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Broken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl ()

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A frail waif, abused by her brutal boxer father in London's seedy Limehouse District, is befriended by a sensitive Chinese immigrant with tragic consequences.
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Cast verified as complete

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Lucy - The Girl (as Miss Lillian Gish)
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Cheng Huan - The Yellow Man (as Mr. Richard Barthelmess)
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Battling Burrows
Arthur Howard ...
Battling Burrows' Manager
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Evil Eye (as Edward Peil)
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The Spying One
Norman Selby ...
A Prizefighter
Rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Ernest Butterworth ...
Secondary Role (uncredited)
Fred Hamer ...
Secondary Role (uncredited)
Wilbur Higby ...
London Policeman (uncredited)
Man-Ching Kwan ...
Buddhist Monk (uncredited)
Bobbie Mack ...
Ringside Employee (uncredited)
Steve Murphy ...
Fight Spectator (uncredited)
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Police Constable (uncredited)
Karla Schramm ...
Burrows' Girlfriend (uncredited)
Bessie Wong ...
Girl in China (uncredited)

Directed by

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D.W. Griffith ... (under the personal direction of)

Written by

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Thomas Burke ... (adapted from 'The Chink and the Child' by)
 
D.W. Griffith ... (writer)

Produced by

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D.W. Griffith ... producer (uncredited)

Cinematography by

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G.W. Bitzer ... (photography by)

Film Editing by

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James Smith ... (uncredited)

Art Department

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Joseph Stringer ... set builder (uncredited)

Visual Effects by

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Hendrik Sartov ... visual effects (uncredited)

Camera and Electrical Department

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Karl Brown ... camera operator (uncredited)

Music Department

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David Cullen ... orchestrator
Carl Davis ... conductor / music adaptor / music arranger
Joseph Turrin ... conductor
Louis F. Gottschalk ... music arranger (uncredited)

Additional Crew

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Man-Ching Kwan ... technical advisor (uncredited)
James B. Leong ... interpreter: Chinese (uncredited)
Crew verified as complete

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Storyline

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Plot Summary

Cheng Huan is a missionary whose goal is to bring the teachings of peace by Buddha to the civilized Anglo-Saxons. Upon landing in England, he is quickly disillusioned by the intolerance and apathy of the country. He becomes a storekeeper of a small shop. Out his window, he sees the young Lucy Burrows. She is regularly beaten by her prizefighter father, underfed and wears ragged clothes. Even in this deplorable condition, Cheng can see that she is a priceless beauty and he falls in love with her from afar. On the day that she passes out in front of his store, he takes her in and cares for her. With nothing but love in his heart, he dresses her in silks and provides food for her. Still weak, she stays in his shop that night and all that Cheng does is watch over her. The peace and happiness that he sees last only until Battling Burrows finds out that his daughter is with a foreigner. Written by Tony Fontana

Plot Keywords
Taglines tonight- you can enjoy the mystic throb of foreign souls; the flame, the fright, the glory of wondrous scenes. (Print Ad- Bismarck Daily Tribune, ((Bismarck ND)) 19 February 1920) See more »
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Parents Guide View content advisory »
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Additional Details

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Also Known As
  • Broken Blossoms (United States, English title)
  • Broken Blossoms (United States)
  • Broken Blossoms or the Yellow Man and the Girl (United States)
  • The Chink and the Child (World-wide, English title)
  • Broken Blossoms (World-wide, English title)
  • See more »
Runtime
  • 90 min
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Box Office

Budget $88,000 (estimated)

Did You Know?

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Trivia Cheng Huan is so saintly because D.W. Griffith knew there was a lot of Sinophobia in the US, and audiences would have trouble accepting a Chinese hero. In the original short story, Cheng Huan is just a guy who joined the Chinese merchant marines when he got into debt, grew tired of shipboard life and ended up in Limehouse, a multi-cultural port district in the poor section of London. He was never a Buddhist missionary or a pacifist, and fell just short of being a statutory rapist (albeit, he really loved Lucy); another part of rehabilitating his character was to change Lucy's age from 12 to 16. The audience is not supposed to think they had a sexual relationship, but if people played that out in their heads, it wasn't illegal (unless it was under US miscegenation laws, but Griffith kept the London setting). Anyway, it wasn't child-rape. In the original story, the only way in which Cheng Huan is morally superior to anyone else is his ahead-of-its-time compassion for Lucy. Griffith's personal copy of "Limehouse Nights", the book with the short story "The Chink and the Child"--on which this film is based--with all his screen writing marginal notes, still exists, in a rare book collection at the Lilly Library on the campus of Indiana University, along with a manuscript copy of the story by the author, with comments by Griffith and Lillian Gish. See more »
Goofs The intertitles state, "The Buddha says, 'What thou dost not want others to do thee, do thou not to others.'" It was actually not the Buddha but Confucius' teaching. See more »
Movie Connections Featured in The Birth of the Movies (1951). See more »
Quotes Narrator: The Yellow Man holds a great dream to take the glorious message of peace to the barbarous Anglo-Saxons, sons of turmoil and strife.
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