Pauline Kael on Way Down East.

Pauline Kael's Review of Way Down East

Way Down East (1920) - The plot is Victorian, but the treatment is inspired. D. W. Griffith took a creaking, dated stage melodrama and turned it into a melodramatic epic.

Lillian Gish is the girl betrayed by Lowell Sherman and eventually rescued from an icy river by Richard Barthlemess. Audiences giggle at bits here and there, but not at the sequence in which she refuses to part from her dead baby.

Griffith stole from Thomas Hardy, but he stole beautifully. One of Griffith's greatest box-office successes, and a film that influenced several Russian epics. (The play by Lottie Blair Parker and Joseph R. Grismer was so popular that Griffith paid $175,000 for the right to adapt it.) Silent, b & w.

Date originally published unknown

Lillian Gish in Anya

Anya Playbill signed by cast member Constance Towers. Towers later married actor John Gavin ("Psycho." "Spartacus," and Ambassador to Mexico in the Reagan administration.) Lillian made her singing debut in this short run production. "Little Hands" was included on the album and can be found on YouTube. This is one of the few Playbills on which Lillian appeared in costume.


Jim Patterson
2015