Way Down East

Way Down East is a 1920 American silent melodrama directed by D. W. Griffith, starring Lillian Gish as Anna Moore, a country girl tricked into a sham marriage, abandoned, and finally rescued from drifting river ice by David Bartlett (Richard Barthelmess). It premiered on 3 September 1920 at the 44th Street Theatre in New York and was distributed by United Artists.^{1 • 2}

Production

Griffith bought the picture rights from theatrical producer William A. Brady and began production at his own studio in Mamaroneck, on Long Island; Way Down East was the first film produced there.^{1 • 6} Some scenes were shot at White River Junction, Vermont, and, according to modern sources, Elmer Clifton directed some of these, with Leigh Smith and Herbert Sutch assisting.¹

Real blizzards and real ice. Griffith rehearsed scenes at Claridge's Hotel in New York for eight weeks while keeping an order that, in case of a blizzard, night or day, all hands report to the Mamaroneck studio; the blizzard in the film had to be a real one, and the ice was real ice, most of it at any rate.⁴ The climactic ice-floe scene was shot at Orient Point, Long Island, where Lillian Gish had taken Stanford White's house.^{3 • 4} Gish's biographer Albert Bigelow Paine records that she floated down on a cake of ice twenty times a day for two weeks while Griffith made his way toward her, stepping from one cake to another, to play the rescue.⁴

The role of Kate Brewster was originally portrayed by Clarine Seymour, who died during production; her footage was reshot and the role was assumed by Mary Hay.^{3 • 2} The crew included cinematographers G. W. Bitzer, Hendrik Sartov, and Paul H. Allen, editors James Smith and Rose Smith, art directors Charles O. Seessel and Clifford Pember, and costume designer Lady Duff Gordon; the original score was composed and arranged by Louis Silvers and William Frederick Peters.^{1 • 2}

Release and reception

The film was released on a road show basis with twenty companies, including symphonic orchestras and effects, touring first-class theaters in the United States. It was shown in two parts with an intermission, and Gish appeared in some performances in a staged prologue. After the road show, the film was released nationally by United Artists.³ To support the release, Griffith published "A Letter to the People, Whose Servant I Am," describing the production hardships and the film's merits.⁶

Though financially successful, Way Down East was Griffith's last major hit at the box office, and it did not return enough to make him solvent; his Mamaroneck studio closed in 1925.⁶ The film was re-released in 1931 with synchronized music and sound effects, and Twentieth Century-Fox produced a sound remake from the same source in 1935, directed by Henry King and starring Rochelle Hudson and Henry Fonda.^{2 • 3}

Filmmaking technique

By the time of Way Down East, Griffith's command of continuity editing was widely imitated. In the opening sequence, Anna's unhappy experiences in the city are intercut with idyllic scenes on the Bartlett farm, setting up the viewer to anticipate her return to the country. In the blizzard and drifting-ice stretch, the film cuts back and forth between Anna struggling through the storm and David battling Sanderson, so that his confrontation reads as a dangerous delay for her, punctuated by close-ups of snow and ice clinging to her eyelashes. On the icy river, Griffith shortened the shots as the rescue intensified, and the cutting combined with the actors performing their own stunts created extreme suspense.⁶

Restoration

Shortly after release, Griffith began re-editing the film; it was shortened by one quarter, entire scenes were eliminated, characters vanished, titles were rewritten, and a sound track destroyed part of the image. By the time the Museum of Modern Art received the film in the late 1930s, no print of the original could be found.⁵ MoMA began restoring the film in 1979, working from four different prints, two from its own archive and two tinted mid-1920s nitrate prints from private collectors. The Library of Congress supplied a detailed shot analysis Griffith had deposited with his 1920 copyright registration, and Gillian Anderson, Music Specialist in the Library's Music Division, matched the original musical score against the shot analysis to confirm the correct sequence of scenes. The restored version premiered at MoMA in June 1984 with live performance of the Silvers and Peters score, and the restoration is only about five minutes short of the estimated length of the original.⁵

References

1. Way Down East (1920), AFI Catalog of Feature Films
2. Way Down East (1920), Progressive Silent Film List, Silent Era
3. Way Down East (1920), AFI Catalog (expanded history)
4. Albert Bigelow Paine, Life and Lillian Gish, Project Gutenberg
5. Museum of Modern Art press release No. 82: Restoration tour of Way Down East
6. Susan Doll, "Way Down East," Turner Classic Movies

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Early and silent cinema › Silent feature films › Released 1914 to 1926

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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