Most folks are, I would imagine, at least cursorily familiar with D. W. Griffith and his infamous 1915 film Birth of a Nation. Griffith is of tremendous importance above all because he is popularly believed to have been the first director to consolidate into his films all the miscellaneous elements we tend to consider crucial to modern cinema, especially the various stratagems grouped under the designation “continuity editing” and the expressive use of the closeup (especially with respect to his actresses). Anybody who knows about Birth of a Nation probably knows that it is a racist travesty that celebrates the Ku Klux Klan, sympathetically representing both lynchers and lynchings themselves. If you have not seen the film it is probable that you are not prepared for how unspeakably, shockingly vile it actually is. Many audiences and/or individual viewers at the time of the film’s initial release felt that way, even if Birth of a Nation was a massive, highly profitable event on a national scale. We tend to call the United Sates, like most modern nations, polarized, which I believe is the incorrect word; it is divided, complicatedly and in any number of often contradictory ways, always has been, and Griffith both capitalized on and suffered for it, producing a violently divisive cinematographic epic. The fact was not lost on the man himself, and we can surmise that he had certain misgivings. More an exploiter of market potential than any kind of ideologue, Griffith is widely considered to have conceived of his 1919 film Broken Blossoms as in large part a corrective measure, telling as that film does the sympathetic story of a Chinese immigrant in London who is the target of racist white neanderthals. Broken Blossoms features Griffith’s favourite movie star, Lillian Gish, as a young waif, herself the victim of abuse, who befriends the Chinese immigrant portrayed by Richard Barthelmess in what was then commonly called “yellow face.” Let us leave aside the many ways in which Griffith’s efforts to mitigate more than credible charges concerning his racism are themselves appallingly racist. Let’s focus on Lillian Gish, the waif, twenty-six years of age at the time of the film’s release, but still suspended within the amber of her screen persona, which, like that of her contemporary, the Canadian-born Mary Pickford (just over a year Lillian’s senior), was a persona dependent on a vertiginous suspension between girlhood and womanhood. You could make a case that this is in fact exactly what a waif is. I always assume the idea is that young men are supposed to want to marry Lillian Gish as means, essentially, to the affording of an opportunity to play dolly with her, her being perceived (strategically) to be made of porcelain; part of the nobility of the whole deal is supposed to be that you save her from sexual violence in order to consign her to a gentler form of bondage ratified by Church and State. Griffith was himself both obsessive and possessive when it came to Lillian Gish. I think we can consider that a pertinent addendum. Part of the reason Gish and Pickford are made to exist suspended between girlhood and womanhood is simply because the concept of the teenager does not yet exist. Fundamentally a construction precipitated by the underhanded machinations of the advertising industry, the teenager of the postwar era, ideal citizen of the 1950s, is a particular and historically unique form of disposable income. We already see it happening in the curious and pretty terrific 1947 film The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, starring over-forty Cary Grant opposite teenaged Shirley Temple, but of course it is Nicholas Ray’s immortal CinemaScope/Technicolor extravaganza Rebel Without a Cause that truly consecrates the ascension of the American teen. One cannot escape making mention of the fact that Mr. Ray is generally believed to have engaged in sexual relations (and gotten high) with all three of his young principles, namely James Dean, Sal Mineo, and Natalie Wood. Between Lillian Gish and the kids of Rebel Without a Cause, we have the story of the gifted star of stage and screen Marion Davies who I recently watched in the wonderful Blondie of the Follies (’32) and who was forced (probably not without a good deal of her own complicity) to throw away her career in order to play mistress and house pet at Xanadu to media magnate William Randolph Hearst. In the Epilogue to Blondie of the Follies we are provided the token happy ending, though we may have cause to worry that the recently maimed Blondie, already self-medicating and a born party animal to boot, in all likelihood has a life of alcoholic abjection and woeful dissipation ahead of her. Ah, but worry not, William Randolph Hearst to the rescue! This is a man around whom all are expected to remain compliantly teetotal lest they wish to excite his famous wrath. It has been averred—by no less than Gore Vidal in one notable instance—that the detail about Welles’s Citizen Kane that most vexed Hearst relates to the matter of “rosebud” having purportedly been the man’s term of endearment for Davies’ genitalia. Both Marion Davies and Rebel’s Natalie Wood are fixtures in lurid stories of Hollywood death connected to yachts of varying proportion. In the case of Natalie Wood the death was sadly her own, and there are many still inclined to place the suspicion on her husband, the movie star Robert Wagner, certain also that witness Christopher Walken has not told us all he knows. Marion Davies is connected to the death of Thomas Ince, the dubious scuttlebutt having long been that the insupportably sloshed Ince may have made passes at her and subsequently been made to answer for it. You may wish to check out Peter Bogdanovich’s 2001 picture The Cat's Meow in which Kirsten Dunst plays Davies, Edward Herrmann plays Hearst, and Cary Elwes plays Ince. Though I must confess to not having myself seen the Bogdanovich, let me just add, on a personal note, that as an approximately ten-year-old boy on a road trip to California with my family in what would have to have been 1989 or 1990, I was more consummately taken with both Redwood Forest and William Randolph Hearst’s Xanadu than I was with Disneyland.
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