Review #403: 'Way Down East' (1920)

Anna (Lillian Gish), is a poor country girl who arrives at her rich auntie's mansion to ask for money. The spoiled, womanising Lennox Sanderson (Lowell Sherman), is bored with seducing upper-class girls and becomes infatuated by Anna. Seeing that she a moral, God-fearing woman, Lennox proposes to her and arranges a sham marriage. Anna becomes pregnant, only for Lennox to reveal his scheme and kick her out, and Anna's baby dies. Lost and emotionally damaged, Anna wanders to a nearby farm, ran by Squire Bartlett (Burr McIntosh) and his scripture-quoting wife Mother (Kate Bruce). Squire's son David (Richard Barthelmess) falls for Anna, only for Lennox to show up lusting after another girl.

It's hard for me to bring myself to criticise and evaluate a work of D.W. Griffith. As questionable as his political and racial views were, he is one of cinema's true innovators, and even here, back in 1920, he employs an early Technicolor process and an eye for epic cinema. Yet the film hasn't dated well at all, and the religious and moral preaching, and the over-use of title cards, makes the film ridiculously old-fashioned and tedious. This is Griffith's ode to the idea that God created one woman for every man, and states it is a story of women everywhere, who suffer at the hands of men's selfish womanising. It's quite hard to swallow morality lessons from the man that made The Birth of a Nation (1915), a film that glamorised the Ku Klux Klan, and made black people out to be nothing more than loutish animals.

Yet the film does display Griffith's film-making ability, especially in the famous climax that shows David rescuing  an unconscious Anna from an ice flood. It even holds up today, with the lack of CGI effects or actors on wires making it even more impressive, and it's all captured beautifully by Billy Bitzer and Hendrik Sartov's cinematography. And Gish, one of the most successful and hard-working actresses in film history (and one of the few survivors of the death of the silent era) is exceptional. Her timid Anna is beaten down at every turn by the amoral upper classes, who, in Griffith's eyes, are defying God with their whoring and luxurious, indulgent lives. Yet overall, at 145 minutes, the film drags, especially when Griffith shifts his concentration on various supporting sub-plots, that play out like intrusive and uninteresting vignettes. Certainly worth seeing for some fine technical work and the captivating Gish, but not a film I can see myself needing to watch again.


Directed by: D.W. Griffith
Starring: Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, Lowell Sherman, Burr McIntosh
Country: USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie