It wasn't laziness or impulsive generosity that led Griffith to let Gish direct herself in True Heart Susie a year before she was to get her first and only directing credit with Remodeling Her Husband, starring her sister, Dorothy. While it has frequently been observed that she, Griffith and camerman Billy Bitzer invented the closeup, it is less often acknowledged that she soon afterward invented, or at least perfected, underplaying. It serves her well here, bringing a freshness and even glint of good-humored astringency to what could have been an insufferably cloying take on a spunky Indiana farmgirl as the ultimate passive woman living a life of benign incarceration, waiting for the dim bulb of a childhood sweetheart she loves to come around.
In ways that have nothing to do with the fact that it's a silent movie, Gish's Susie Trueheart (a name calculated to make feminists gag, later parodied by attaching it to comic strip pop icon Dick Tracy's girlfriend), keeps inside most of what she's feeling. She loves Robert Harron's big lug, William, who has no idea that his college bills have been paid by Susie selling her family's cow. He returns to town a minister and marries Claire Seymour's party-loving little milliner from the big bad city of Chicago, never dreaming that while he's full of himself, his new bride sees him as a hick, but is tired of working and ready to marry. With melodramatic irony, Susie is forced to put her romantic plans on hold when she sees him embracing Seymour's flapper, and stoically serve as a bridesmaid. Eventually, of course, fate takes a hand.
Harron, who later was to die from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, was just making the jump from juvenile leads to light comedy. With his lightbulb-shaped head, pasted-on mustache and air of sweet-natured obliviousness to anything except what the church elders might have been thinking about him, he's a provincial model of what sociologist David Reisman was to term the other-directed man. In short, not worth Susie's heart. But she loves him anyway. Gish, and hence Susie, is inner-directed, following her heart, confiding only in her diary, the very picture of the virginal primness with which she was to ever be identified, but on this occasion more spirited than angelic. Encased in a pinafore, arms glued to her side, head flattened by a hat pulled down over her face, she nevertheless manages moments of unexpected breakout, as in one scene showing her walking with tight little steps down a dusty country road with William. She doesn't let him see how happy it makes her. But she lets us see, in an exuberant little backward kick of her foot.
Grffith's trust in Gish's ability to come up with the right expressive gesture at the right time peaked during the filming of Way Down East on the frigid White River the following year. As her co-star Richard Barthelmess and Griffith stood huddled in thick coats on its banks, Gish, wearing only a little woolen dress during rehearsals, plunged into the frigid river, where the ice floes were the real thing, a dozen times a day for three weeks. It was her idea to let her hand and her hair trail through the water as her unconscious heroine was carried on a slab of ice to the falls downriver. Her hand, she told an enthralled audience decades later at Lincoln Center, never felt right each winter since.
Working on a much smaller canvas in True Heart Susie, unencumbered by the crude melodrama of Way Down East, Gish enlivens the film constantly, rescuing it from its stock situations. Framed by her window, she looks out it and sees William, back from Chicago. We never do. But her wide-set blue eyes, tracking him from one side of the frame to the other, tell us all we need to know. When he rushes to her, as she's watering flowers in a window box, she quickly holds up the watering can to preserve a comfortable distance. But her ladylike primness and reserve, which could so easily turn off-putting, is rendered lovable by her forbearing fidelity, and palatable by her flashes of temperament, even in the hoary device of diary entries (in Gish's own hand), her only emotional outlet.
She never overdoes the pathos a smart approach to Griffith. Ironically, Susie can be seen as an analogue to Gish in her own relationship with Griffith. She was always there when he needed her, always respectful, even when he behaved imperiously (there was more than a trace of sexual warfare and even sadism in the subtext of the Way Down East filming). Even more ironically, William preferring the modern flapper from Chicago to the old-fashioned girl Gish personified presaged in miniature the career hurdle she faced during the 1920s, when she had to fight the notion that she was passé. Meanwhile, the disarming True Heart Susie is a last hurrah for the simple virtues that came so naturally to Griffith and Gish. It's a triumph of bearing. Overshadowed in its own time by the acclaim accruing to Broken Blossoms (1919), the rediscovered True Heart Susie, thanks to Gish's exquisite delicacy, imparts a warm glow to Griffith's suite of chamber pieces.
It's accompanied on the Blackhawk DVD by another Griffith film, but once removed, the 64-minute Hoodoo Ann (1916). Written by Griffth under a pseudoinym (Granville Warwick) and directed by Lloyd Ingraham, it stars the best known Griffith leading lady after Gish and Mary Pickford Mae Marsh. But it's hugely ordinary, a curio belying the fact that Marsh enjoyed a long Hollywood career, becoming a favorite of John Ford, for whom she made her last film in 1967, Cheyenne Autumn. Here, she plays a waif in an orphanage with a hex on her that can only be put right by wedding bells. It doesn't take a sage to figure out where it's going. But although Marsh was less successful than Gish at artfully handling melodramatic contrivance, and can't begin to match her rival's depth and range, her one-note liveliness carries the film through its conventionality and around co-star Harron's blandness.
by Jay Carr
Sources:
IMDb
The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, by Lillian Gish
D.W. Griffith: an American Life, by Richard Schickel
Lillian Gish: Her Kegend, Her Life, by Charles Affron
Hollywood: the Pioneers, by Kevin Brownlow, John Korbal
For more information about True Heart Susie/Hoodoo Ann, visit Image Entertainment. To order True Heart Susie/Hoodoo Ann, go to TCM Shopping.
