Griffith Masterworks 2: WAY DOWN EAST, THE AVENGING CONSCIENCE
It may not have been terribly original of Kino to include in their 2005 Griffith Masterworks boxed set the only four D. W. Griffith features that most people could name (let alone claim to have seen), but it would have been downright perverse to pass over The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Broken Blossoms, and Orphans of the Storm (the fifth and sixth discs were made up of several Biograph shorts).
With their second set, Griffith Masterworks 2, released this month, Kino has selected some genuine curiosities; each of the five films on offer here has novelty value in addition to being the work of cinema’s first genius.
Way Down East (1920), the first film in the set, is probably the only one with any kind of reputation. It fits in quite well, both stylistically and thematically, with the aforementioned films of the first set. Anna (Lillian Gish), a pure-hearted girl from the countryside, visits some relatives in Boston. In short order, she finds herself seduced by a wealthy cad, who stages a sham marriage and then, after the wedding night, ditches her. She bears his child, and then retreats to an unfamiliar village in order to start her life over.
Way Down East was adapted from a popular play, and Griffith seems to have taken this into account in his version. The staging owes much more to the conventions of theater than to his earlier films, with wide shots predominating and actors spread all over the frame. Even so, the film feels almost novelistic in scope; while Anna’s story provides a sturdy spine for the plot, Griffith mixes in several secondary (and even tertiary) characters, generously giving each actor a memorable scene or two. This, along with the lovely pastoral locations, works to paint an authentic picture of the virtuous, rural, Protestant world that was already beginning to disappear by the 1920s, one that Griffith had obvious affection for (even as he understood its limits — hence Anna’s need to keep her past a secret).
The whole thing is topped off with a mad chase over a river clogged with ice floes, probably the most famous Griffith sequence not in The Birth of a Nation or Intolerance. Way Down East is well deserving of a spot in the classic Griffith canon, and deserves the second life it will no doubt find on this release.
The second disc in the set features a three-hour, three-part BBC documentary on Griffith’s life and work, D. W. Griffith: Father of Film. The doc itself was directed by the great chronicler of silent cinema, Kevin Brownlow, and is very good, illustrating Griffith’s visual style with carefully-chosen clips. However, there is little here that couldn’t be discovered in a trip to the library or in Brownlow’s own books and although it might be a good introduction for the uninitiated, the uninitiated are unlikely to delve into a 5-DVD box of silent epics in the first place. While this is a worthy example of film scholarship, I would have preferred another movie.
Disc number three features The Avenging Conscience (1914), which may be more interesting than good, but it sure is interesting. This was released a year before The Birth of a Nation, and it foreshadows that film’s ambition, if not nearly as much of its formal skill. The Avenging Conscience claims to be based on Edgar Allan Poe’s poem ‘Annabel Lee,’ but it is actually a very loose adaptation of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’: a young lawyer murders his tyrannical uncle, stashing the body in his office. Later, during the investigation, he is troubled by spooky religious visions, as well as the ghost of his victim.
The Avenging Conscience is notable mainly for the primitive (yet fun) special effects and the slightly shabby rehearsal of some of the stylistic innovations that would mark Griffith’s later masterpieces. It’s also an intriguing relic of a time when cinema was making its first attempts at respectability; Griffith here indulges his fondness for literary pretension and highbrow symbolism in a way that, to put it kindly, hasn’t aged terribly well.
The last twenty minutes or so are one howler after another, giving us first the cliched (even by then) Griffith-standoff ending, the climax of which reveals that the entire preceding film was the protagonist’s dream. From there we follow our two young lovers into the woods, where they dedicate their love to the fauns, nymphs, and satyrs of the forest; these creatures then put in an appearance! Whatever else he was, Griffith was never boring, and seeing his imagination outpace his abilities like this is more fun than most subsequent directors’ best work.
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Tags: Classic Movies, D. W. Griffith, DVDs, Edgar Allan Poe, Kino International, Lillian Gish, Silent Films, The Avenging Conscience, Way Down East
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