Orphans of the Storm [DVD] [1921] [Region 1] [US Import] [NTSC]

From the days when his once revolutionary style was seeming rapidly outdated, D.W. Griffith's last film with the Gish sisters and his last popular success, Orphans of the Storm does not see him at his best. As Orson Welles says in his TV screening introduction that's included on Kino's DVD, it's the kind of film that was old-fashioned even when it was new, a remake of The Two Orphans, a theatrical warhorse since the 1870s that had already been filmed twice and which also saw a German version produced the same year. A Dickensian stage melodrama filmed on a lavish scale, the scene setting is initially abrupt, the performances for the most part wildly overplayed, characterisation one-dimensional, the plot contrived and the sentiment laid on thick to little genuine emotional effect. It's not a terrible film, more a mediocre one, but it's hard to escape the feeling that a mere six years after shaking up the industry with Birth of a Nation, he's just stuck in a creative rut making the same film over and over again and making it a little bit worse each time. There's no great innovation here of his own and, worse, he's rejected the innovations of lesser directors who were making better films.

As far back as Intolerance Griffith had been increasingly disillusioned with cinema, regarding the theatre as a more legitimate art form that was less in thrall to the demands of censors and commerce but also believing that the audience themselves dragged cinema down to a mere diversion, and there's certainly the sense of the director pandering to what he perceives as the lowest common denominator with plenty of bacchanalian revels, be it lascivious drunken aristos or lascivious drunken peasants, as well as plenty of low comedy of the sword-up-the-jacksi variety. The plot, for all the obstacles he hurls in his heroines' paths as they suffer at the hands of aristos and revolutionaries alike, is hardly challenging either, with Lillian and Dorothy Gish as adopted sisters - one born to impoverished peasants, the other unaware of her true identity as the child of an aristocrat left on the steps of Notre Dame after the father was killed for not being of suitably noble breeding. When Dotty goes blind after an offscreen outbreak of plague, the two travel to Paris for a sight-saving operation only for Lillian to be kidnapped by a randy aristo and the helpless Dotty to fall in with thieves led by Lucille La Verne's moustachioed harridan who sees her blindness as a chance to strike it rich on the begging circuit. Naturally events conspire to keep the two girls apart for the rest of the picture, Lillian falling for Joseph Schildkraut's compassionate aristocrat while the saintly Danton and `the pussy footing Robespierre' (as the film repeatedly refers to him) hang around on the sidelines as revolution draws inevitably closer.

Lovers are separated, hopes dashed, prisons and trials endured before it all ends in another one of the director's patented desperate rides to the rescue, this time with Danton leading the cavalry rather than the Klan to save our heroine from the guillotine, but this time it's all starting to feel a bit tired and contrived, never really gripping the way you feel Griffith could have done only a few years earlier. Technically it's also surprisingly inconsistent, with a dissolute aristocrat's midnight revels alternating between night shooting and bright sunlight, but it's the crudity of the script that's the bigger problem. Once again attracted to a period of great turmoil and social upheaval, Griffith's attempts to liken the French Revolution to the Russian Revolution and the alarmist 20s threats of Bolshevism and anarchy spreading Stateside is clumsy stuff, not helped by his depiction of Danton as France's Abraham Lincoln, striking many an anguished theatrical tableaux as his glorious revolution goes bad in a truly terrible performance by Monte Blue (though he does have one nice comic moment where he pats Robespierre on the head like a favorite puppy dog after a rabble rousing speech).

The film does work from time to time, but the overriding impression is of a director constantly taking two steps back from his best work and churning out a formula he doesn't much care for any more but has worked enough times at the box-office in the past for him to feel he's giving the public what they want - which may have been true in 1921 even though audiences were soon to tire of it. There's a definite feeling of a director trying to stop the clock and recapture past glories rather than create new ones. It's worth a look if you're interested in Griffith's work or silent epics, but it doesn't really do the director or the historical period much justice, making it a hard film to get genuinely excited by.

Of the various DVD versions on the market, Kino's 149-minute print doesn't have the original color tints and many of the captions are replacements but is good but not outstanding quality, featuring the original 1921 score and a very decent selection of extras - the aforementioned introduction by Orson Welles, a short silent film Rescued from the Eagle's Nest, featuring Griffith in his acting days (though he's credited as Henry B. Walthall on the reissue print used here, which is of such poor quality you won't be able to make out his face), footage of Griffith's funeral and a 25-minute radio eulogy by Erich von Stroheim, stills gallery and a 1916 photoplay interview and article built around Intolerance.

"Orphans of the Storm" is the last great box-office success for direct D.W. Griffith and arguably the most melodramatic of his best films. Set on the even of the French Revolution the titular characters are the fabled sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish who have to endure all sorts of traumas as the bloody Reign of Terror consumes Paris. Basically we have too parallel stories between which "Orphans of the Storm" moves back and forth. On the one hand we have the plight of Henrietta (Lillian), the poor little peasant girl, and Louise (Dorothy), her blind "sister," who was abandoned by her upper class mother. On the other we have the growing discontent of the rabble with the aristocracy ("Poverty murmurs ominously outside the gates," as one title card puts it). The two plot lines are put on a collision course when Henrietta falls in love with Chevalier de Vaudrey (Joseph Schildkraut), an aristocrat with a noble heart (he distributes bread to the starving masses). Of course, this will matter little once the guillotine gets going. But before that the key event takes place when the two sisters arrive in Paris so that Louise can undergo an operation that would restore her sight. Henrietta is kidnapped because of her beauty by the lecherous Marquis de Praille (Morgan Wallace), and her blind sister is taken in by gypsies, at which point the melodrama is on in deadly earnest.

The Gish sisters are the stars of this film; their names do not appear in the opening credits; they are reserved for when the pair make their first appearance. But this is really Lillian Gish's movie, even more so that Griffith's. He provides the grand sets and human spectacle, especially once the revolution begins, not to mention the periodic denouncements of bolshevism, but the emotional moments all belong to Lillian, especially the scene when she hears her sister's voice for the first time since their separation. As long as she is on screen you pay attention, but when the story goes back to the other plot threads slowly coming together your mind can start to wander, and it is her performance that makes the melodrama palatable. After all, this is a film where her starving father goes to the church to abandon her and ends up bringing two babies home. The close calls that almost reunite the two sisters are such that you could easily see this 1921 silent film being recut as a serial.

The special features for this Kino on Video DVD that is part of the Griffith Masterworks series includes a filmed introduction by Orson Welles; a portfolio of rare Griffith photographs of the directors and his starlets; "Rescued From the Eagle's Nest," a 1908 film that stars Griffith as an actor; "The Story of David Wark Griffith," a biography published in "Photoplay" magazine in 1916; footage taken at Griffith's funeral; and a radio eulogy of Griffith by fellow director Erich von Stroheim. Based on Adolphe d'Ennery's play "The Two Orphans," this film runs 150 minutes and features the 1922 score by Louis F. Gottschalk & William Frederick Peters given a modern arrangement and performed by Brian Benison. "Orphans of the Storm" would not qualify as a great silent film, but Griffith's hand and Lillian Gish's performance is enough to ensure it is considered a classic. I know that Mary Pickford was America's Sweetheart, but I find that hard to believe every time the camera lingers of Lillian Gish.