realises she's been 'betrayed' and she nurses her child while he slips from this world. It's acting at it's finest for no words were necessary, it's all in 'the look'. Certainly 10 out of 10, but if I were to make one comment about this film in the negative, it would be it's length. Perhaps 15 to 20 minutes too long. Otherwise it's majestic.
5 out of 5 people found the following comment useful :- An old fashioned melodrama with a universal message, 23 July 2006 Author: barhound78 from United Kingdom
*** This comment may contain spoilers ***
D.W. Griffith followed up the majestic Broken Blossoms with this epic melodrama. The subtitle, "A Simple Story Of Plain People", tells only half the story. Way Down East is a parable with simple values told on a bravura scale. At the time of release the story Griffith offered seemed out of kilter with a society on the cusp of a decade of decadence. However, the Victorian messages of tolerance, charity, understanding and forgiveness seemed more pertinent than ever. And as much as the film is an affirmation of love, honest living and general goodness, it is also takes a swipe at the puritanical aspects of Christianity. It became one of the highest grossing films of the 1920's. The story is one of hardship and of suffering. Anna Moore (Lillian Gish) is a naive country girl sent to stay as a "poor relation" with her cousins in the city where she falls under the influence of a cad Lennox Sanderson (deliciously played Lowell Shermann) who sets up a false wedding and tricks the infatuated Anna into sleeping with him. Inevitably, Anna quickly falls pregnant and Sanderson absconds leaving her to face her fate alone. And it is a terrible fate. She returns home but her mother soon dies and then, in one of the films most poignant scenes, the illegitimate newborn child that will be her curse dies in her arms in a boarding house. It is soon realised that Anna has no husband and she becomes a pariah; unable to find work and told to leave her board. She is forced to wander to find work and, finally, she stumbles across a farm owned by the puritanical Squire Bartlett. At first he turns Anna away, but his wife speaks to him of Christian scripture and they take her in. She lives a blameless, hardworking life with the Bartletts and slowly finds herself falling in love with the Bartletts son David (Richard Barthelmess) but the cross she bears prevents her from giving in to her feelings. This is only amplified when she discovers that Sanderson owns an estate adjacent to the Bartletts and he puts pressure on her to leave. However, her secret is only eventually when she is recognised by her old landlady. She is cast out into the blizzard by the Squire but not before she exposes Sanderson (who is present) as the architect of her doom. Wandering into the freezing night she finally passes out on a drifting glacier leading to one of the most exciting and jaw-dropping climaxes of Silent cinema. Way Down East was a labour of love for Griffith. The photography is some of the finest he was to ever produce whilst he waited for the seasons to change and for nature to flourish in order to capture and represent the changing moods and emotions of his characters. Similarly, the final moments on the ice floes of the Mamaroneck river is one of the great location sequences. Gish herself (who died in 1993 aged 99) never regained full feeling in her hand from having it draped in the icy water for so long. This film is open to accusations of being old fashioned, but I feel anybody who levels such claims would be missing the point. This is melodrama of grand proportions and it carries within it messages and morals that are universal and timeless. And when these messages are carried by an actress as mesmerising and as dignified as Lillian Gish then, as Way Down East undoubtedly proves, no amount of generational drift can render them obsolete.
6 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :- Flashes of Brilliance, 3 September 2005 Author: Cineanalyst
Despite the major box-office success of 'Way Down East,' Griffith, apparently, continued to have financial difficulties. His lack of sound money management is probably the major reason for his eventual failure in the movie industry he helped create, and it likely is much of the cause of his artistic decline, as well, which I think was beginning around this time. 'The Birth of a Nation' and 'Intolerance' revolutionized motion pictures severalfold--an enormous peak for a career, doubtless, but henceforth he made some lousy, derivative and prosaic films--only flashes of brilliance, like those in this film, make the remainder of his filmography worth investigating.The $182,000 he paid for the rights to Brady, Parker and Grismer's horse-and-buggy play seems absurd, and the melodrama itself is overly sensational and ridiculous; yet, it's impressive how Griffith's inspired direction and Lillian Gish's performance somehow manage to make that not always seem the case. Many problems remain in the film. The message of monogamy (regardless of one's standpoint on the issue), the staginess and especially the comic relief add to the already inherit disadvantages of the genre. The comic relief is unnecessary, ill placed and unfunny; it undermines much of the picture, which is overlong as a result.As for Gish, this has to be some of her best acting. Aside from the competent and (this time) careful film-making, she is the saving grace of the film. She is pitiful and beautiful--composing Griffith's ideal woman. She rises above the story-lines that require her to faint four times.There's a particularly picturesque scene where Richard Berthelmess's character first admits his attraction to Gish. And, I always like when Griffith rallies against busybody gossipers. The most acclaimed sequence, however, is, of course, the film's climax, including the great ice-break scene, which has Richard Barthelmess saving Gish from death (thankfully not rape this time). It is an exceptionally well-edited and photographed dénouement--one of the more memorable and exciting moments in film history. Too bad it and the other virtues of 'Way Down East' lie beside their conversely negative parts.
7 out of 9 people found the following comment useful :- Gish Suffers Nobly, 3 January 2006 Author: brocksilvey from United States
"Way Down East" will probably be a hard pill for many filmgoers to swallow, as it's a silent and very long, but I would recommend you give it a try, as it's also pretty entertaining.Lillian Gish gets put through her melodramatic paces by the granddaddy of modern cinema, D.W. Griffith. Griffith was a master at building his movies up to intolerably exciting finales, and this film is no exception. A classic set piece puts Gish trying to escape across a frozen river, jumping from one drifting block of ice to the next. And consider that this was in the day before special effects, and it's even quite possible that Gish did all of the stunts herself.A slice of early cinema that goes down easily if you give it the chance.Grade: A-
4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :- Who needs CGI?, 25 February 2008 Author: Michael_Elliott from Louisville, KY
Way Down East (1920) *** 1/2 (out of 4) Anna (Lillian Gish), a naive country girl travels to Boston to ask her rich relatives for some money but once there she meets a rich man (Lowell Sherman) who likes to play the ladies. Soon the rich man cons Anna into a fake marriage but when he learns that she's pregnant he informs her that the marriage is fake and he leaves her. After the baby dies, she's kicked out everywhere because people see her as an unwed mother. She lands a new job with a family but keeps her secret from everyone including a young man (Richard Barthelmess) who falls for her but soon gossip reaches the town and Anna's secret comes out.Being a huge fan of the director I'm really not sure what took me so long in watching this film. I've read countless books on the director, silent era and Gish and everyone of them have mentioned the ending to this film, which has Anna stuck on a sheet of ice while is quickly goes down river and nearing a waterfall but more on this later. The story itself deals with hypocrites in religion and one of Griffith's favorite subjects of the rich taking advantage of the poor. The story itself really isn't all that original but there's certainly magic all over the film. Lillian Gish, the greatest of all silent female actresses, turns in another marvelous performance as the poor girl who doesn't know when her heart is being played with. There's a short but heartbreaking sequence where Anna is taking care of her dying child and the tenderness and heartache in the eyes of Gish says more than any words could. The power that this scene contains is just one reason why I think silent films are more powerful than sound ones. Richard Barthelmess is also terrific as the young man who sees Anna as a virgin wife and the changes his character goes through are perfectly captures by the actor. Lowell Sherman is also terrific in his role which has to be one of the greatest villains in film history. Griffith certainly builds up the hatred towards his character and it's quite powerful. The cinematography by G.W. Bitzer is among the best of his career.You can't say Griffith today without getting into a bullshit debate about race but this is a damn shame because there's no doubt in my mind that he had the greatest mind in the history of cinema. We could talk about the battle scenes in The Birth of a Nation or we can talk about nearly any scene in Intolerance but there's no question that Griffith knew how to create suspense and really push a scene for everything it's worth. The famous scene here is the climax where Anna is stuck on the ice and it's just downright remarkable at what they were able to pull off. Various people nearly died in Griffith's 1915 and 1916 epics and that holds true here where both Gish and Barthelmess nearly died pulling off this scene. I've read countless books that talked about how this stuff was filmed but it still seems impossible that they were able to pull this off. The epic scenery and the way it's shot shows that there isn't any trickery going on, which is just downright remarkable. It really blows my mind at how Griffith could pull all of this stuff off and watching it on screen is just something truly remarkable. Apparently Gish suffered permanent injuries to her hand while filming in the cold water, which is just another reason why silent stars were so remarkable since they had to do their own stunts and without the benefit of CGI. Considering that the term "special effects" weren't into play when this was filmed, it's really breathtaking to see something like this take place. It's amazing but 88-years later I can't think of a scene that matches this.
4 out of 4 people found the following comment useful :- Melodramatic, but Gish makes it work, 5 February 2006 Author: devil_doll12 from Canada
Lillian Gish once said that she got sick of playing "gaga-babies" for D.W. Griffith and longed to play women of the world rather than innocent naïfs. She then inadvertently paid herself a great compliment when she added that it was far harder to play this sort of role than a vamp because it was far harder to make such a character interesting. Through a combination of her talent and Grifftith's direction her gaga-babies, such as Anna Moore in "Way Down East" continue to compel audiences decades later, long after many of the great vamp roles (that, ironically, were once seen as a modern alternative to Griffith's good girl parts) have been forgotten.In "Way Down East," Gish, in a story very reminiscent of Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" plays a naïve country girl who suffers, among offer things, the snobbery of rich cousins, a sham marriage, an illegitimate pregnancy and social ostracization. Such sagas of innocence abused are the sort of thing sophisticated audiences love to hate (forgetting perhaps in the real world there are plenty of cases of innocence abused), but Gish somehow makes the melodrama believable, from her joy on her wedding night (that even makes her caddish seducer feel momentarily guilty), to her grief over her dead baby and most famously her fleeing into a blizzard after a local gossip has revealed the truth of her past to the farm family that has employed her. This last part in particular could have become very contrived in the hands of a lesser actress (the ice flow scenes practically beg for snide comparisons with "Uncle Tom's Cabin"), but perhaps because Gish in general avoids over-emoting we don't get the feeling that our feelings are being milked for the sake of sensationalism but rather that we are seeing a woman whose circumstances have earned her the right to lose emotional control. Gish is also helped by a good supporting cast including Lowell Sherman as the cad and Richard Barthlemass as the decent farm boy who courts Anna ,but particularly memorable is the gossip whose open glee when she learns the truth about Anna is chilling (here as in "Intolerance" Griffith recognizes that the zeal of the righteous often has more to do with the pleasure of crucifying wrongdoers than anything else.) "Way Down East" bears comparison with Gish's better known films, but avoid the cheap Alpha DVD whose score consists of a few mournful bars of music played over and over.
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