Broken Blossoms

Broken Blossoms is a 1919 American silent film directed by D. W. Griffith, adapted from a short story by Thomas Burke, following a Chinese immigrant in London's Limehouse district who befriends and shelters a young woman abused by her prizefighter father. The film was notable for its intimate, small-scale production and its heavy use of diffused, atmospheric lighting and tinted film stock to create a somber visual mood, a departure from the large-scale spectacle of Griffith's earlier The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. Broken Blossoms was a commercial and critical success on release and is regarded as an early landmark of visual style and mood in narrative filmmaking, though modern critics have also noted its use of yellowface casting in the lead role as characteristic of the era's racial attitudes.