Broken Blossoms (dir. D.W. Griffith, 1919)

1. There must be few things grimmer than watching an enraged man unprovokedly and inexplicably beat a helpless woman, even (or especially?) circa 1919. I can't entirely explain if my reaction is not one that does not run along racial or gendered lines (ah, the double negatives). For sure, there is an issue of fairness: it is never fun watching the strong beat up the weak. Yet, along the gendered line, I can't admit to not watching women kill off men with a certain sense of satisfaction: Anne Parillaud in Nikita, Famke Janssen in Goldeneye, Uma Thurman in Kill Bill... Along the racial line, on the other hand...well, I didn't feel a thing watching Uma Thurman and Daryl Hannah slug it out in Kill Bill, but while my companion guffawed and chuckled as Queen Latifah and Kimberly J. Brown brawled in the ladies room in Bringing Down the House, I couldn't quite do the same. There's something about a black woman engaging with a white woman in this manner - it's comic, sure, but there's also something darker underneath which I couldn't quite place (and anyway the whole film's depiction of race relations is interesting to the extreme, it being a movie with Steve Martin notwithstanding). I am reminded of the line from (and I know I've described her thus before) the almost sickeningly talented Zadie Smith's fabulous first book, White Teeth - on the hows and whys of the unfortunate end of the torrid affair between Samad Iqbal and Miss Poppy Burt-Jones (viz, the Indian man and the English woman - yes, another inter-racial relationship, while we are at it!), it eventually boiled down to this: "too much bloody history."

2. I would never have guessed that Broken Blossoms would be an astonishing forerunner to so many other classic cinematic motifs, most notably:

(i) the hack-through-the-bathroom-door (Lillian Gish even has more than a passing similarity to Shelley Duvall!);

(ii) the inter-racial romance (I am consistently reminded of a quote I once read as spoken by a fellow countryman, about how he theoretically has "no problems" with inter-racial marrying but nonetheless will never allow his children to marry inter-racially because there is "a reason" why "bloodlines" should be kept "pure" - I kid you not. He would probably have an apoplectic fit, then, watching this film, and this is from 1919!!!, which kind of shows how far THTC has progressed);

(iii) the use of boxing as a visual epithet for violence and an ironic statement on manhood (cf countless subsequent boxing films like Rocky, Raging Bull, Rocco and his Brothers...);

(iv) the alternating between two sequences of action, viz Battling beating Lucy to death and the Yellow Man rushing along the Limehouse docks to save her, which is actually alot more thrilling than it sounds (anything to save the piteous Lillian Gish!);

3. And then, finally, there is the shockingly innocent racism - at one point, the intertitles asks, as Lillian Gish gazes gratefully at the Yellow Man: "Why are you so nice to me, Chinky?" to which for one second I simply could not react. If Todd Haynes's Far From Heaven "desires an anachronistic spectator", Broken Blossoms makes one too consciously aware how anachronism - ergo racial inequality, relatively speaking - can also be a very bad thing.