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Lillian Gish: Sisters
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Lillian Gish is the daughter of a rich Italian count who is killed in a fall from his horse. Though Lillian stands to inherit a large estate, her older half-sister burns the will and ... inherits the property herself, throwing Lillian into poverty. Fortunately, she is engaged to marry the dashing officer Ronald Coleman, but he is captured by Arabs on an expedition to Arabia. Dedicating her life to his memory, Lillian becomes a nun, unaware that her lover has escaped his captors and returning to Italy! The climax takes place against a backdrop of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
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Lillian Gish worked onstage as a child actor with younger sister Dorothy. Began in films, with Dorothy, in 1912 for D.W. Griffith at the Biograph studio in New York. Continued working for Griffith after he established his own production companies. Began making films for independent company Inspiration Pictures in the early 1920s. Signed a contract with MGM in the mid-1920s, which carried her through the majority of the 1920s.
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[E]ven the great Lillian Gish wasn't spared from the generation change. New faces were demanded and film offers became more rarely. In the 20's she only took part in nine movies, among them "Orphans of the Storm" (21), in which she acted at her sister's side and gave a great performance, "Romola" (24), "La Boheme" (26), "The Scarlet Letter" (26) and "The Wind" (28).
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More suffering was ahead: as “Little Miss Yes’m’” in The Greatest Question (1919), Gish is an open-mouthed, dim victim who covers her doll’s eyes before she undresses. Her ridiculous purity incites the base lust of a hulking older man and she gets whipped by his evil sister (but not before pleading with her to have mercy, ad nauseam). In Way Down East (1920), an epic melodrama, Gish has two big moments: the death of her illegitimate baby and the famous long sequence where she is stranded on an ice floe. The first scene is classic Gish, a silent scream, and the ice sequence has been used to show her extreme (masochistic) devotion to her art: she almost went right over a waterfall. Gish is always praised for her courage, yet Griffith is never taken to task for risking her safety to get his silly climax. Some sharp social observation on smalltown life cannot make Way Down East into anything more than an empty spectacle and a Gish showcase filled with familiar effects.
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Gish had a bad experience with her next two movies, made for Inspiration Pictures. In her unusual contract, she received 15% of the profits, perhaps because she was one of the company's financial backers. After appearing in The White Sister (1923) and Romola (1924), Gish had questions about the finances for the first film. Her inquires led Charles Duell, president of Inspiration Pictures, to claim that she had promised to be his bride. Gish sued and won, her reputation remaining intact. Free of Inspiration, Gish signed a six picture contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer worth about $800,000 to $1 million in 1925.
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Gish studied literature and philosophy, fencing and dancing to prepare her mind and her body for acting. She practiced with the Denishawn Company of Los Angeles, which produced Martha Graham among other famous modern dancers. Similar to Bogart's expressive face... Gish's eyes and mouth were her primary instruments of communication. Upon hearing that her lover has been killed, in The White Sister (1923), she delivers the gaze that is found in so many of her films: wide-eyed, vulnerable, distant, and tragic. (The intertitle describes her as being in "a trance-like state of dry-eyed despair.") Some of Gish's most powerful moments on film occur when her stoic suffering gives way to an expressive panic. In the climatic scene of Broken Blossoms, she flings her body around a tiny room and expresses on her face all of the fear and terror of someone who is about to be beaten brutally.
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