In Way Down East, D.W. Griffith’s cornball chestnut from 1920, there are only about ten minutes of film worth seeing. But boy are those ten minutes thrilling! In fact, I’d be willing to state that the famous ice-floe sequence is as good or better than Indiana Jones’ desperate sprint in front of a rolling boulder.

Unfortunately, to get to that part of the silent movie you have to endure two hours of Victorian melodrama at its bloated worst. Ever the master showman, you could never accuse Griffith of being too subtle or too delicate. When we think of him (if we think of him at all these days, that is), we recall the Big Stuff: the fervent Civil War clashes in Birth of a Nation, the teeming Biblical crowds of Intolerance, the orgy of the French Revolution in Orphans of the Storm. Don’t get me wrong—Griffith was very good at the craft of excess. Sometimes, however, bombast can be tiresome.

Such is the case with Way Down East. Bear with me while I plow through the plot.

The tale, based on a play written in 1890 (that alone should give you a clue the film stinks of mothballs), is “A Simple Story of Plain People,” according to the opening title card. Anna (the always-ethereal waif Lillian Gish) is a poor country girl sent by her mother to pay a visit to some rich relatives. While at a party, she meets Lennox Sanderson (Lowell Sherman), a slimy-hearted playboy who wants her for one thing and one thing alone: sex (unseen and unspoken, but never far from Griffith’s mind). He tricks her into a false marriage, paying off some friends to act as a preacher and witnesses, then whisks her off to the honeymoon bed.

Before they tumble between the sheets, Sanderson has a twinge of guilt, but then that slimy glint quickly twinkles back into his eyes. I figure his hesitation was Griffith’s way of balancing his thirst for lurid sex with any potential audience backlash.

But more moral outrage is soon to follow. Sanderson starts to neglect Anna, feeling tied down by his fake marriage. She can’t figure out why her husband is suddenly growing distant…but soon she has more pressing matters on her mind. Yep, that’s right, folks: she’s got a bun in the oven. When she tells Sanderson the happy news, he in turn tells her the unhappy news—they were never married. Callous swine that he is, Sanderson then deserts her.

Anna has her baby, but soon it grows sickly and dies, leaving the unwed mother grief-stricken (no one does wailing and gnashing of teeth better than Lillian Gish, by the way). Ostracized by the community, Anna wanders the country roads until she stumbles up to a farm presided over by a strict, Puritanical farmer named Squire Bartlett (Burr McIntosh). The squire’s son, David (Richard Barthelmess, Gish’s co-star in Broken Blossoms), soon falls in love with Anna and—as doves coo and butterflies dance—she does, too.

Dark clouds are on the horizon, however…It’s not long before Sanderson shows up (quite by coincidence) and Anna is revealed to be a (cue the organ music) Fallen Woman. The God-fearing farmer is outraged that he’s been harboring an immoral woman in his house. He banishes Anna from the farm and, wild with anguish and shame, she plunges out into a snowstorm. David learns the truth of the matter and, after a rough and tumble fist-fight with Sanderson, he heads out into the blizzard after the girl he loves.

Now, pay attention, this is when Way Down East gets good.

Anna wanders onto a frozen river and collapses. Just then, the river ice starts to break up and she’s trapped on a chunk the size of a dinner table. Cut to David searching through the woods, holding up a lantern and calling her name. Cut back to Anna’s unconscious body on the edge of the ice floe, her hand and hair trailing in the icy water. Cut to footage of the approaching waterfall (in reality, a mill dam in Farmington, Connecticut, which Griffith shot in August). David makes it to the riverbank just in time to see Anna out in the middle of the river, swept downstream by the current. He leaps onto the ice floes and hops from chunk to chunk to scoop up his beloved Anna literally seconds before she goes over the falls.

At this point, I was seriously wondering if I’d have to go to the emergency room to have my heart dislodged from my throat.

The river ice rescue is one of Griffith’s finest moments in cinema—a perfect blend of stuntwork, cinematography and editing. The sequence is convincing mainly because it’s all very real and involves no trickery (apart from the summertime waterfall). Gish really did lay prostrate on an iceberg, Barthelmess really did hop across the river, the current really did almost sweep them both downstream.

But allow me step aside for a moment and let Lillian Gish tell you in her own words. This is how she described the scene in her 1969 autobiography:

Mr. Griffith was directing Dick from a bridge over the river, but the noise of the falls drowned out his directions. Dick, a slight young man, was hampered by the heavy raccoon coat and spiked boots he had to wear. As I headed toward the falls on my slab of ice, Mr. Griffith shouted to Dick that he was moving too slowly, but Dick couldn’t hear him. The people on the banks were also yelling frantically. As Dick ran toward me he became excited, leaped and landed on a piece of ice that was too small. He sank into the water, climbed back out, finally lifted me in his arms as I was about to go over, and ran like mad to shore. Years later when Dick and I were reminiscing, he said: ‘I wonder why we went through with it. We could have been killed. There isn’t enough money in the world to pay me to do it today.’ But we weren’t doing it for the money….

Those of us who worked with Mr. Griffith were completely committed to the picture we were making. No sacrifice was too great to get the film right, to get it accurate, true and perfect. We weren’t important in our minds; only the picture was.

While some of Miss Gish’s memories are probably clouded by hyperbole, the fact remains that those were real people out there on ice that wasn’t computer-generated and they were putting themselves at risk for the sake of cinema. Today, you wouldn’t be able to find an insurance company willing to touch Way Down East with a ten-foot pole.

While you might not want to touch the majority of the broadly-played movie with even a twenty-foot pole, those ten minutes are sure worth it.



Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: DVD