BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Drama	Menu Audio Biographies - Cast and Crew
Rating
Year Released	1919
Running Time	88:49 minutes (not 69 minutes as stated on packaging)
RSDL/Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region	1,2,3,4,5,6	Director	D.W. Griffith
Studio Distributor	Force Video	Starring	Lillian Gish Richard Barthelmess Donald Crisp  Arthur Howard Edward Peil  George Beranger Norman Selby
Case	Transparent Amaray
RPI	$32.95	Music

    This is the story of a peace-loving Buddhist by the name of Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess) who after seeing how westerners acted in his native China, decided to head to the West to spread the word of Buddha. His idealistic journey sees him resident in the Limehouse district of London, where he becomes disillusioned with his fellow man and descends into the world of the local entertainment. Sustaining his existence is a small shop that he owns. Not far away is the residence of local boxing identity Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp), a xenophobe who intersperses his bouts in the ring with bouts with the bottle and women - for which he is roundly castigated by his manager (Arthur Howard). Such castigations usually saw his frustration being taken out on the nearest object, which generally meant his adopted 15 year old daughter Lucy (Lillian Gish). Now Lucy is the unrequited love of Cheng and after a particularly savage beating she manages to stagger as far as his shop before collapsing. Cheng takes her in and with acts of kindness to which she is not at all familiar, nurses Lucy back to some semblance of health and bestows upon her small gifts and clothing of great beauty. However, when Battling Burrows finds out that his daughter is with the Chinese man, he goes berserk and heads to the shop, where he finds Lucy. After destroying Cheng's modest abode, he drags Lucy off home where he gives her a beating so savage that she dies. Distraught by what he discovers, Cheng exacts the price of Lucy's death upon Battling Burrows before finally taking his own life.

   The story is very simple, but that is not really the point here. What D.W. Griffith was trying to achieve went way beyond the story, and to reach those goals he needed a great performance from his leading lady. Lillian Gish has been variously described as the greatest American actress of all time and the greatest female star of the silent film era, amongst others. If you want to know why, then you need look no further than this film. Whilst I could wax lyrical about her performance, perhaps I best leave that to someone who can do it so much better - the noted film critic from the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert, in a rather interesting retrospective look at the film. Certainly she carries this film, but then again she did most films she appeared in. However, D.W. Griffith still found the time to insert some interesting takes on what makes a "heathen" here, and in the end goes some way to firmly dispelling the notion that he is a racist.

   Broken Blossoms is superb melodrama that is not going to be to the tastes of all. It takes a little while to get into the film, but the last forty minutes are as powerful as anything you are likely to see in film and this is an absolute must for fans of the silent era and good melodrama. Of course, we are talking about an eighty-one year old transfer that is well past its prime, but just ignore the snowstorm and concentrate on the film.

Video

    There are obviously limitations to what we can generally expect in a film of this age, and to be blunt this is perhaps no worse than we have every right to expect, all things considered. That is not to say however that it is a good transfer, for certainly there are plenty of things awry here. First and foremost is the slightly inconsistent transfer, which has segments that are quite sharp and well-defined, whilst there are others that are quite diffuse and ill-defined. Overall, this is a decent enough transfer for the age of the material, which by the way does not seem to have had anything much in the way of restoration done to it. Overall detail is a little variable too but is pretty much what I was expecting - reasonably adequate and not much better, with some scenes being literally unwatchable. The noticeable issue here is the rather poor shadow detail at times, so that anything that moves out of centre stage runs the risk of disappearing into the background. I don't think the description of clear is appropriate here although it has to be said that grain was not a great issue here and neither was low level noise. Definitely a transfer that looks eighty-one years old, albeit a reasonably sprightly octogenarian.

    This transfer is described as tinted. I am not sure that that simple word adequately describes the breadth of the tinting used here. I would suspect that this is not the original tinting, as it covers about seven or eight different colours ranging from dullish yellow to quite bright purple. It does take some getting used to the tinting at times, especially the purple, but the general feeling of the underlying black and white film is quite good with a reasonable degree of definition in the colour scales.

    There did not appear to be any significant MPEG artefacts in the transfer, nor did there appear to be any significant film-to-video artefacts. However, the extent of the snowstorm raging in the transfer is something of a sight to behold. Most of it is in the form of copious dirt marks, regrettably of the bright white variety, but just for good measure there are plenty of scratch marks and blotches thrown in as well. This is really a very dirty transfer in that respect and perhaps the worst of the very early Force releases I have seen. However, it has to be said that such is the power of the film that it is possible to blot out the distraction of the film artefacts and enjoy the film, unless you really, desperately have to have a pristine print - which I doubt even exists in this case.
 
 

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain
Film-to-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The silent dialogue comes up terrifically in the transfer with absolutely no problems whatsoever in not being able to hear it nor understand it. There is a shocking lack of audio sync in the silent dialogue soundtrack, but this probably will not cause too many overall problems for the viewer.

    The original music score is uncredited as far as I could ascertain from the DVD. It is a fairly typical silent movie soundtrack that does enough to pull the right strings when the melodrama really needs it, and fill in the melancholy bits with the right tone of music.

    The main issue with the soundtrack is that it appears to suffer a little from distortion throughout, as well as being just a tad congested at times. This is what suggests that this is actually an early soundtrack, and not a re-recorded effort. Since the overall need for the music is to your personal taste, the problem with the soundtrack is either devastating or barely an issue. For me, it is not much of an issue as I tend to turn the volume down a little for silent films and at a lower than normal listening level the effect of the congestion and distortion is much reduced. There is of course no surround channel nor bass channel use here at all.
 
 

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

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© Ian Morris (have a laugh, check out the bio)
19th December 2000