“Early in the film Gish, as Prynne, loses her bonnet chasing a songbird through a summer glade. When the wind catches her waist-long tresses, Gish appears for an instant as if she had stepped into a painting by Botticelli...Seastrom seizes on Gish's sensuality throughout the film...bringing this largely faithful adaptation down squarely on the side of love and ardent sensuality.”— Film critic Paul Malcolm[4]
The film was the second one Gish made under her contract with M-G-M and a departure from the ingénue roles she had performed in service to director D.W. Griffith. (Her first M-G-M picture was directed by King Vidor, an adaption of La bohème with co-star John Gilbert, in which she played the pathetic consumptive Mimi.)[5] She asked production manager Louis B. Mayer specifically to make The Scarlet Letter: his agreement was reluctant, due to M-G-M's concern that censors would object to a frank depiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne's character, Hester Prynne, whose romantic indiscretions unleash a wave of reactionary bigotry. Director Seastrom disabused these expectations with an opening intertitle "establishing Prynne's [Gish's] ordeal as 'a story of bigotry uncurbed.'"[6]
Shooting took under two months. The production cost a total of $417,000 when factoring out $48,000 overhead costs.[7]
^Durgnat and Simmons, 1988: p. 75-76: In both films Gish plays "the self-sacrificial lover..."
^Malcolm, 2004: "Gish was the project's prime mover as she sought more mature roles after playing ingenues for D. W. Griffith." And: "...Gish's wholesome reputation [established under her D.W. Griffith films] put censorship groups at ease [anticipating] a most chaste Hester Prynne." expected from Gish. And: An opening intertitle reads "a story of bigotry uncurbed."
^Slide, Anthony. "Those Elusive Budget Figures". Silent Topics: Essays on Undocumented Areas of Silent Film. Scarecrow Press, 2005, p. 25.
^Scott Eyman, Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer, Robson, 2005 p 125
Malcolm, Paul. 2004. The Scarlet Letter, 1926. UCLA Film and Television Archive: 12th Festival of Preservation, July 22-August 21, 2004. Guest festival guide.
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