heh, we've all been lillian gish in this one

Really though, this is a painfully sad movie. Sure, the ending is somewhat beautiful and tastefully done, even if totally absurd. But every shot with Lillian Gish in the movies second half is totally heartbreaking. In my opinion, this isn't light-fare, this is romantic masochism. If not for the ending, this would be a movie about the impossibility of a love that lasts forever...Good thing Griffith is so idealistic.

But the cutting! Whoever says this is one of Griffith's least ambitious has no idea what they're talking about. "Simple, pastoral romance"? Griffith here is at his most free-associative. We can burst into flashback without notice, we can see what someone is…

Film #1 of Film School Drop Outs 2018

I don’t know how accurately True Heart Susie represents the gender dynamics of its time (early 1900s) and place (Chicago area), but the film’s tragedy is entirely drawn from those confines. Characters still make choices. But the film makes an effort to highlight the romantic narratives and sexism which determine these decisions. When William leaves for college, the film crosscuts between the lovers, showing Susie and William giving in to gendered ideas of how they should live. William needs to prove his worth by fighting; Susie needs to prove her worth by practicing housekeeping skills. Neither of them seem particularly comfortable what they’re doing—William even looks like a fool. And yet, what…

Maybe my favourite ever Lillian Gish performance, with everyone's favourite tiny-mouthed acting titan playing the "simple, plain" Susie, an angelic, motherless farmer who sells her cow to fund sweetheart Robert Harron's college career, then watches, powerless as he falls for a tight-skirted, powder-faced party animal (Clarine Seymour).

Yes, that is the best premise for a movie ever, thank you for asking.

True Heart Susie is old-fashioned, rose-tinted and heavy-handed in its depiction of the afflictions besetting America (adultery, dancing, lipstick), with a lurch towards melodrama in the final quarter that's more convenient than credible, but it's also utterly beguiling: beautifully directed by a filmmaker who could do Americana with the best of them, when he wasn't doing racism with the…

This film’s melodramatic structure, in which the fulfillment of Susie’s affections is continually eclipsed in the narrative’s progression, employs the generic conventions of emotional excess, sacrifice, and contrived reversal of events as narrative resolution to fashion a description of ineffable mental experience as the foundation of language and modern ways of life despite its untranslatability into expressive forms. Such a lapse between signification and intent is apparent in the early scene in the classroom, in which Susie’s sweetheart William fails an exercise in a spelling class. Susie then gives the correct spelling of the word and the two switch positions in a large circle which the students form around the room. The staging of the actors directly refers to a…

Really well made for its era, True Heart Susie is one of the better silent films and delivers a good story with varied characters. It starts off sweet at first and is a very easy watch all the way through even if tails off towards a cheesy ending. It's surprisingly emotional for a silent film and there's some particularly poignant flashbacks in the second half. 

The only real quibbles with the story is to do with dated notions of a woman's role of society and the plot is distinctly about the qualities of a good wife. Having said that, it's fairly unobjectionable given how it's presented (the characters' morals hold up in other aspects) and also given the era. It's…

I've never before known how it feels to see someone you love loving someone else! I was in tears. The expression in this film is so tender, the chemistry between characters is perfect. Those who still want to create such romances to the cinema's landscape should see these early films first; they are as fresh as they were back then in their emotions! There's no love between William and Bettina but Susie can't see it... The life is bitter but it gets better. It's always beautiful! Once again Griffith shows how he was one of the greatest poets of early cinema and we can finally forget (forget but never really forget) the harmful Birth of the Nation of which many…

I believe that when you think of someone, and your love is pure, it does something with the other person, whether they know it or not. You can reach out to someone you cannot reach any other way. That’s what Susie does. The man she’s thinking of cannot be entirely happy because he’s rejected love. It lives right next door to him, but he’s turned his head and is looking into the other direction, sleeping in the arms of a woman whose love isn’t real. But he doesn’t know, because a person needs to know their own heart in order to understand others. And Susie is still there, talking to cows, crying into flowers, writing her dreams, her love rooted…