Helen

Griffith and the Gish Sisters

"Griffith and the Gish Sisters
ORPHANS OF THE STORM was the last film the Gish sisters made with Griffith.
Lillian, who helped set up the Mamaroneck studio for Griffith, also found the original play. “I couldn’t tell him what to do, I could only gently suggest. Griffith said, ‘You only want me to make the story because there’s a part in it for Dorothy.’

But he liked the story and decided to do it against the background of the French Revolution to make it more of a production.”
A member of the Italian theatre was Frank Puglia, signed to play the crippled Pierre. And at Mamaroneck, many members of the Italian community played in the picture.
Griffith’s effectiveness as a director was never more apparent than in the sequence at the end of Part One where Lillian hears the voice of her long-lost sister, begging in the street below. It was daring enough to base a scene in a silent film upon a voice which no one would hear, but to convey so important a voice demanded a great deal from Lillian Gish. Griffith spoke to her throughout the scene, and one can almost hear his voice as well as that of Dorothy.
When they viewed the final cut, Lillian said she thought the climax had been drawn out too long. “He was quite peeved, and told me that I had forced him to do so by acting too intensely at the climax of the first act. ‘You carried that climax too high. I can’t top it.’”
The cameraman, Henrik Sartov, who specialized in soft focus was hired. Griffith had to work fast on exteriors. “He had a man at Mamaroneck who had rheumatism who could tell the weather,” said Dorothy. “He would call the Weather Bureau, then the man with rheumatism. On one occasion, he didn’t take his advice and it was cloudy.”
The night scenes were the hardest, she said. They had batteries of cameras, but also batteries of arc lights. The unprotected ultra-violet rays gave her the painful inflammation known as “Klieg eyes”, and she still had to work round the clock. “We had such good crews. They were just as interested in getting it right as we were.”

In the final reunion of the Gish sisters, at the base of the guillotine, Griffith sensed Lillian’s dissatisfaction. “He could tell by looking at me if I liked something,” she remembered. “He said, ‘I see Miss Geesh,’ as he called me, ‘isn’t pleased with this scene.’ And I said, ‘It isn’t that, Mr. Griffith, it’s just that it’s like other scenes of the films I’ve seen, and I think they expect more than this of you.’ He said, ‘If you’re so smart, you get up there and show me how it should be done.’ Well, there were all the extras around; there must have been a hundred people there hearing this. So I came down the steps again, and I played the meeting with my sister as I felt would be the reaction of a girl that thought she’d be dead instead of walking down the steps. He didn’t say anything when it was over. He got down on both knees in front of me, took my two hands and kissed them, and turned round and said, ‘Well, you’ve got to say, she does know.’’’
Kevin Brownlow"

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