The Mothering Heart (1913)

A crazed Lillian Gish

Here's another D.W. Griffith film (this one clocking in at just over 23 minutes).  Lillian Gish plays a young woman who, against her better judgment, agrees to marry her boyfriend. After struggling to make ends meet, the man finally gains some success and takes his wife to a nightclub.  She is out of place in high society, but he manages to attract the attentions of another "idle woman."  The husband soon begins an affair with this woman and when his now pregnant wife finds out, she leaves him for her mother's house.  Ultimately, the wife begins raising the child on her own and the husband's concubine attracts the attentions of another man.  Seeing the error of his ways, the husband tries to reconcile.  But is it already too late for their marriage and... the baby?

All right, I'll admit it. This one felt like a chore. The story was just never terribly engaging. The entire relationship between the unnamed husband and wife just never really clicked, so his philandering does not come as a shock.

A couple of real positives are on display here, first and foremost being Gish's performance. This is the first performance I have seen in this marathon that is off-kilter.  I'm talking Gary Oldman in The Professional off-kilter.  Nicolas Cage in... well, everything, off-kilter.  When the wife discovers the other woman's scarf in her husband's coat pocket, she smiles, frowns, laughs and becomes angry over the course of seconds.  At the end of the film as she wanders through her rose garden, she looked (to me) exactly like Michelle Pfeiffer's crazed Selina Kyle in Batman Returns.

The most remarkable thing to share however is the ending. SPOILERS FOLLOW!  A title card appears on the screen saying "The baby ill."  That statement is like describing the great flood from the Bible as a slight drizzle.  The doctor comes to the house, dotes over the child for a minute and the baby dies.  The woman loses it and the husband, who had just seen his child presumably for the first time moments ago, mourns by the cradle. After destroying the rose bushes she so carefully tended during the movie, the wife reenters the house and is about to kick her husband out when she notices the baby's pacifier juxtaposed against his wedding ring.  As the movie ends they appear to reconcile in that moment.

Because of the inherent shortness of the piece, nothing about this ending feels earned.  The baby is on-screen for mere moments before you find out the baby died.  The husband is generally a jerk throughout and there is no evidence he's changed at all.  The wife has spent entire movie being put upon, has her baby taken from her and is rewarded with the moron that she spent the movie escaping from.

Technically, the movie feels both overly long (with repeated shots of the goings-on at the nightclub) and compressed (I could not for the life of me explain passage of time in this movie).  He does more referencing of earlier scenes than I've seen before, most notably when the husband first attracts the idle woman's attention and then later has the situation very precisely reversed in both action and staging. 

I love my Griffith, but beyond Gish's kooky performance which is great, this is one of the lesser works I've seen from the director.

Watched on YouTube
Picture from MoMA