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Lillian Gish
Richard Barthelmess
WAY DOWN EAST
From the Museum of Modern Art’s 35mm Restoration
D.W. Griffith’s penchant for Victorian melodrama reached its height of expression in WAY DOWN EAST. First performed in 1898, Lottie Blair Parker’s play was one of the most successful stageworks ever written, a theatrical chestnut, heavy with sentiment, that cried out for the touch of the master. Griffith captured the appeal of Parker’s original, while embossing it with devices borrowed from other popular melodramas, such as the climactic chase across an ice floe (inspired by stage adaptations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin).
Lillian Gish stars as a small-town girl who is seduced, impregnated, and cast aside by Lennox Sanderson, a wealthy playboy (Lowell Sherman). To escape the shame of having a fatherless child, Anna changes her name and starts a new life in a small farming community, where she meets David, an icon of male virtue and decency (Richard Barthelmess). Their delicate happiness is threatened when Lennox arrives in town, and word of Anna’s unsavory past begins to spread.
US 1920 Color Tinted 149 Min. Full-frame (1.33:1)
Directed by D.W. Griffith
Screenplay by Anthony Paul Kelly
Based on the play by Lottie Blair Parker
Photographed by G.W. Bitzer and Hendrick Sartov
With Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess,
Lowell Sherman, Creighton Hale, Burr McIntosh
Score compiled from historic photoplay music by
The Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra
Series produced for video by Bret Wood
Contents of this restoration © 2008 The Museum of Modern Art
Music © and P 2008 Mont Alto Motion Picture Orchestra |
