True Heart Susie

Susie lives on a farm in the country and is in love with William, the boy next door. He wants to go to college and has no money. She sells her cows and sends him the money anonymously, and never tells him. William comes back to the town as a minister and marries a woman from the city who dresses well and knows how to talk. Susie says nothing. D. W. Griffith directs. Lillian Gish plays Susie and Robert Harron plays William. It is one of the small rural films Griffith made after his large scale epics, produced the same year as Broken Blossoms and standing in an entirely different area. The idea is the contrast between plainness and display, and the film openly takes a side; even the intertitles make the preference clear. Lillian Gish's performance carries it. Few actors in silent film convey so much with so little movement, and the role is among her most cited. The narrative presents the woman as an example of self sacrifice, which is its most troubling side from here; that Susie never speaks is shown as a virtue. The country scenes were shot on location and stand as a concrete record of village life at the time. Who it is for: viewers who like silent classics and Lillian Gish. Who it is not for: the narrative is simple, the moral stance belongs to its period, and the pace is slow by present measure.