I’m Sorry I Made Me Cry

The consulting room I sat in that dun December afternoon in 1920 was a perfect setting for a senior Rhode Island eye specialist, and Dr. Adrian Budlong was perfectly cast in the role of the specialist. A septuagenarian with a sunken, emaciated face, and as angular as a praying mantis, Dr. Budlong bore a chilling resemblance to the mummified Rameses II, and it would not have surprised me to learn that he kept his entrails in an alabaster canopic jar under his desk. The room itself was rather like a crypt, dark and redolent of musty bindings and iodoform; behind the Doctor’s head, in the shadows, a bust of Galen just large enough for a raven to perch on scowled down at me balefully. For forty-­five minutes, Dr. Budlong, in an effort to discover why my eyelids were swollen like Smyrna figs, had submitted me to every test known to ophthalmology. He had checked my vision with all manner of graduated charts and images, made me swivel my eyeballs until they bellied from their sockets, peered endlessly into my irises with sinister flashlights. The examination, clearly, had been fruitless, for he was now bombarding me with questions that struck me as irrelevant, if not fatuous. Had I eaten any toadstools recently, been stung by any wasps or hornets? Had I wittingly stepped on a rattlesnake or serpent of any description?

“I—I swim under water a lot at the Y.M.C.A.,” I faltered. “Maybe the disinfectant—”

“Chlorine never hurt anybody,” he snapped. “Clears the brain.” With a palsied clawlike hand, he plucked the optical mirror from his death’s-­head and dropped it on the blotter. “Humph—no reason a boy of your age should suddenly start looking like a bullfrog. Have you been under any mental strain lately? What kind of stuff d’ye read?”

“Er—mostly history,” I said evasively. “Balzac’s Droll Stories, the Decameron, Brantôme’s Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies—”

“Nothing there that would affect the lids especially,” he said, with what I considered unnecessary coarseness. “Now let’s stop paltering around, young man. What have you been crying about?” Somewhere deep in my consciousness, a louver flew open and I saw the façade of the Providence Opera House, the temple where every moviegoer in town had been snuffling uncontrollably over D. W. Griffith’s great tear-­jerker Way Down East. Choking back a sob, I confessed shamefacedly that I had seen the picture three times. Dr. Budlong regarded me for a full twenty minutes in silence, patently undecided whether to have me certified or bastinadoed. Then, making no effort to conceal his spleen, he prescribed cold poultices and a moratorium on cinematic pathos, and flung me out. By an evil circumstance, the trolley car that bore me homeward passed the Opera House. Hours later, streaked with tears, and blubbering from my fourth exposure to the masterpiece, I informed my folks that Budlong had pronounced me a victim of winter hay fever. The diagnosis aroused no visible furor. By then the family was impervious to shock.

Not long ago, examining the network of laughter lines around my eyes in the mirror, it occurred to me that I was in peril of becoming a slippered popinjay. Life since forty had been so rollicking and mirthful that I had allowed my sentimental, nobler instincts to retrogress; what I needed, and pronto, was a profound emotional nettoyage. Accordingly, I downed twenty pages of Thomas Merton, the spiritual equivalent of sulphur and molasses, listened to Jan Peerce’s superbly emetic recording of “What Is a Boy?” and topped it off with a matinée of Way Down East at the Museum of Modern Art. I can get around the house passably by holding on to the furniture, but I still feel a mite queasy.

The leitmotiv of Way Down East, like that of so many early film melodramas, was innocence betrayed, virtue—doggedly sullied through ten reels—rising triumphant and kneeing its traducer in the groin. The sweet resignation with which Lillian Gish, the heroine, underwent every vicissitude of fortune from bastardy to frostbite, and the lacquered, mandarin composure of Richard Barthelmess in the face of ostracism and blizzard, have rarely been surpassed on celluloid. It was, however, Lowell Sherman, that peerless actor, who, in his delineation of the villain, copped the honors. Exquisitely groomed, a trifle flaccid, the epitome of the jaded roué, he moved catlike through the action, stalking his prey, his face a mask of smiling insincerity that occasionally let slip a barbered sneer. When he tapped a cigarette deliberately on his silver case and cast a cool, speculative glance into a woman’s bodice, you knew she would never survive the rabbit test. Sidney Blackmer, Henry Daniell, Robert Morley—there have been many able varmints since, but none quite as silky or loathsome as Lowell Sherman. They had to spray him with fungicide between takes to keep the mushrooms from forming on him.

Way Down East, billed in its opening title as “a simple story for plain people” (the adjectives would seem to be interchangeable), starts off with a windy hundred-­and-­twenty-­two-­word essay containing far less juice than pulp and seeds. Its general content is that while polygamy is on the wane, monogamy is not yet worldwide—an assertion calculated to lacerate nobody’s feelings, whether Bedouin or Baptist. The locale of the drama, continues the preamble, is “in the story world of make-­believe; characters nowhere, yet everywhere.” Having slaked the passion for universality that constantly assailed him, Griffith yielded the stage to his puppets. Anna Moore (Miss Gish) and her widowed mother, destitute in a New England village, decide to put the sleeve on the Tremonts, their rich Boston relatives. Clad in gingham and a black wide-­awake straw, Anna sets off for their mansion, bumbling into a stylish musicale they are giving and discomfiting her snobbish female cousins. In order to make character with a rich, eccentric aunt, however, the Tremonts swallow their resentment and take Anna in. Simultaneously, the girl has a fleeting encounter with her seducer-­to-­be, dashing Lennox Sanderson (Lowell Sherman), who smirks into her cleavage and earmarks her for future spoliation. We now whisk to the countervailing influence in Anna’s life, David Bartlett (Richard Barthelmess), as he scratches a pigeon’s neck on his father’s farm, adjacent to Sanderson’s country estate. “Though of plain stock,” the subtitle explains, “he has been tutored by poets and vision wide as the world.” He has also had access, it might be noted, to a remarkable pomade, which keeps his hair snugly plastered to his scalp no matter how turbulent the action becomes. The secret of Barthelmess’s hair has never ceased to fascinate me. In every picture I recall him in, from Broken Blossoms and Tol’able David to The Idol Dancer and The Love Flower, nothing ever disturbed that sleek coiffure. Cockney bruisers beat the daylights out of Barthelmess, bullying mates kicked him down hatchways and flailed him with marlinspikes, and Papuans boiled him in kettles, but he always looked as though he had just emerged from the Dawn Patrol Barbershop. Of course, there is no external evidence that his hair was real; it may merely have been Duco, sprayed on him between takes, like Sherman’s fungicide, but how they ever prevented it from cracking is beyond me.

Anna’s downfall, the next item on the agenda, is one of the most precipitous and brutal since the sack of Constantinople by the Turks. Sanderson spies her at a society rout, almost unbearably ethereal in soft focus and a cloud of tulle, and, closing in, murmurs thickly, “In your beauty lives again Elaine, the Lily Maid, love-­dreaming at Astolat.” Enchanted by this verbal zircon, Anna dimples from head to toe and implores, “Tell me more.” He obliges, with such notable effect that she ultimately agrees to a secret marriage ceremony, unaware that the parson is bogus and the witnesses fixed. From then on, the poor creature is fed through the dramatic wringer with relentless ferocity. After her return home, she finds she is gravid, appeals to Sanderson—who, meanwhile, has gone on to other amorous diversions—and discovers that she has been euchred. Sanderson callously deserts her, on the pretext that he will be disinherited if their liaison comes to light, and Anna’s mother, with typical maternal spitefulness, dies off just when she is most needed. The baby languishes from birth; when it succumbs, giving Anna endless golden opportunities for histrionics, she is expelled from her lodgings by a righteous landlady, and the first portion of her Gethsemane concludes. The least sophisticated movie fan senses, though, that his tear ducts are being permitted only the briefest respite. Better than any director before or since, Griffith understood the use of the bean ball, and he now prepares to pitch it square at his leading lady and reduce everyone to jelly.

Drawn by the peculiar magnetism that polarizes movie characters, Anna wanders to the Bartlett farm, meets David, and so generally excites pity that Squire Bartlett, his gruff, bigoted father, gives her a minor post agitating a churn. The farm hums with all sorts of romantic activity. There is, for instance, a visiting niece named Kate who is alternately being courted by Hi Holler, the hired man, and the Professor, an absent-­minded pedagogue with a butterfly net. Gusty bucolic comedy ensues when the former, daubing his shoes and hair with axle grease to enhance his charm, is struck on the head by a new-­laid egg and backs into a pitchfork. Also on hand to provoke chuckles is a rustic twosome made up of Martha Perkins, the village gossip, and her perennial admirer, a hayseed in a linen duster who quaffs Long Life Bitters. The story meanders sluggishly along for a spell, washing up tender symbols like cooing buds and bursting doves to blueprint David’s bias for Anna, and then Lennox Sanderson pops in again, this time mousing around after Kate. He berates Anna for remaining in his bailiwick and, in truly heartless fashion, orders her to clear off. As she is about to, though, David shyly confesses his béguin for her (and nobody could confess a béguin more shyly than Barthelmess, without moving so much as a muscle in his face). At length, sorely troubled, she decides to stay—a difficult decision and similar to one that I myself, by a coincidence, was having to make. Confidentially, it was touch and go.

Except for love’s gradual ripening, the next thousand feet of the film are as devoid of incident as a Fitzpatrick travel talk on Costa Rica, Land of the Coffee Bean. There is a plethora of fields choked with daisies, misty-­eyed colloquies, and orotund subtitles like “One heart for one heart, one soul for one soul, one love, even through eternity. At last the great overwhelming love, only to be halted by the stark ghost of her past.” With the onset of winter, the plot registers a sudden galvanic twitch. Just as Anna is stalemated between David’s proposal, which she cannot bring herself to accept, and Sanderson’s renewed persecutions, her onetime landlady happens into the village, recognizes her, and recounts her shame to the sewing circle. Martha Perkins, of course, instantly hurries to the Squire to apprise him that he is harboring a Jezebel, and the fat is in the fire. Anna is excoriated in front of the entire household and driven forth despite David’s protestations, but not before she castigates Sanderson as her betrayer. A blizzard, which has been picking its teeth in the wings, now comes in on cue, and enfolding the outcast, whirls her toward the icebound river. David, who meanwhile has been locked in mortal combat with Sanderson (without having his hair mussed, naturally), flattens his adversary and runs to intercept Anna; the ice goes out, she is swept to the brink of the falls, and her lover, exhibiting the nimblest footwork since Packy McFarland, saves her from annihilation. The rest of the spool portrays Sanderson, surprisingly natty after his drubbing, offering his dupe legitimate wedlock and sighing with relief when she disdains him, and a multiple marriage in which Anna and David, Kate and the Professor, and Martha and her apple-­knocker are united. So ends the morality, with no hard feelings except in the gluteus, and with that unique sense of degradation that attends a trip to the movies during daylight.

As it happens, the only known antidote for the foregoing is a double banana split with oodles of fudge sauce, and immediately on quitting Way Down East I sought one out at a neighboring drugstore. As I was burrowing into it like a snowplow, I became conscious of the soda jerker’s intent scrutiny. “Say, din I use to see you around the old Opera House in Providence?” he inquired narrowly. “I took tickets there when I was a kid.” Judging from the man’s decrepitude, I would have had to dandle Bronson Alcott on my knee to be his contemporary, but I waived the point and held still for a spate of theatrical reminiscence. At last, as a sort of tourniquet, I mentioned Way Down East and suggested he might enjoy seeing it again. He drew himself up, offended. “Listen, wise guy,” he retorted. “I may handle slop for a living, but I don’t have to look at it.” I slunk out with flaming cheeks, made even pinker by the cashier’s recalling me to settle the check. Altogether, it was a shattering afternoon. The next time my nobler nature gets the upper hand, I aim for the nearest Turkish bath.