Mid-winter melodrama: Lillian Gish stars in 'Way Down East' on Thursday, 2/4 in Plymouth, N.H.

 A poster for the French release of 'Way Down East' (1920).

This is the one that helped me understand what D.W. Griffith accomplished.

Yes, the film is justly famous for its climactic sequence. But what about all that stuff—more than two hours of antique hokum—leading up to it?

About 10 years ago, I was preparing to score this warhorse for the first time. As I watched it at home, without music, I kept wondering how anyone could take this movie seriously.

The one-dimensional characters. The cornpone humor. The slow pace. 

But at show time, was I ever surprised. We were blessed with a heavy turnout, and the crowd was with it right from the start. 

Really! They were hooting and hollering even during Griffith's moralistic introductory titles, laden as they are with long-outmoded Victorian sentiment.

And it never let up. Long sequences that I felt played at a glacial pace suddenly snapped to life. 

The missing ingredient, of course, was the audience. Griffith knew what he was doing: he knew how to tap into what is essentially mob psychology and engage a large group right from the start. And he knew how to keep everyone watching all the way through.

We may wear different clothes today, and have different gadgets, and be different in a hundred different ways. But we're still human, and in very elemental ways we respond just as humans have for thousands of years. 

Griffith understood that dynamic, and harnessed it to make pictures that would grab an audience's attention and then never let go. That was his big accomplishment!

Why? Because more than anyone in early cinema, I think, Griffith showed that movies could tell tales on a grand scale—tales that could be engineered to keep an audience spellbound for three hours at a time. 

See for yourself when I accompany 'Way Down East' on Thursday, Feb. 4 at the Flying Monkey Moviehouse and Performance Center in Plymouth, N.H. Part of the film was made close by, on the Connecticut River! Details and more information in the press release below.

Hope to see you there!

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Lillian Gish on the Connecticut River near White River Junction, Vt.

MONDAY, JAN. 18, 2021 / FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact Jeff Rapsis • (603) 236-9237 • jeffrapsis@gmail.com

Silent film classic 'Way Down East' at Flying Monkey on Thursday, Feb. 4

D.W. Griffith blockbuster starring Lillian Gish, filmed partly in New England, to be screened with live music

PLYMOUTH, N.H. — The iconic image of actress Lillian Gish trapped on an ice floe and headed straight for a waterfall will once again fill the big screen when 'Way Down East' (1920) is revived on Thursday, Feb. 4 at 6:30 p.m. at the Flying Monkey Moviehouse and Performance Center, 39 Main St., Plymouth, N.H.

General admission is $10 per person.

The movie, a blockbuster melodrama directed by D.W. Griffith, is set in old-time rural New England, and was partly filmed on location in New Hampshire and Vermont. It stars Gish in an acclaimed performance as a wronged woman trying to make her way in an unforgiving world. Can she find love and redemption, or will she ride to her doom on the raging river's ice floes?

'Way Down East' will be screened with live music by Jeff Rapsis, a New Hampshire-based silent film accompanist.

At the Flying Monkey, accommodations are in place to keep patrons safe in the Covid-19 era.

Face-coverings are required to enter the theater, and should remain on at all times until movie-goers take their seats. Capacity is limited to 50 percent; audience members are asked to observe social distancing in choosing seats.

In 'Way Down East,' Gish stars as a poor New England country girl who travels to Boston to visit her rich relatives in the hopes of getting financial help. While there, she's dazzled by upper class society and romanced by a rich womanizer (Lowell Sherman) who takes advantage of her innocence by tricking her into bed with a fake marriage ceremony.

Convinced she's found the husband of her dreams, Gish returns home to the country, only to be abandoned. She informs her faux husband she's pregnant; he orders her to get an abortion. Instead, Gish goes into exile to have the baby, finds herself persecuted for giving birth out of wedlock, and flees even further into the country to seek refuge. The film was noteworthy in its time for addressing such topics as abortion and women's rights.

Modern critics hail 'Way Down East' for Gish's performance, which continues to mesmerize audiences nearly a century after the film's release. "Gish provides an abject lesson in screen acting and brings home the importance and effectiveness of seeing a film in a theater with a crowd," wrote Paul Brenner on www.filmcritic.com in 2007. "If you are not moved at the scene of Gish baptizing her dead baby, then you should check the obituaries of your local paper to see if you are listed."

The film also stars silent era heartthrob Richard Barthelmess. In the film's climax, Barthelmess must dash to rescue Gish from being carried away on the ice floes.

Much of the acclaimed ice floe sequence was filmed in March 1920 on location on the Connecticut River in New Hampshire and the White River in Vermont, as the winter pack ice was breaking up. No process shots or post-production special effects were available to filmmakers at the time, so Griffith and his crew had no choice but to stage and shoot it all on a real river, with the players out on the ice. To get the floes to break up and float down the river, Griffith's crew dynamited pack ice upstream.

Gish later said that she suffered frostbite by following director Griffith's command to always keep one hand in the water during the shooting.

Despite such hardships, 'Way Down East' cemented Gish's reputation as one of the silent era's major stars. Gish would continue to work in films and, later, television, until the 1980s. She died in 1993 at age 99.

Accompanist Jeff Rapsis specializes in creating music that bridges the gap between an older film and the expectations of today's audiences. Using a digital synthesizer that recreates the texture of a full orchestra, he improvises scores in real time as a movie unfolds, so that the music for no two screenings is the same.

"It's kind of a high wire act, but it helps create an emotional energy that's part of the silent film experience," Rapsis said. "It's easier to follow the emotional line of the movie and the audience's reaction when I'm able to follow what's on screen, rather than be buried in sheet music," he said.

Because silent films were designed to be shown to large audiences in theaters with live music, the best way to experience them is to recreate the conditions in which they were first shown, Rapsis said.

"Films such as 'Way Down East' were created to be shown on the big screen to large audiences as a communal experience," Rapsis said. "With an audience and live music, silent films come to life in the way their makers intended. Not only are they entertaining, but they give today's audiences a chance to understand what caused people to first fall in love with the movies."

'Way Down East' was based on a popular stage drama, for which director Griffith paid the then-astounding sum of $175,000 to turn into a movie. The picture proved to be a huge moneymaker, taking in $4.5 million, making it the fourth-highest grossing movie of the silent film era. 'Way Down East' would be the last of Griffith's great blockbusters; tastes changed as the 1920s rolled on and Griffith's Victorian style fell out of favor. Receipts from 'Way Down East' kept Griffith's studio afloat during a subsequent series of box office flops.

"This picture was a monster hit when it was released," Rapsis said, "and it still holds up well today. As a melodrama, it's a great film for an audience to cheer on the good folks and boo and hiss the bad guys. But there's an additional level of interest now because the film captured a way of life that's long since disappeared."

'Way Down East' will be shown on Thursday, Feb. 4 at 6:30 p.m. at the Flying Monkey Moviehouse and Performance Center, 39 Main St., Plymouth, N.H. General admission is $10 per person. For more info, visit www.flyingmonkeynh.com or call (603) 536-2551.

One track mind, two railroad pictures: Railroad flicks on Sunday, 9/28 in Wilton, N.H.

The passenger depot still stands in Wilton, N.H., but the tracks are only used for freight.

Two railroad melodramas are on the bill for a silent film program Sunday, Sept. 28 at 4:30 p.m. at the Wilton (N.H.) Town Hall Theatre.

For more info about the flicks, please check out the press release included below.

Pondering this program, I think it's a great example of how silent films, rather than fading into irrelevance as decades pass, can sometimes become more interesting over time.

In this case, both films show how not long ago, railroads played a crucial part in the day-to-day lives of most people in this country.

Really. In the United States, before the Interstate Highway system and modern air travel came into being (starting after World War II), if you wanted to go anywhere, you went by train.

Silent cinema reflects this reality. In picture after picture, characters hop on and off trains to make journeys with a frequency that's just completely alien to us today.

At the time, the nation was honey-combed and criss-crossed with rail lines connecting small towns and big cities across the land. This network was no accident, but the result of a century of railroad building all over the continent.

The dense rail network in New Hampshire in 1898. Several more lines were built as the network expanded up until the 1920s. Today, almost all these lines are gone.

But with the rise of highway and air travel, the U.S. essentially abandoned its robust passenger rail system. And this in turn greatly affected how town and cities were developed.

You know the story: with the rise of auto-dependent decentralized suburbia, city centers declined into centers of poverty, etc. Over time, fewer places in the U.S. looked like, say, downtown Bedford Falls in Frank Capra's 'It's a Wonderful Life' (1946), and more of us wound up living in Dick Van Dyke's New Rochelle, N.Y., just to pick an example.

The merits of this transformation can be debated. What silent film gives us, almost by accident, is a vivid window into how society functioned a century ago, before all these changes. And it turns out to be an incredible record.

Think of it: even the most preposterous low budget silent film program filler, in theaters for maybe a week and then forgotten, is filled with images of society and how it functioned: the clothes we wore, how we worked, where and how we ate, and, yes, how we traveled.

Seen today, such images have a layer of interest their creators never anticipated. It's accidental history. And I think it will become even more compelling as time passes.

Again, think of it: what if we had films from the time of Shakespeare, or from the Roman Empire? They'd contain a wealth of information, even just in terms of the backgrounds.

With silent film, we're not there yet. But the time will come, I think, when vintage cinema of all types will be routinely seen as unique and vital historical record, regardless of its entertainment or artistic value.

So that's one reason to preserve the films, good or bad, and keep showing them today—so that they will not be forgotten, and so future generations will be able to wonder at the unintentional revelations embedded within them.

For now, Sunday's double feature of railroad melodramas will certainly give you a sense of how much has already changed in just the past 100 years, at least in terms of how we regard railroads.

Today, railroads are regarded with such disdain (and are so disconnected to our regular lives, except when we're stuck at a crossing), that companies such as CSX find it in their interest to run public service advertising just to explain what they do.

But in the 1920s, railroads were the highly respected lifelines of the nation. They were also the subject of romance, adventure, drama, and thrills, as our two pictures will demonstrate.

And once more, think of it: in the 1920s, you could have taken a train to Wilton, N.H., where the station (still standing) is just a short walk from the Town Hall Theatre. By a miracle, the tracks are still in place (most in N.H. were torn up decades ago), but today the line only sees freight service to a quarry the next town over. Not much glamour there.

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TUESDAY, SEPT. 16, 2014 / FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact Jeff Rapsis • (603) 236-9237 • jeffrapsis@gmail.com

Stop! Look! Vintage railroad melodramas on Sunday, Sept. 28 at Wilton (N.H.) Town Hall Theatre

Live music to accompany double feature program of classic silent-era train thrillers on the big screen

WILTON, N.H.—A double feature of vintage train melodramas will promise an express ride to excitement later this month when the Wilton Town Hall Theatre screens a pair of rarely scene silent-era railroad films with live music.

'The West-Bound Limited' (1923) and 'Transcontinental Limited' (1926) will be screened on Sunday, Sept. 28 at 4:30 p.m. at the Wilton Town Hall Theatre, 40 Main St., Wilton, N.H. Admission is free, with a donation of $5 per person suggested to help defray expenses.

In 'The West-Bound Limited,' a fired employee takes revenge on the railroad by setting a trap for a head-on collision between a passenger train and a freight train.

In 'Transcontinental Limited,' Jerry Reynolds is an aging train engineer fast approaching retirement, but his eyes are giving out even faster! Will he still collect his pension?

Both movies were shot on location on actual working railroad lines. Made at a time when massive steam engines ruled the rails, both films are filled with scenes that train buffs will find fascinating today.

Railroad films were a popular sub-genre during the silent film era, when trains were the primary mode of long distance travel in the U.S. As an important part of the daily life of virtually every community in the land, railroads formed a popular background for many early films.

Live music for the movies will be provided by silent film accompanist Jeff Rapsis.

In reviving these two rarely shown train melodramas, organizers aim to show silent film as it was meant to be seen—in restored prints, on a large screen, with live music, and with an audience.

"All those elements are important parts of the silent film experience," said Rapsis, who will accompany the films. "Recreate those conditions, and movies of early Hollywood like these railroad dramas leap back to life in ways that audiences still find entertaining."

Rapsis performs on a digital synthesizer that reproduces the texture of the full orchestra, creating a traditional "movie score" sound. He improvises the complete score in real time during the screening.

"Creating a movie score on the fly is kind of a high-wire act, but it can often make for more excitement than if everything is planned out in advance," Rapsis said.

Rapsis encouraged people unfamiliar with silent film to give it a try.

"If you haven't seen a silent film the way it was intended to be shown, then you're missing a unique experience," Rapsis said. "At their best, silent films still do connect with cinema-goers. They retain a tremendous power to cast a spell, engage an audience, tap into elemental emotions, and provoke strong reactions."

Upcoming films in the Town Hall Theatre's silent film series include:

• Sunday, Oct. 26, 2014, 4:30 p.m.: Lon Chaney Halloween Creepfest. 'The Unholy Three' (1925) and 'West of Zanzibar' (1928). Two really really odd early thrillers about crime, twisted love, and bodily mutilation starring Lon Chaney, the man of 1,000 faces. Just in time for Halloween!

• Sunday, Nov. 30, 2014, 4:30 p.m.: Buster Keaton in 'Seven Chances.' Finish off Thanksgiving weekend with a helping of laughter courtesy Buster Keaton. A pair of classic short comedies, then 'Seven Chances' (1925), a wild feature in which Buster has until sundown to get married or lose a fortune!

• Sunday, Dec. 28, 2014, 4:30 p.m.: Chaplin's Short Best Comedies. This Christmas, receive some laughs! Mark the 100th anniversary of Chaplin's iconic 'Little Tramp' character with a selection of his best short comedies. A great way for the whole family to cap off the holiday weekend.

• Sunday, Jan. 25, 2015, 4:30 p.m.: Silent Sci-Fi: 'Woman in the Moon.' An early sci-fi adventure epic about the first rocket ship to the moon, as imagined in 1929. Made on a grand scale; the rarely-screened final silent feature from German filmmaker Fritz Lang, director 'Metropolis.'

The Town Hall Theatre's 2014-15 season of silent film kicks off with a double feature of railroad melodramas on Sunday, Sept. 28 at 4:30 p.m at the Wilton Town Hall Theatre, 40 Main St., Wilton, N.H. Live music will be provided by Jeff Rapsis. Admission is free, with a donation of $5 per person suggested to help defray expenses.

For more information, call the theater at (603) 654-3456 or visit www.wiltontownhalltheatre.com. For more information on the music, please visit www.jeffrapsis.com.