Way Down East

Way Down East (1920) is a silent melodrama from D.W. Griffith you can watch online on iFILM. A poor country girl is lured into a fake marriage, then cast out to carry the shame — and a child — alone.

Anna Moore visits wealthy relatives in Boston, where the charming cad Sanderson stages a sham wedding to get what he wants. A pregnancy, the death of her mother and baby, and the brand of a 'fallen woman' follow — in an era that forgave none of it. Anna takes work on Squire Bartlett's farm and falls for his son David, never knowing that her old seducer lives just down the road.

Griffith made this at the height of the silent age, and Lillian Gish carries it on the pure expression of her face and body, without a single spoken word. The climax on a breaking river, with Anna swept toward the falls on a sheet of ice, went into the textbooks as one of early Hollywood's most dangerous shoots — Gish trailed her hand in freezing water for months to get it. Old cinema that still lands a punch. Stream Way Down East online on iFILM.