From Intimate Talks with Movie Stars (New York: Dale Publishing, 1921), 63–70.
Strolling through the streets of old Paris, the Paris that saw the Revolution, and the head of Danton roll into the basket of the guillotine, I stopped and recalled the first time I witnessed the stage presentation of The Two Orphans, and I thought of the remark of the aristocratic Chevalier Vaudrey about having seen one of Beaumarchais’ plays1 that contained revolutionary sentiments which the police had forbidden, but the people took sides with the author, and the king was compelled to yield:
De Presles— The king compelled to yield? If that is true, royalty has lowered its dignity.
Vaudrey— No, marquis. It is the people who are asserting theirs.
De Presles— Why, if this goes on they will not be satisfied until they suppress one’s titles and privileges.
Vaudrey— That would not at all surprise me. (Picard, the Chevalier’s valet laughs.) Why, Picard, that seems to amuse you.
Picard— Excuse me, sir, but that is as ridiculous as though you were to say that one of these days the Parisians would rise and demolish the Bastille.
Vaudrey— Who knows?
Picard— What? The Bastille? Well, when that time comes everything will be upside down. They won’t even respect a nobleman’s valet.
Vaudrey— Nor a nobleman either.
Here all references to the tragic unrest that was to result in the French Revolution ends, so far as the play is concerned; but it is also into this momentous period of the world’s history that the two orphan girls enter when they alight from the Normandy coach. And it is upon this hint that D. W. Griffith has seized the comprehensive scope of the screen and used the tragic episode of Danton’s execution as part of the atmosphere in his silent version of the Dennery story. The long life and immense popularity of The Two Orphans would tempt any producer to put it on the screen, with its appealing story and the vigor and variety of its characters and incidents.
The City by the Seine which Griffith has built on the shores of Long Island Sound is an impressive collection of ancient structures, with the grim old Bastille facing the fountain in the center of the square and the keen knife of the guillotine gleaming in the sunlight at the lower end of the street, a sinister and repulsive object.
As I came through the lodge gate at the entrance of the studio grounds a hurrying crowd of French citizens were disappearing under an arch behind a rude cart in which rode a young girl, her arms bound behind her and a look of resignation on her face. By the time I reached the side of the arch the last of the excited mob was out of sight, but the voice of some one in authority could be heard urging everyone to remember that the girl in the cart was about to have her head chopped off and was not taking a ride for her health. It was not the voice of D. W. Griffith but that of his assistant. I stole around to the end of the set and glanced into the square. The famous director was standing on the camera platform, calmly smoking a cigar and giving an occasional order intended only for the ear of his second in command.
It is related of D. W. Griffith that when one of the biggest scenes in Intolerance was ready to be photographed word was brought to him that the engine which hurled the stones during the assault of the army of Cyrus on the walls of Babylon had broken down and must be repaired. Everything else was in readiness. The thousands of men and women were in their positions, the caldrons of oil lighted, and delay meant a serious expense. The situation would have driven most directors into a justifiable rage.
“How long will it take to fix the catapult?” asked Mr. Griffith.
“Half an hour,” he was informed.
“Go ahead,” was all he said. When the engine was fixed, work was resumed on the scene as though nothing had happened.
In the same unperturbed spirit he listens to criticism of himself and his pictures. Upon being told that one fault of a certain picture of his was its length he exhibited no resentment but replied smilingly: “That is said generally of my pictures. But pictures should not be restricted as to length. The development of character is the essential thing, and time should be taken to do this thoroughly. The moving picture,” he concluded, “is becoming more and more like a story by Dickens. Not Tale of Two Cities, which is drama first of all; but like David Copperfield.”
I walked over to the reverse side of the arch and presently the mob and the cart came trooping back through it and I got a smile of recognition and a wave of the hand from the blind Louise. The next instant sister Dorothy [playing Louise] hove into sight, and I was treated to another smile and a sample of her wicked little wink. There was a hurried right-about-face on the part of everyone, and then the cart went plunging ahead with its sad-faced victim; Henriette, pale and torn with anguish, and the frenzied mob bringing up the rear. It was a raw, bleak day, and just suited to the mood of the shouting mob and the tragic scene. Tragedy of this sort, deep and relentless, is where Griffith excels. Broken Blossoms is of the same order of story.
When the first three-dollar movie was shown at the George M. Cohan Theatre in New York, D. W. Griffith remarked to me:
“Broken Blossoms will do more for the moving picture than was accomplished by The Birth of a Nation. I didn’t recognize this when the picture was finished, but since coming to New York and putting the matter to the test it is plainly evident. I did not think that a simple story told in picture form and running only an hour and a half would take such a firm hold on the public, but the opening night at the George M. Cohan Theatre showed how little a man can guess the amusement business. Out West they preferred True Heart Susie. Here in New York we have had a number of the more critical sort of amusement seekers in to see Broken Blossoms three and four times, and the house has been sold out every performance.”
“So the public does not put the spectacle first after all, Mr. Griffith?”
“It certainly looks like it,” was the reply.
“Please explain in what way Broken Blossoms will benefit the moving picture.”
“It will help to classify it. There clearly is a demand for a form of screen drama that will attract a class of patrons who do not care for the regulation program. The price of admission does not weigh in the matter at all. This portion of the public is now paying $3 to see Broken Blossoms. It is related closely to the public which attends such stage productions as the Barrymores in The Jest [1919, starring only John and Lionel].
“Have you ever thought, Mr. Griffith, that there are two forms of screen fiction— the photodrama and the photonovel?”
One secret of D. W. Griffith’s success is his open mind.
“No, I never have,” he said, “but it is a good idea.”
“Would not the general acceptance of this fact enlarge the scope of the picture?” I asked.
“Very much so,” was the reply. “Like every other form of art the screen is bound to develop the specialist, who will be known for his particular brand of picture.”
“At present,” he was reminded, “directors, in most cases, have no clearly defined school of their own. They see some new thing applied successfully to the making of a photoplay and they introduce it into their next picture without stopping to find out if it belongs there.”
“We all have a great deal to learn about this profession of ours,” remarked Mr. Griffith. “An entertainment which is completed at one sitting is not like a book which can be put down when the reader pleases and picked up again when he is ready to assume his reading, and it is this which had led to the preference for the straightaway story.”
Another interested watcher that day was the Romanian poet and dramatist, Miss Adrio Val,2 who was visiting the Griffith studio for the purpose of learning how motion pictures are made in America. When the march to the guillotine was finished, Lillian and Dorothy Gish came over to where Miss Val was standing and chatted with her, while a body of troops on horseback dashed across the square and straight up to the entrance of the Bastille, in a vain attempt to ride right into the prison before the massive doors could be closed. The scene was “shot” several times, but the shouts of the horsemen and the clatter of their horses’ hoofs as they came tearing out of a side street and plunged straight ahead without slackening speed until within a few feet of the doors gave a fresh thrill to the scene every time it was repeated.
“What wonderful riders those soldiers are!” exclaimed Miss Adrio Val; “and the horses are wonderful, too: they seem to enjoy what they are doing.”
“They are all cow ponies, and the men are cowboys and stunt riders,” Lillian Gish explained.
Monte Blue, who is playing Danton, came hobbling up with the help of a cane, and something was said about a badly bruised knee, a souvenir of a nasty fall the day before, when there was also some wild riding and one of the horses slipped and threw his rider.
Mr. Griffith joined the party at this point and led the way into the studio, where there was a grateful sense of warmth, and workmen were rapidly demolishing the great hall in which Danton and Camille and their companions were condemned to die.
Danton! “With all his dross he was a man,” Carlyle says of him: “fiery-zeal from the great fire-bosom of nature herself.”
As for Monte Blue, I have Mr. Griffith’s word for it that his Danton has the “wild revolutionary force and manhood” demanded of this farmer’s son who at one time ruled France by force of his inflexible will. This day Monte was only half as impressive a Danton as he should have been. But there was a reason for it: His coat and hat and the lines of his face were those of the French leader of 1792, but his feet and legs belonged to the year 1921. Above his waist he was the famous head of the French Revolution; below his vest pockets and his Republican sash he wore the long trousers and laced shoes of the present. A time-saving sartorial arrangement popular with moving picture actors when there are only close-ups to be taken.
A walk about the studio disclosed several bits of local color in the nature of dens and parts of “The Reign of Terror” settings, not to be found in the original play. There isn’t the slightest doubt that if Adolphe Dennery were alive today, the D. W. Griffith screen version of The Two Orphans would fill its author with amazement and awe.
1. Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais (1732–1799) is best remembered as the author of the inspirations for the operas, The Barber of Seville and The Marriage of Figaro. The quoted dialogue is from The Two Orphans by Adolphe Dennery and Eugene Cormon, the source material for Orphans of the Storm.
2. Born in Romania in 1897, educated in France and entered the United States in 1921. She authored plays, novels and poetry.