That Chink at Golden Gulch (1910) User Reviews

A Story Of Tolerance

[boblipton · 7/10 · 9 November 2019]

Here's a short subject that most people won't even look at, given its title. One word will confirm everything you've heard about D.W. Griffith's racism. Yet, if you look at it, you will discover something very different: someone from another culture who behaves better than the people whom Griffith is supposed to have exalted.

Anthony O'Sullivan plays the eponymous Chink, who makes a living as the laundryman. He's on his rounds about town, when this title pops up:

"The Pagan Chink Gets A Taste Of The Result Of Two Thousand Years Of Civilization"

... and some white men, led by dandified Dell Henderson grab him for their own amusement. They are stopped by the kindhearted Gertrude Robinson and her beau, Charles West. Later, O'Sullivan will prove his gratitude and decency.

It's certainly not the best of D.W. Griffith's shorts. O'Sullivan's acting is not among the best of Griffith's troupe, and there is no great advancement in the director's technique. Yet his message in this film is not one of hate, but of toleration and kindness. In movie after movie, Griffith made the point that people are different, societies are different, yet decency -- and meanness -- are the province of individuals, and not of a society or race.

Melodramatic Racial (Mis)Representation

[Cineanalyst · 1 April 2021]

This one-reeler isn't quite as bad as it sounds with a title that includes a racial slur and as directed by D. W. Griffith, the same who went on to make the racist epic "The Birth of a Nation" (1915). I've seen quite a lot of Griffith's oeuvre, though, and it seems that films such as this Biograph short may be a better representation of his muddled racial views than the perverted history he adapted from Thomas Dixon and President Woodrow Wilson for his most notorious feature. Sure, it's still based in stereotypes and ultimately supports the white-supremacist system, but it's against racial violence, and the racial "other" is depicted with some sensitivity--albeit in yellowface and in melodramatic fashion where racial minorities or the poor must always sacrifice themselves for the well being of the higher-class white couples. So many melodramas do this; it's a big trope. This time, the character devotes himself to aiding his white saviors, who stopped a bunch of cowboys from shooting at him. The title card mocking "2,000 years of civilization" for the white characters is a nice bit of sarcasm from 1910, though.

Basically, the supposed Chinese man depicted here is like the "faithful souls" in "The Birth of a Nation," the black slaves who remain loyal to their masters even after nominal emancipation. That seems to be how Griffith most often handled non-white characters, or he otherwise employed them in minstrel-show type comic relief (the blackface in "One Exciting Night" (1922), e.g.). Such shorts as "His Trust" and "His Trust Fulfilled" (both 1911) do the same thing with an African-American character as this one does with the Chinese one, or as Griffith would do again with the Chinese character in "Broken Blossoms" (1919). The genre conventions of melodrama that Griffith advocated surely dictate much of this. In addition to African Americans, the depiction of Native Americans in his films could vary from relatively sensitive if stereotypical to offensively violent depending on the genre dictates of the white characters' plight--whether being attacked by a tribe in "The Battle at Elderbush Gulch" (1913) or condemning Indian removal in "The Red Man's View" (1909).

Otherwise, this isn't one of Griffith's more technically-sophisticated pictures, either. The editing, including some crosscutting, is relatively quick for the era, if not necessarily for Griffith, though. That especially stands out to me now since I've just finished watching a bunch of Alice Guy's Solax productions. Her being a director more in what one might term the European mode or tableau tradition focused on mise-en-scene over montage, and Griffith being the opposite--the so-called pioneer of the American way.