The Mothering Heart (1913)

What can one say about this film? In one sense, it seems the culmination of all work that Griffith had done for Biograph - and at the same time it represents the kind of hokey melodrama and Victorian values that the director is too often linked. The truth is somewhere in the middle - there is no question of The Mothering Heart’s old-fashioned melodramatic overtones, yet there is a naturalness and an honesty that seems to shine forth throughout it, essentially overcoming it. There’s something here that seems to turn the film into a true tragedy, as well as an artful depiction of human affairs that speak directly to an audience the way only the new medium of cinema could.

Of course, the primary key to the film is found through the extraordinary film presence and unique acting style of Lillian Gish in the lead role. There is something so natural, so fresh about Gish’s performance, something so absolutely convincing, that it drives the film home, making it truly heartbreaking rather than simply maudlin.

This is not to say that the film isn’t maudlin as well, for it certainly is. All the faults are there, in plain view. Griffith has made many more imaginative and innovative films than this one, but there is something about The Mothering Heart that is simply unmatchable in sheer emotional power. To make something this commanding, with these few elements, is a testament to a certain kind of mastery - and an indicator that this long, tried-and-tested veteran of early cinema is ready to move the art form on to another level of sustained narrative and emotional impact. The director has only a dozen or more one-reelers left to make for American Biograph (out of more than 400!) before leaving to direct the four-reel feature Judith of Bethulia. One year later, he will create The Birth of a Nation, and the modern age of cinema will have formally begun.

Griffith plays with archetypes in The Mothering Heart - a less kindly critic might call them cliche’s. Gish plays the role of a young wife, and eventually mother, with such immaculately chaste and pure emotions that she becomes, in essence, the era’s pin-up girl for feminine propriety. On the other hand, her natural joyfulness, her native instinct for play endears her totally to the audience and creates a kind of purely believable icon of the best of young American womanhood.

She is matched perfectly on screen with Walter Miller, her inconstant and befuddled male counterpart. Miller (Gish’s musician husband in The Musketeers of Pig Alley, as well as the spurned-lover, good-guy partner in Death’s Marathon) is really a more pitiable character than a cad. With disarming, Jimmy Stewart-like confusion, he is sincerely in love with Gish, as well as seriously baffled at his own contradictory desires and his pitiful puppy-dog wandering.

Perhaps that is the central link that binds this film together so well - the conflicting human emotions are quite real. The young Miller is completely in love with Gish’s mothering character, and at the same time, he cannot seem to resist his natural urges for frolicsome fun.

The central - and for me, the most uncomfortable - sequence of the film is when Miller convinces Gish to go out to a nightclub for some uninhibited good times. Gish’s discomfort at the nightclub is unsettling - why can’t she relax and have a fun evening? Her fastidious prudishness is off putting, and her refusal to share a glass of champagne is tangibly annoying. Can we really blame the young husband for being attracted by the bare-armed temptress at the next table?

Well, yes and no. To us today, the problem seems to be that Miller has gotten himself stuck in an either/or world which simply does not exist for us in the next century. Of course there is a question as to whether this dichotomy actually existed in 1913, but I have enough personal family evidence to suggest that it certainly did. When women were easily divided up between "mothers" and "tramps," it’s easy to see how there might be no gray area in between.

Griffith, naturally, is on the side of the "mothers." And following his loaded narrative, there is no question that Miller is the character in error and that Gish is the one who must unjustly suffer for her husband’s shortcomings. And of course, disaster looms in the end. The question is, is this really how Griffith saw life? Is this how he saw woman?

I find enough evidence in this collection of films to suggest that D.W. Griffith, though a naive sentimentalist, was morally more complex than one might at first assume. In One Is Business, the Other Crime, he goes to great pains to show the unjust parallel between treatment of justice in class relations. Religious hypocrites are taken to task in The New York Hat. The Burglar’s Dilemma demonstrates that even familial betrayal can be overcome through love and a good will. And The Last Drop of Water shows us that one need not be an exemplary person to prove a valiant hero.

But when it comes to women’s issues, however - as it will come to race - Griffith seems much much more inflexible. It is in his unquestioning acceptance of the stereotypes of his age - for both gender and race, that he runs into such insupportable moral and aesthetic conditions.

The great irony is that these blind spots placed Griffith in a morally indefensible position that he really could not probably see. By siding so whole-heartedly with Gish’s "mother" figure, he believes he is championing the cause of womanhood. Ironically, he is selling the human center of the female frightfully short, demanding her to place both herself and her husband in an impossible world of ego division.

By the same token, it is easy to see that in celebrating the "virtues" of the old Negro in His Trust, that while attempting to laud and celebrate Old George, he is essentially taking away both the character’s dignity and humanity.

That is, it is easy for us to see this. For Griffith would remain tragically unaware of the implications of his own moral universe. And this is sad, because we continually see in cinema’s first great artist a towering nobility and defender of humanity. We see a man with a sense of moral ambiguity - a man who can respect even a gangster’s honor in the covenant of "one good turn deserves another." The ultimate tragedy of Griffith, however, just may reside in his entrapment in certain social conventions that are glacially solidified in his time-bound sense of consciousness. In the end, he was basically and simply, quite unaware of the terrible moral ironies that he would commit to the screen.

Inside D.W. Griffith, however, lies a "great heart." At the end of The Mothering Heart, the most emotionally wrenching and authentic moment of the film is finally not the husband’s betrayal of his wife - nor even the devastating death of the couple’s sickly little baby. It is, indeed, the great wash of forgiveness and acceptance that Gish offers to the devastated Miller, a boundless generosity of spirit that bind the two - and indeed all of humanity - in a shared redemption based on the undying and unquenchable spirit of human love and the capaciousness of grace.

It is true that much of Griffith’s work will forever seem not only outmoded - not simply morally inadequate, but at times truly repugnant. But there exists within his moral and aesthetic vision such a broad and heartfelt commitment to the dictums of love and the eternal dignity of humanity, that we must search beyond the surface to reach the good (however flawed) man underneath. This is not just conscientiousness on our part, but it is the very essence of the vision that the artist and his art held out as a proud banner for the human race.