Lillian Gish is pretty compelling playing a teenager in this film, with her angelic face and magnetic eyes showing such haunting fragility. The scenes of a brutal whipping she gets at the hands of her abusive father (Donald Crisp) and his taking an axe to the closet she's hiding in are horrifying. Director D.W. Griffith gives us such an atmosphere of squalor and fog in London that the scene of innocent tenderness with a Chinese immigrant (Richard Barthelmess, argh) comes as a nice contrast. He's protected her on the street and shown her some simple kindness, and the intertitle which reads "Blue and yellow silk caressing white skin - her beauty so long hidden shines out like a poem" is one of the few lovely moments in an otherwise rather depressing film.
Unfortunately the film has a few distasteful elements, not the least of which is casting Barthelmess in the role of Cheng Huan, and then referring to him as the Yellow Man, Chink, and Chinky. He also acts the part poorly, maybe giving us a portrait of a gentle soul, yes, but the way he moves around, emotes, and leans in to kiss Gish is generally weird and creepy. There were laws against interracial relations so it's understandable the film didn't go there, and the character could be justified in his hesitance for a lot of reasons: he knows the laws against miscegenation, he knows she's only 15 (he does give her a doll after all), he's been steeped in Buddhism, or he's just a kind person who doesn't want to take advantage of her. His love does seem on a higher plane, and it's pretty sweet. The worst moment was when he approaches her a second time, and Gish recoils with a look of disgust on her face that seems to mean only one thing. We also see Cheng Huan in an opium den while depressed early on.
While the film includes some of the stereotypes of the day, what it was telling mainstream audiences was something positive, that an Asian man may be living by a religious code with tenets similar to their own (the Buddhist quote early on being a variant of Christianity's Golden Rule), that he might fall in love just as anyone else might, and that he might act bravely and be a hero, rather than preying on a vulnerable white girl. I also loved the criticism of xenophobia in this intertitle: "Above all, Battling (the abusive father character) hates those not born in the same great country as himself." The film was among the first to show an interracial love story which was pretty daring for the fledgling United Artists, and it's interesting to think about it relative to films which would follow, e.g. Piccadilly (1929) and The Bitter Tea of General Yen (1933).
