Gish of the day… Broken Blossoms (1919), Donald MacKenzie, Regent Street Cinema

My second Gish this week and I've seen two excellent performances from Dorothy and Lillian that could hardly be more different.

This was DW Griffith in his peak run, following up Intolerance with a tale of inter-racial love, brutish intolerance and steadfast faith in gods and each other. Apparently, it was Mary Pickford that recommended Eltham-born Thomas Burke’s book of short stories, Limehouse Nights (1916) to Griffith and Broken Blossoms was based on the story, The Chink and the Child… alliteration can get you many places but, this case, it can’t guarantee your title will stand the test of time.

Burke was not impressed with the end product but DW took his outline and delivered an intense, close-quarters song of love and hate that was probably the only way he could go after Babylon. The set is shrouded in pea-soup fog and maybe it pre-figures German films of the twenties and even Film Noir with its foreboding atmosphere and singular lack of a guaranteed happy ending.

Lillian Gish

Those Germans may have had Emil Jannings but America had perhaps the greatest physical actor of the generation in Lillian Gish, a woman who generates such frailty that you doubt she’ll make it through the film. From the outset, her character Lucy – supposedly a teenager – is so weak she cannot even raise a smile. She was delivered onto the doorstep of her father, boxer Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp with cauliflower ear painfully folded over like a pasty!) by one of his former lovers and has had to endure his disdain for all the intervening years.

Burrows isn’t a battler he’s just a brute and he treats his daughter like dirt. Lucy waits on him and has to stand by to see if there will be any food left over for her to eat. She is so beaten down she cannot stand straight and the only way she can force a smile is by using her fingers to push the edges of her mouth up…. imagine a life so full of unrelenting sadness that smiling is physically unlearned?

Donald Crisp

You can well understand why Griffith took a number of months to finish the film in post-production, he confessed that he couldn’t look at “…the damned thing; it depresses me so.” Yet finish it he did and it is one of his most complete and revered films.

That said, this is DW and so we must confront the anachronistic elephant in the screening room… but what’s it doing there I hear you cry, you only get elephants in India? Whilst there are actors of Chinese origin in the film, the lead role and other key parts are played by white actors with quite horrible make up. We are at a point here between Sessue Hayakawa and Anna May Wong and it was deemed that Richard Barthelmess would make for a more acceptable hero as Cheng Huan than an actor requiring less make up...

He does a decent job through the goop and it’s just one of those 100-year old things you have to try contextualise; a bit like the Elizabethan boys playing girls in Shakespeare, the British Empire and, in the far future, a multiple bankrupt, TV personality being US President… that sort of thing.

Richard Barthelmess

Cheng is shown at the film’s start preparing to take his faith to the West and encountering American sailors having a wild time in the Chinese port in which he lives. Griffith goes out of his way to set up Cheng’s Buddhist background with a frequently referenced shot of temple bells and is at pains to stress the sincerity of beliefs every bit as heartfelt as those in the West.

Cut forward a few years and Cheng is a weary walker in East London streets, leaning against the front of his shop as he relives how his attempt to bring a new faith to aggressive Anglo-Saxons has turned sour. He survives in London’s notorious Limehouse (before it was riddled with City financiers) and having chased one dragon too many lives a disappointed life as a gambling, self-medicating shopkeeper.

Living in terror

But Cheng hasn’t lost his good nature even if he has been worn down. He watches Lucy often in their street and loves her from a far, seeing the beauty that all of Limehouse ignores. After one particularly savage beating, she literally falls into his doorway and he helps her recover. There are some sweet scenes between the two as gifts are given and affection grows even though Lucy is alarmed by one close encounter as The Yellow Man (cringe) pulls out of an intended kiss.

This is too early for an interracial happy ending (see above) and sure enough, Lucy is spotted and her father told. He has a big boxing match across the river but once he’s done with his opponent he’ll be right over to meet out further punishment...

Barthelmess and Gish

Against this harsh, unrelenting force, the flowers that signify and surround Lucy and Cheng seem so hopelessly futile and, of course, blossoms are the most fleeting of all flowers. Cheng describes Lucy as his White Blossom and Gish acts as much like a spring bloom as any person could, her presence being even more insubstantial and fragile than usual – she is almost too painful to watch.

Lucy's interaction with her thuggish father has Gish conveying a hopeless mix of sadness and terror through her forced smiles: the actorly equivalent of rubbing your tummy, tapping your head and hopping on one leg… all submerged deeply in character. Barthelmess is unfortunately little more than a prop in their scenes together – well I wasn’t watching him - whilst Lillian exhibits her full range of tender intricacies. Victorian child-woman and all those things Griffith wanted her to be, Lillian Gish still dazzles with her virtuosity: her talent outshining her director.

An horrific moment as Lucy tries to avoid another beating

Donald MacKenzie accompanied on the Regent Street Cinema’s organ and showed just why he is one of the leading players in the UK. The organ is so evocative of the picture house past that it works in different – very specific - ways to piano which has a more timeless feel. To play beyond the audience’s tonal expectations requires narrative awareness as well as sensitive technique and Mr McKenzie has clearly mastered both. After a while you forget about the sound and just feel along to the music and the bells … and the whistles!

The print was not the best but there’s exciting news of a new restoration emerging from Paris – Silent London has an update on this and other treats in store in her latest podcast. Broken Blossoms is another tricksy Griffith film for us 21^st Century folk but for Billy Bitzer’s camerawork, DW's cinematic vision and Lillian's guts this is one I would like to watch again and with the new Carl Davis score!

Primal screen… Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1920), with Donald MacKenzie on the Troxy Wurlitzer

This was a first for me; the chance to hear a silent film accompanied by a Wurlitzer organ an instrument synonymous with the form. Being a native Lancastrian (in old money) I have, of course, seen organs rise up in front of cinema screens in Blackpool (certainly) and Liverpool (probably) but only as a lad and never playing a soundtrack. The Wurlitzer makes a sound queasily nostalgic and also undeniably genuine: the authentic sound of populist entertainment. If Hans Zimmer and Thomas Newman were around in 1920, this is how they’d make themselves heard…

The mighty machine at Limehouse’s Troxy was originally installed in its sister cinema the Trocadero cinema at the Elephant and Castle and has been relocated and restored over a six year period. It has four keyboards, 1,728 pipes and effects including – actual - drums, cymbals, xylophone, glockenspiel, marimba and piano. This is the silent sound pallet with, again actual, knobs on!

The Troxy opened with a film about a large gorilla in 1933 and organist Donald MacKenzie played the theme from King Kong in his introductory medley. It’s one of the great London cinemas – it had  3,500 seats – and has been used for a variety of cultural purposes in recent years  and, like Kentish Town’s Forum, Brixton’s Astoria (now the Academy) et al. as a venue for bingo and then that thing they call "rock" – I was here last to watch Canadian post-rock ensemble, Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

But now the flickers are back and tonight was the first time an organ had been played for a life time. The Troxy was set up in style with a proper queue, ushers in uniform (a bit like Emile Jannings in The Last Laugh) and pie and mash for the locals: it felt like an alternate universe combined with a time-slip… and the place was pretty full, and with an audience that respected the material.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has long been on my watch list and didn’t really disappoint aided by Mr MacKenzie’s mastery of improvisation organ which propelled the story to its breathless conclusion. There are some flat sections – not helped by over familiarity with Robert Louis Stevenson’s story – but John S. Robertson directs well and Barrymore is, of course, a monster.

Filming was on stages constructed in the Amsterdam Opera House on 44^th St. Manhattan,  so that JB could carry out his stage duties on Broadway in the evening – no rest for the wicked: that was at least three roles he was playing.

Brandon Hurst tempts John Barrymore

John Barrymore plays Dr. Henry Jekyll a visionary doctor who fixes the poor during the day and researches the furthest possibilities of human biology in the evening – more duality. He’s romancing Millicent Carew (Martha Mansfield) the daughter of Sir George Carew (Brandon Hurst) a man who has experienced most things in life and uses his wiles to shelter his daughter and to cynically forge his way in the world.

Miss Gina, “Italian artist”

He can’t believe that Jekyll is the do-gooder he seems and sets out to tempt him to taste the forbidden fruit of naughty Nita Naldi or Miss Gina, “Italian artist” as she is known here, an exotic dancer in a seedy club “gentlemen” frequent. Faced with Miss Gina, Jekyll can well see Carew’s point but he breaks away integrity intact.

Sir George tells the Doctor that the easiest way to get rid of a temptation is to give into it… and this is one of a number of Wildean moments in a film that also draws on Dorian Grey as well as The Strange Case…

Back in his lab Jekyll muses on the possibilities of having cake and eating it: what if you could isolate the bad from eth good in a separate persona? It’s slightly flawed logic as the same person is still performing the acts but… it’s a near-perfect way of eradicating guilt and blame. Writing before Freud, The Strange Case… was published in 1886; Stevenson was writing an allegory partly based on an actual case of split personality. Modern amateur psychologists can have a field day…

Mr. Edward Hyde makes his initial appearance without the assistance of make-up as Barrymore contorted face and body to disturbing effect. Hyde goes back to find Miss Gina, kicks over inconvenient children and is generally unpleasant in personal hygiene and deed.

Martha Mansfield and John Barrymore

Jekyll has him under control initially and proposes to Millicent in the optimistic assumption that civilised life carries on but the door has been opened and his alter ego keeps on coming back and every time he is worse…

As the organ swirls every more violently the narrative whips up a storm and, well, you probably know the rest… The tale is well wrought though and Roy F. Overbaugh’s cinematography is also to be commended for turning those Manhattan street sets into London after midnight.

Mr Hyde busy ruining lives... in dives.

But it's Barrymore that makes you believe... that self-confessed mixture of "talent, a glass and some cracked ice" was most definitely heavily-laced with the former.

A Stan Laurel spoof, Dr. Pyckle and Mr. Pryde (1925) was shown before the main feature and was a slightly patchy affair that actually made a lot more sense after we’d seen the main feature. Must re-watch!

Doctor Pyckle

This was silent cinema returning to the people in a manner I’ve not seen before. We didn’t have the pie and mash but next time we’re down the Troxy we’ll go for the full-East End.

Watch the Troxy for details of up-coming events and check out Amazon for DVDs of the film – the Kino edition should be decent (?) but the print we saw could do with a restoration.

Donald MacKenzie's site has details of his busy schedule - he's playing the organ at Ally Pally soon.

A queue stretching around the block!