Broken Blossoms or the Yellow Man and the Girl is an 1919 film directed by D.W. Griffith and starring
Lillian Gish, a tale of love between a Chinese man and an English girl, and very different from the far better-known
The Birth of a Nation.
Chen Huan, a young Chinese man leaves his native homeland for the shores of England, as a missionary hoping to spread the teachings of Buddha. However, London quickly chews him up and spits him back out again, and he finds himself running a shop and drifting through opium dens. However, a chance meeting with the young Lucy Burrows, the abused daughter of well known boxer Battling Burrows, leads the two of them to fall in love. But when her father finds out, their love quickly turns into tragedy.
This film is in the public domain and can be viewed in its entirety at
Google Video
.
This film contains examples of:- Abusive Parents: Battling Burrows, who abuses Lucy both verbally and physically, and eventually kills her.
- Actual Pacifist: Originally, Chen is one; he tries to stop two sailors from fighting, quoting The Golden Rule.
- Almost Kiss: Twice, Chen leans in to kiss Lucy, but seeing her draw back refrains.
- Blood from the Mouth
- Break the Cutie: Chen and Lucy.
- Broken Bird: Poor, poor Lucy.
- Broken Smile: Lucy forces herself to smile like this several times, including while dying.
- Buddhism
- Chastity Couple: Chen's love is "a pure and holy thing". Enforced: even though Chen is played by a white actor in yellowface, an interracial makeout session would have been too much for most people to take in 1919 America. And Lucy is only 15, after all.
- Dawson Casting: 26-year-old Lillian Gish playing 15-year-old Lucy, though it works for her rather well. In the original short story, Lucy is 12, but Griffiths knew that only a child actor could pull off the role of a 12-year-old, and didn't want to traumatise a kid by making her act the part of the badly mistreated Lucy.
- Downer Ending
- Driven to Suicide: Chen at the end.
- Drowning My Sorrows: Chen visits opium dens because he's depressed.
- Fake Brit: Technically, Lillian Gish, but since it's a silent film, it doesn't make much of a difference.
- The Golden Rule: At the beginning of the movie, Chen quotes this as a precept of the Buddha's to two white men who are fighting.
- Kill Em All - The three main characters all die.
- May-December Romance: More like May-September, as Chen is still a young man.
- The Missionary: Chen wants to be one, but he fails.
- Missing Mom - Lucy's mother, who simply handed her over to Battling Burrows as an infant, and never came back.
- Opium Den: Chen starts spending time in these after things go bad in London.
- Stalker with a Crush: Chen, though he's harmless.
- A Taste of the Lash: Battling Burrows regulary beats Lucy with a whip.
- The Un-Smile: When Lucy is ordered to smile by her father, she pushes up the corners of her mouth with her fingers.
- Wide-Eyed Idealist - Chen starts out as one.
- Yellowface: The Chinese characters are played by white actors.
- Yellow Peril - Subverted, in that all the Chinese characters, even the sinister looking "Evil Eye", are actually nice people, and the villain of the film is the white Battling Burrows.
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