Happy Birthday, Lillian Gish

While re-arranging my library, which meant removing many many books, I turned around and saw this tableau.

Not only did Lillian Gish get her start in the earliest days of cinema, helping to basically “invent” the closeup, under the direction of pioneer D.W. Griffith, she became one of the first modern-age super-stars (along with folks like Chaplin and all the silent comedians, Mary Pickford, Fairbanks, etc.). She had an innocent and open appeal, playing (often) damsels in distress. Her style was naturalistic and fresh, something one needed if the camera is going to be right up in your grill. If you watch Birth of a Nation (and if you can get past the racism and the “Yay for the KKK” ending – well, first, you should ask why you can get past it), you can see her almost single-handedly invent modern cinematic acting. The spontaneous private moments (her alone in her bedroom), the thoughtful pauses where the camera actually captures what is going on in her brain, the simplicity with which she expressed emotion. It’s not that the more declamatory pantomime-based acting style of the 19th century (and before that) is bad or “lesser.” That style was necessary in the days of live theatre where an actor had to reach the cheap seats! But with the eradication of the proscenium, another type of style needed to be developed. A style psychological and interior since the camera itself became the “proscenium” and in the new medium the proscenium could be an entire eyeball, seen in closeup, or whatever. Griffith got that. Gish was a perfect actress for this new kind of work.

So there’s that. Lillian Gish was a star in the teens of the 20th century, in films that still get play-time today (along with probably hundreds more). Griffith’s Way Down East, in 1920, is fantastic, and it includes a scene that is probably at least visually familiar to everyone, even if you haven’t seen the film. It’s a chase scene on a moving ice floe, and these two actors (Gish and the excellent Richard Barthelmess, who was so unforgettable almost 20 years later in Howard Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings) are REALLY doing all of this stuff. Screw CGI.

It is one of the most exciting action scenes ever filmed. Here’s a post I wrote about it.

Gish continued working throughout her life, although the pace slowed in the 30s and 40s. The industry had changed so much in that time, but Gish still had a powerful recognition factor. She worked in the early days of live television. If you look at her IMDB page, there are no significant gaps in time. The Whales of August was her final film, in 1987, and even then – even then – when there weren’t many left alive on the planet who had experienced her in her heyday in the teens, there was an enormous nostalgia factor about her life, her career, her presence, her stature. She was a giant.

Naturally her stuff with Griffith is what put her on the map. BUT in 1955, actor and first-time director Charles Laughton, put Gish into his creepy sui generis masterpiece, The Night of the Hunter. It was her greatest role. The film also has one of the best scenes in all of cinema, the “dueling” hymns scene, between Gish, on the porch, a Whistler’s Mother with a rifle, and Robert Mitchum, the killer waiting out in the yard to pounce. There has never been anything like this scene, before or since. Evil seems so irrevocable, yes? A force like a tornado, like night falling: it cannot be stopped. Night of the Hunter is practically nihilistic in its acceptance of Evil. But Gish’s character, a kindly old Christian lady who takes in stray children to care for them and raise them right, stands watch in the night.

The small frail female figure is the only thing keeping Evil at bay. She’s ready.

I have goosebumps just thinking about that scene.

Happy birthday, Lillian Gish!