Orphans of the Storm

D W Griffith, USA, 1921, ?? minutes

"No more gorgeous thing has ever been offered on the the screen. It has motion within motion, action within action, and it builds up to crashing climaxes with all that superb deftnition which makes Mr Griffith first and always the showman". So read one review in Moving Picture World after Orphans of the Storm premiered. After watching the film you might agree that the comments are exaggerated, yet still relevant more that 70 years after they were written. D.W. Griffith, the father of the motion picture, was directing his favourite actress, Lillian Gish, and her sister Dorothy, in this melodramatic epic set in revolutionary France.

The story has Henriette and Louise as the orphaned sisters enduring a series of tribulations designed to tug your heart strings. Louise is blind, and cruelly separated from her sister, raised by thieves, and Henriette is the sweet innocent plundered by lecherous aristocrats. It's an implausible tale, but casting that aside it's also a beautiful fairy story with an excellent climax that has Henriette facing the guillotine. Griffith and Lillian Gish together made a series of films that are truly "classic" - Birth Of A Nation, Broken Blossoms, Hearts Of The World, Intolerance, True Heart Susie and Way Down East. Most are only known to film buffs and historians, becoming slightiy creaky after the passage of time. They were all silent movies, and different to anything then or since, and Orphans is one of the best examples that captures the particular mood and magic Griffith could create.

Griffith also subtly put in an anti-communist message, with title cards like "The tyranny of kings and nobles is hard to bear, but the tyranny of the maddened mob under blood-lusting rulers is intolerable" and others that stab at anarchy and bolshevism. But he was mainly interested in making a good film that would enthrall its audience.

Review by Martin Hunt
Taken from EUFS Programme 1992-93