Broken Blossoms (Kino) (1919) Rating: Starring: Richard Barthelmess, Lillian Gish, Donald Crisp Director: D.W. Griffith Category: Drama, Classic Studio: Kino Video Subtitles: [None] Length: 90 mins     "Unforgettable One of those lucky congruences of talent and timing." - Richard Shickel, D.W. Griffith D.W. Griffith reached a pinnacle of expressiveness in this tender yet tragic tale of love and suffering in the seedy Limehouse district of London. Richard Barthelmess gives a sensitive portrayal of a Chinese man who travels to England to spread the pacifist teachings of the Orient, but it is Lillian Gish who illuminates the screen. In this, the most heart-rending performance of her career, she plays a fifteen-year-old street urchin who longs to escape her miserable existance. Emotionally scarred by the torment and neglect of her abusive father (Donald Crisp), she collapses in the shop of the lonely and disillusioned "yellow man." As he tenderly nurtures her back to health, an unspoken romance flowers between them, awakening in each of them feelings of love they thought themselves forever denied. In some ways, BROKEN BLOSSONS was Griffith's respnse to critics of THE BIRTH OF A NATION, an effort to clear himself of lingering charges of rasism. However, cinematic convention forbade physical intimacy between the two races. With this in mind, Griffith took what might have beeen a bold interracial romance and transformed the two races. With this in mind, Grifith took what might have been a bold interracial romance and transfromed it into something more ethereal...a form of cinematic poetry that engages the viewer through minute gestures and changes of expression, meticulously choreographed and gracefully asssembled.