Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 5, 1993 TAG: 9303050363
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: PAXTON DAVIS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
GOLDEN SILENTS
NO WOMAN dominated the early history of American film as Lillian Gish did. When she died last weekend at 99 (though some references give her birthdate as Oct. 14, 1896), she was the last figure who can be said to have bridged the entire history of the commercial motion-picture. Not even Greta Garbo, who personified stardom, was more influential.Only moviegoers past a certain age will have seen Gish's performances at all, and to a younger generation - always excepting those willing to sit up until the wee hours to catch a flickering rerun on television - she is scarcely more than a name.
But for film historians and lovers of film generally, she is the single greatest actor of either sex to grace the silent screen - and, though much more rarely, the talkies as well. Her career is indelibly associated with that of D.W. Griffith, the great innovator of the early movies. Together, they form the pinnacle of movie making at its most epochal.
She and her younger sister Dorothy, who also became an important Griffith actress, began on the stage, as children; but on a visit to New York to visit their friend Mary Pickford, in 1912, they met Griffith, then working at Biograph, and he put them to work at once.
Lillian seems quickly to have understood that acting for the camera was an inherently different art from acting for the stage. That understanding was complemented by the beauty of her face, especially her eyes, which were both large and expressive; and it may have been because of the intensity of her facial qualities that Griffith began to move the camera in closer than had been the custom. In any case, the "close-up" was born, a means of conveying emotion without the overwrought flailing and exaggerated bodily gestures that were part of the equipment of most actors.
Between them Griffith and Gish created something new, and between them there existed - and there remained - a symbiotic grasp of the screen and its possibilities that let them advance its range and power.
Among many others, she made for Griffith, in those early years, "The Birth of a Nation" (1915), "Intolerance" (1916), "Hearts of the World" (1917) and "Orphans of the Storm" (1921); and what most consider her greatest film of them all, "Broken Blossoms" (1919). In the last, she is brutally beaten to death by her father, Donald Crisp, in a scene so believable that after it was shot Griffith said to her, "My God, why didn't you warn me you were going to do that?"
Later, for other studios and other directors, she gave memorable performances in "La Boheme" (1926), "The Scarlet Letter" (1926) and what many regard as the finest film of her career, "The Wind" (1928).
On screen she was the very image of purity and innocence, and she confirmed that impression off screen as well. There was no marriage. There were no rumors, no scandals; and she left Hollywood in 1930 over a private dispute with the legendary Irving Thalberg, who proposed to invent a scandal to heighten her box-office appeal. The era of Garbo, Joan Crawford and Clara Bow had arrived.
On the Broadway stage, Gish triumphed in "Hamlet" and "The Three Sisters," among others, then made a triumphant return to the movies in the character parts she was to play, now and then, for the rest of her long life. The most important of those was what critic David Thomson calls the "WASP fairy godmother" in Charles Laughton's only movie as director, "The Night of the Hunter."
But she was always, however much she underplayed, an incandescent screen presence, and she can be glimpsed at odd moments in "Duel in the Sun," "Portrait of Jennie," "The Unforgiven," "The Comedians" and - her last bow - "The Whales of August," made only six years ago.
"Integrity" is an attribute or character shamelessly thrown around these days to describe the shabbiest riffraff of politics, sports and entertainment. But no word more fittingly describes Lillian Gish and her undeviating devotion to her art. With her death, not only the movies but all the arts lose something precious and irreplaceable.