One of the Most Exciting Action Scenes Ever Filmed

It’s from D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920), starring Lillian Gish and a stalwart yet passionate Richard Barthelmess. Way Down East, even with its overlay of sentimentality about womanhood (one title card reads: “Maternity – Woman’s Gethsemene”), is a very pointed critique of the double standard. While it doesn’t have the stature (or controversy or rabid racism) of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, it is still a gripping melodrama, with a great performance by Lillian Gish in the center of it.

Theatre has an objectivity to it, because even with careful staging and lighting choices, you cannot make the audience look in any one specific place. The action on stage is taken in as a whole piece by the collective eye of the audience. With film, you can control that eye, through collage and close-up. This was the groundbreaking aspect in cinema, pioneered by people like Eisenstein (and others, including Griffith): by using collage, you could shape the narrative, control the audience’s gaze: Look here. See this. And now see this. The close-up turned film into a subjective artform. A closeup is not just an image. It is psychology. This was not immediately apparent to many early filmmakers, because the medium was so new, and everyone was making it up as they went along. Conventions of theatre were used initially, almost habitually, in early films, everything still filmed as if the proscenium arch was a given. But the imaginative ones realized almost immediately that the camera could do all sorts of things that the naked eye could not. The camera could move in close on a face. You could cut away from a scene to an entirely different location or even TIME. You could have a closeup of an object in the middle of a conversation. All of these things help you tell your story in an inventive way. It is, essentially, what the camera is for.

Presentational acting was what was appropriate for the theatre. “Presentational” means just that: emotions were pantomimed and presented, big enough to reach the cheap seats in giant theatres. This does not necessarily mean “phony”, do not get it twisted. Actresses like Sarah Bernhardt and Ellen Terry were masters of this kind of acting. Cinema brought in other requirements. The pantomimes were too big for the screen, but this was not understood right away. In theatre, you have to show that you are thinking something. Your thought has to be somehow visible to the audience. But in the cinema, the showing part is not necessary. You just need to stand there and think something, even if it’s “I wonder when’s lunch.” This is not a judgment on the old style of acting. It was just different, something that worked in one venue and not so much in the new medium. To watch Lillian Gish next to the older actors is to watch a new artform literally being born before our eyes. The other actors are uniformly excellent in Way Down East: there’s the cackling gossip, the kindly grandmother, the judgmental landlady, the caddish ladies-man. We understand their characters instantly through their broad use of pantomime and presentation. By contrast, Lillian Gish quivers with actual life in every moment, and seems to be experiencing actual emotion, and actual thought, as opposed to showing she is thinking.

When her character’s shameful past is revealed (and the film makes the point, repeatedly, that it is NOT her shame to begin with; it is the shame of the caddish man, as well as judgmental hypocritical society) she flees into the teeth of a raging snowstorm. Richard Barthelmess, who plays her admirer, runs after her. She comes across an ice-bound river, and, trapped, runs out onto the ice. It is at that moment, that the ice begins to break apart into big chunks, the chunks flowing down the river, ever faster, towards the thunderous falls. The scene is rightly famous, and deserves its place in history. Richard Barthelmess runs out onto the shifting ice floe and chases after her, as Gish careens towards certain death.

Griffith was determined to film during a real storm, with a real icy river. Gish was basically on call, and told to report to duty any time a snowflake appeared in the air. The scenes were filmed on Long Island, and also up at White River Junction in Vermont, where the river routinely freezes over. Griffith’s face actually froze at one point during filming. The camera froze, too. The temperature never went above zero for the entire shoot. Gish and Barthelmess did those scenes, over and over again, out in the actual elements. It’s CRIMINAL. But it’s good cinema!

It was Gish’s suggestion that she lie on the ice floe, with her hand and hair dangling into the water. She regretted that decision and said in an interview many years later, “After a while, my hair froze, and I felt as if my hand were in a flame. To this day, it aches if I am out in the cold for very long. When the sequence was finally finished, I had been on a slab of ice at least twenty times a day for three weeks.”

The river was frozen solid and every day the crew would dynamite it or saw at it to get the chunks of ice they wanted for the ice floe.

So when you watch the clip above, keep in mind: They are actually doing all of this. There are scenes filmed in long shot, where you can see how fast the ice is moving, and you can see the small figure collapsed on one piece of ice, or you can see Barthelmess leaping from chunk to chunk, as the floe is moving. They are actually doing all of this.

Watch Barthelmess leap from ice chunk to ice chunk. Imagine the courage and athleticism that took. Watch him pick her up in his arms and struggle with her across the chunks of ice.

This is one of the most exciting action scenes ever filmed.