Lillian Gish in BROKEN BLOSSOMS -- The Closet Scene

The famous "closet scene" from BROKEN BLOSSOMS (1919) became a benchmark for sheer terror in cinema, and its preeminence in that regard would not be seriously challenged for over forty years, until Hitchcock gave us PSYCHO.

In the movie, Gish's father has dragged her character home and is preparing to horsewhip her to death. Terrified, she dives into the closet and locks the door against him, listening in raw terror to his angry ravings and then his battering down of the door with a hatchet, THE SHINING-style. Alone in the dark, the doomed young girl has plenty of time to contemplate what is about to happen to her.

On the day it was to be shot, Griffith ran Gish ragged until 2 a.m., trying to get her into an exhausted state conducive to losing herself in the moment. What he didn't know was that she had been rehearsing the scene in private "almost without sleep" for three days and nights, striving to come up with the perfect pantomime for terror, some action or gesture that would pierce the audience like a knife in the heart:

"I worked that out myself. I never told Griffith what I was going to do. You see, if I had told him, he'd have made me rehearse it over and over again; and that would have spoilt it. It had to be spontaneous, the hysterical terror of a child.
Well, when I came to play the scene in front of the camera, I did it as I planned -- spinning and screaming terribly (I was a good screamer; Mr. Griffith used to encourage me to scream at the top of my voice). When we finished, Mr. Griffith was very pale."

It remains, for all of the advances we've had in technology, an electrifying scene. "I have seen every actress of America and Europe during the last half-century," the famous actor Rudolph Schildkraut said at the time. "Lillian Gish's scene in the closet, where she is hiding in terror from her brutal father, is the finest work I have ever witnessed."

Normally during a shoot, Griffith's highest praise after a scene was to murmur with soft content, "That is very fine." But on this night, after Lillian Gish had screamed for long minutes like a banshee and twirled around in the enclosed closet space like a feral animal, Griffith's response was "My God -- why didn't you warn me you were going to do that?" One suspects that he said this with a huge smile, for cameraman Billy Bitzer reports that, while Gish was immersed in her throes of terror, he snuck a glance over at Griffith and saw that he was "leaned forward in his directors chair, relishing every moment of it."
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[9carva]

@lazer59882 A criminal a crazy man with an ax is trying to break a door to probably: hurt, torture, rape, mutilate and finally kill a young girl WITH AN AX. And you say that she spins like a retarted lost dog. What are you? A sadist, rapist or perv? Probably is more realistic than most garbage nowadays. It was the 1910s with crude techniques and limitations. What were you expecting her to do dope? Take a machine gun look badass and say: go to hell asshole (as most movies nowadays portray?) Dumb!

[TheHeirOfEdWood]

Kubrick must have seen this!

[stunashv]

@9carva ur an idiot. the man is his father and hes about to beat her cause he ran away and stayed at an asian mans house because he was always drunk. theres no rape torture or mutilation. maybe instead of trying to be a hipster you could find out what the movie was a bout first

[BesonXL]

Lillian Gish's screams were so loud and desperate that a crowd gathered outside the studio, and Griffith's collaborators had to go out and reassure everyone that it was only a movie being filmed. (from the book Defining moments in Movies, 2007)

[Farvai0]

I wonder how it would be like if we could hear the screams...

[zaftra]

@MagickDog she seems to be saying help me quite a lot.

[MagickDog]

I wonder what they were actually saying when they filmed this....

[UncleCharlieOakley]

Anyone who loved and respected film saw this.

[dugongyogurt]

Just saw this movie last night.... even after all the desensitization over the decades since, this performance is still capable of making a serious impression. thanx 4posting!!