Review of Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl (1919) by Justin B — 05 Sep 2007

It's odd, but while watching this, I couldn't help but apply the "Once Upon a Time in America" theory to it (i.e. the entire movie's the opium dream of a desparate man), as it seemed to fit here, what with Gish's character being an almost freakishly out-of-place ray of light in an otherwise rather hellish modern London.

At any rate, this melodramatic potboiler takes on a nightmarish quality precisely because its values and beliefs are so distant; we can (and should) bemoan its condescension and Orientalism, but these attributes, perversely enough, are exactly what give it its power; the story thus reduces itself to a fable without a moral, and imprints its horror directly onto our brains.

Perhaps I wouldn't have been so struck and so mortified by the film if I hadn't seen it in a theater where it was presented with a live ambient/industrial soundtrack and all sorts of odd theatrical touches (i.

E., at the end of the movie, a woman wearing a white dress and veil walked through the aisle, chiming a bell), and perhaps, if I'd seen it in a more objective setting, I'd only give it three stars; but what the hell--it was a great presentation, and the film was pretty damn good too.