Editing Broken Blossoms (section)

==The "closet scene"==
The most-discussed scene in ''Broken Blossoms'' is Lillian Gish's "closet" scene. Here Gish performs Lucy's horror by writhing in the [[Claustrophobia|claustrophobic]] space like a tortured animal who knows there is no escape.<ref name="Schickel, Richard 1984. page 392">Schickel, ''D.W. Griffith: an American Film Life'', 1984, p. 392.</ref> There is more than one anecdote about the filming of the "closet" scene, [[Richard Schickel]] writes:
{{Blockquote|It is heartbreaking – yet for the most part quite delicately controlled by the actress. Barthelmess reports that her hysteria was induced by Griffith's taunting of her. Gish, on her part, claims that she improvised the child's tortured movements on the spot and that when she finished the scene there was a hush on stage, broken finally by Griffith's exclamation, "My God, why didn't you warn me you were going to do that?"<ref name="Schickel, Richard 1984. page 392"/>}} The scene is also used to demonstrate Griffith's uncanny ability to create an aural effect with only an image.<ref>O'Dell, ''Griffith and the Rise of Hollywood'', 1970, p. 125.</ref> Gish's screams apparently attracted such a crowd outside the studio that people needed to be held back.<ref>Williams, ''Griffith: First Artist of the Movies'', 1980, p. 114.</ref>