The Scarlet Letter

In Puritan New England, Hester Prynne bears a child out of wedlock and refuses to name the father. As punishment a scarlet A is sewn to her breast. The father is the town's minister, and nobody knows it. The film is not interested in sin. It is interested in the cost of silence: Hester carries her punishment in plain sight and the minister carries his in secret, and the film says the second burden is the heavier. The form, in the hands of a director from Swedish cinema, binds landscape to feeling: the forest, the light and the weather carry the characters' states of mind. Getting it made was a fight in itself. Lillian Gish proposed the novel; Louis B. Mayer told her the book was on the list banned for adaptation, because church and women's groups considered the subject unfit for the screen. Gish wrote personally to Will Hays and to the heads of such organisations around the country, guaranteeing the film would be made in good taste, met their leaders, and invited them to read the script and visit the set. That is how permission came. Victor Sjöström directed and Lars Hanson took the male lead, both Swedes. Hanson played his scenes in Swedish and Gish in English, neither understanding the other. Who it is for: viewers who love silent classics and Gish's acting. Who it is not for: anyone after the weight of the novel. The film softens Hawthorne and pulls the ending somewhere more forgiving.