I have loved Lillian Gish from the very first moment I saw her photograph in our family's aged coffee table book about "the movies." We're talking pre-school, so that makes her, hands down, the longest crush of my life.

The first full-length picture I saw her in that was not a clip in an anthology, or montage in a tribute was The Birth of a Nation (1915), that famous discomfiting picture, which everyone seems to want to show and discuss, but which isn't nearly as good as Broken Blossoms (1919), a film that is just as racist and disturbing. 

Miss Gish has always been the transcendent figure in these early troubling narratives.

Lillian Gish was born in Springfield, Ohio, to a drunken philanderer and an actress, Mary Robinson McConnell. Lillian and her sister, Dorothy, performed on the stage with their mother, who had only turned to acting in order to support her family after her husband abandoned them. Mrs. Gish also ran a candy store next to the Majestic Theater in East St. Louis, Illinois, where they had relocated to be near Lillian's aunt and uncle. After the theater burned down in 1912, the family moved to New York and there befriended a young actress named Gladys Smith, who worked with some guy called D.W. Griffith at the Biograph Studios. Gladys (better known as Mary Pickford) introduced the girls to Mr. Griffith, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Lillian and Dorothy Gish spent their early years at Biograph as extras and in short films. By 1915, Lillian's talent and (comparative) naturalness on screen made her a star; Dorothy would eventually become one of the screen's best-loved comediennes. Throughout the Teens and for most of the Twenties, Lillian Gish became known as "The First Lady of the Silent Screen," but wasn't much interested in working in film once sound was introduced: "I never approved of talkies. Silent movies were well on their way to developing an entirely new art form. It was not just pantomine, but something wonderfully expressive." And back to the stage she went for the next couple of decades.

But she did return to film every so often, and when she did, Lillian Gish made a huge impression. For her role as the mother of two crazy mixed up cowboys in the dopey Western soap opera, Duel in the Sun (1946), Gish got (and lost) her only Academy Award nomination. She should have got and won one for The Wind, but who am I? 

For a slight, angelic-looking person, Lillian Gish has always conveyed a determination and strength that belied her deceptively frail physique. In real life she was a workhorse: conservative, very private, and not a little anti-Semitic. She never married, believing marriage was a business, like acting, and she had no intention of having two jobs. The job she picked netted her millions, which she bequeathed at her death to establish The Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, for “a man or woman who has made an outstanding contribution to the beauty of the world and to mankind’s enjoyment and understanding of life.” Spike Lee won it last year.

Lillian Gish died in her sleep at her home in Manhattan on February 27, 1993. She was 99 years old.

I will love her until the day I die.

Until last night, I hadn't seen Way Down East in one sitting since I think, the mid-1980s, and having recommended it as the Richard Barthelmess movie to see, I thought I should take my own advice and hope I was right.

I was. I was. I was.

The film opens with young Anna Moore (Lillian Gish), the poor country relation of the wealthy Tremont Family, sent by her mother to visit her city cousins to see if they can lend her poor family a buck or two. Once she arrives, Anna is too embarrassed to ask for money and decides to just visit a while. The Tremonts would rather send her packing, but believe they will impress their "eccentric, but enormously rich aunt" (Florence Short, sporting the best 1920s lesbian outfit ever) if they pretend to be kind to Anna and let her stay. At a society ball, Anna's delicate, guileless beauty attracts every man in the room, particularly society cad Lennox Sanderson (Lowell Sherman), who literally charms the pants off her.

Sanderson, knowing Anna won't go to bed with him unless they're married, gets her to agree to a "secret" marriage, which he arranges by asking a buddy of his to pretend to be a preacher. He then sets her up in a secret cottage where he secretly visits her from time to time until she not so secretly gets pregnant, at which point he lets her in on the secret and dumps her. Anna is forced to move to a new town to have the baby, whom she names "Trust Lennox" (good one), and dodges questions about her husband as long as she can. The baby sickens and dies (a very affecting scene) and Anna, the victim of scandal and rumor, is out in the cold again.

This time she makes her way to Bartlett Village to start a new life and gets hired at the estate of Squire Bartlett (Burr McIntosh) as a domestic servant. Bartlett's son, David (Richard Barthelmess), a strapping young fellow, falls in love with Anna in spite of the family's wishes that he marry his cousin Kate (Barthelmess's eventual first wife, Mary Hay). Who should come sniffing after Kate, but that wretch Lennox Sanderson, out visiting his country estate in Bartlett Village!

Anna and Skeevy McLiarson meet, of course, and he tells he she must go, because for Pete's sake, he lives right next door and it would never do. Anna says, "Seriously, a**hole? That's what you lead with? Your baby's dead, by the way." Not really, but that's how good an actress Lillian Gish is. Anna stays with the family, becoming very dear to all of them, and never lets on that she knows Sanderson. David eventually declares his love, but Anna, ashamed of her past and not wanting to ruin his life, refuses him.

Eventually, the pious landlady who kicked Anna out of her house after the baby died shows up at the Bartlett sewing circle and clues in the town busybody that Anna has a checkered past. The gossip skips gleefully over to the squire's place to spread the good news, which she does, and Anna spends a horrible day making cakes, cleaning house, and setting the table knowing what's coming while the squire confirms the rumor.  She is summarily tossed out on her ear, but not before pointing a just finger at Sanderson, the man who wronged her.

Snowstorm! Ice floes! Deadly waterful!  Stalwart hero! 

Oh my. You know Lillian Gish lived to be 99, but I defy you not to hold your breath during the final eighteen minutes of this film wondering whether she'll be saved.

I'm happy to report that I'd remembered the essential excellence of the story and cinematography, so, phew, but I'd forgotten or had not taken proper notice of the following:

• The sexual double standard was acknowledged up front
• It's a lot longer than I'd remembered (almost 2.5 hours)
• The rich family and their friends wear FABULOUS clothes
• Lillian Gish does a good bumpkin
• Thanks to G.W. Bitzer, the movie is a veritable photo essay on Vermont and New York State, cerca 1920
• There was a pivotal "eccentric, but enormously rich aunt"

All of these good points make it easier to overlook the wretched bits of comedy relief that punctuate the harsher, heartbreaking story. You get why they're there, but it's all yokel jokes and slapstick. Still. Those scenes don't last long.

See it. Love it. Marvel at the eternal, ethereal beauty of Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess.

Richard Barthelmess is one of those silent actors who seem so unbelievably gorgeous and strapping before talkies, and oddly short of stature and limited in the neck department after. It's a mystifying and unfair illusion. Yet he was the first silent film star whose fame and appeal I completely understood. If I were little Edna Mae McRinglets in the early Twenties, my side of the room would be plastered with his image clipped lovingly from movie magazines.

But it's a harsh realization that that stocky guy with the hard stare in Only Angels Have Wings is the handsome, ice-floe-hopping hero of Way Down East with about 20 years on him. Not that Barthelmess wasn't still an arresting performer; just that sound and time seemed to make him a bit less so.

The first movie I ever saw him was Broken Blossoms, one of those tricky D.W. Griffith movies about tolerance that you need to see when you're able to suspend your own intolerance for period racism. In it, Lillian Gish plays the abused daughter of an awful thug of a boxer, whom Barthelmess's character, a Chinese Buddhist shop-owner, loves from afar. When the girl passes out from a beating in front of his store, the man takes her in and cares for her until the father finds out and things go completely south. Many tears; much great acting in among the pantomime and melodrama.

Barthelmess came by acting honestly. His mother was a stage actress who was widowed when "Dick" was just a baby, and the boy often performed with her or on his own in juvenile roles. He studied acting in college and logged in a number of years as a stock performer. Encouraged by his mother's friend, Russian actress, Alla Nazimova, he turned to film, making his debut in the 1916 serial, Gloria's Romance, starring Billie Burke. He then made a number of pictures with Marguerite Clark (the model for Walt Disney's Snow White) and soon caught the attention of D.W. Griffith, who gave him the lead role in Broken Blossoms. He was a leading man thereafter until the advent of sound. In fact, Barthelmess was nominated for two pictures in the very first Academy Awards' Best Actor category, but lost to Emil Jannings's two pictures; they were the only two nominated, so that had to sting.

Talkies didn't do Barthelmess any favors. He only made a handful of films in the mid-1930s and retired for good in 1942 at the age of 47. During World War II, he served in the Naval Reserve, then lived out the rest of his days on Long Island with his (second) wife, whom he married in 1928, on the returns from savvy real estate investment.

Richard Barthelmess died on August 17, 1963, of throat cancer at the age of 68. 

If think you might only want to see one of his films, I recommend Way Down East. It's got everything: sex, death, a reputation ruined, and fantastic cinematography (see Billy Bitzer, ace cameraman) in the climactic rescue on an icy river — and Lillian Gish; it's got Lillian Gish.