Way Down East
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Way Down East is a 1920 silent film directed by D.W. Griffith and starring Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess.
Contents
Plot
The rich, portrayed by Lennox, think only of their own pleasure. Anna is a poor country girl whom Lennox tricks into a fake wedding. She believes that it is true. When she is pregnant, he leaves her and she has the baby, named Trust Lennox, on her own. When the baby dies she wanders until she gets a job with Squire Bartlett. David falls for her, but she rejects him due to her past and then Lennox shows up lusting for Kate. Seeing Anna, he tries to get her to leave, but she doesn't, and she tells no one about his past. When Squire Bartlett learns of her past from Martha, the town gossip, he tosses Anna out in a snow storm. But before she goes, she fingers the respected Lennox, as the father of her dead baby and the spoiler of herself. [link]Background
D.W. Griffith bought the film rights to the story, originally a stage play by an writer named Lottie Blair Parker. Performed in the late 1800s, it soon became one of the most popular plays in the US. It toured successfully across the US for ten years, but was considered outdated by the time of its cinematic production in 1920. Although it was Griffith's most expensive film to date (costing him $175,000, more than the entire cost of his 1915 classic The Birth of a Nation), it was one of his most commercially successful films.[link]Way Down East is the 4th highest grossing silent film in cinema history, taking in more than $5,000,000 at the box office in 1920.
The re-release was cut to 107 minutes.Trivia
- Norma Shearer has a bit part in one scene.
- The waterfall seen in long shot at the climax is Niagara Falls, a site unrelated to, and far from, where the ice floe rescue scenes were shot.
- The ice floes seen at the climax drifting above and going over the waterfall were actually wood constructions, as the scene was shot out of season. The waterfall itself was only a few feet high, going no further down than what is seen at the bottom of the film frame.
- The scenes on the ice flows were not only very dangerous to film, but for at least for Lillian Gish, they had lasting ill effects. Until the day she died, her right hand was somewhat impaired, due to the extended filming where her hand was in the icy water.
- While there is a lot of inter-cutting in the editing, the basic ice floe scenes were filmed in White River Junction (Hartford Village), Vermont during the late winter.
- During the filming of the ice floe scenes, a fire had to be built underneath Billy Bitzer's camera in order to keep it warm enough to run.
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All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.