Broken Blossoms

American filmmaker D .W. Griffith essentially invented the template for what it means to be a director. He set the standard for the scope, vision, technical prowess and even polarizing popular opinion every great director from Orson Welles to Paul Thomas Anderson has embraced as part of his own ethos. Griffith is best known for two iconic, epic-length films, "Birth of a Nation" and "Intolerance." The first, inarguably one of the most controversial movies ever made, is a sympathetic view of Reconstruction-era southern United States that has long been blasted for its perceived racial insensitivity and Ku Klux Klan sympathies, while the second is a response to criticism of "Nation" with epic depictions of fictional and historical intolerance.

"Broken Blossoms," which celebrates its 90th anniversary this year, isn't on nearly the same grand-scale as either of these earlier films but it retains much of what is simultaneously admired and reviled about America's first great director. Released three years after "Intolerance," "Blossoms" sets the same polarizing eye on Anglo-Chinese relations that "Nation" used to hone in on white-black relations in the post-Civil War South, often with the same effect.

Cheng Huan (Richard Barthelmess) is a Chinese missionary who travels from his native country to London to spread the teachings of Buddhism. After a few years, though, Huan is beaten down by the violent and sordid people in the city. When he is not presiding over a shop selling Chinese curios, Huan occupies himself in the opium dens and brothels of London. He is jarred from his complacency one day when he comes across Lucy (Lillian Gish), a young girl who lives in tenement housing not far from Huan's shop.

Lucy comes from a broken home. She is the daughter of an arrogant, abusive boxer, Battling Burrows (Donald Crisp), and a former girlfriend of Burrows' who has seemingly abandoned both of them. Lucy spends her days bowing to her father's every whim, living in constant fear that one of his beatings will end her young life.

After an evening where Battling takes out his frustrations on Lucy particularly harshly, Lucy wanders the streets looking for shelter. Huan finds her collapsed on the floor of his shop and immediately nurses her back to health. In Lucy, Huan finds a purity he has not seen since coming to London and becomes transfixed. However, when word is relayed back to Burrows about the location of his daughter, the pugilist's rage precipitates the film's tragic third act.

Peculiarly for Griffith, Huan and Lucy's story unfolds over a very modest hour and a half, rather than the three-hours-plus of "Nation" and "Intolerance." The smaller scale helps makes the relationship between the two protagonists feel more intimate and relatable, something Griffith rarely achieved with his other films. And, though Huan and Lucy amount to little more than stereotypes (or, at best, archetypes), they still feel like actual characters, rather than placeholders for thoughts, feelings and ideas. Gish, in one of her many excellent collaborations with Griffith, truly brings Lucy to life, making her vulnerability, anguish and rare moments of happiness spent with Huan alternately touching and haunting.

"Blossoms" is another Griffith film that narrowly treads the rather delicate line between racially charged storytelling and flat-out racism. The case for the former is somewhat damaged by the costuming for Barthelmess, who can look Chinese from afar but loses the desired effect to a laughable degree during the thankfully infrequent close-ups. The unavailability ? and, probably, unacceptability ? of actual Chinese actors in the