Hester Prynne and the Rev. Dimmesdale fall in love but their love cannot be, in a version of the old Hawthorne story. Gish is at her best as she unselfishly insists on taking blame for their sin by herself, her huge eyes brimming with tears. The screenplay almost reduces Puritanism to parody, a pastiche of grim-faced people hating every sort of joy and spontaneity, and Hester is made to embody the opposite sort of thing. This may be the reason she alone does not ever wear the Puritan costume of black and white; rather, she wears white and dove-grey, and lots of lace, too, which may be because she is supposed to be a seamstress. She has a pet bird in a cage and skips across the lawn in pursuit when it has the bad taste to escape on the sabbath. Hester's daughter Pearl wears ludicrously anachronistic outfits, a 1920s party dress, slightly old-fashioned, a ribbon in her hair, and smart pumps with ankle straps and bows. Oh, and the church bells ring in a stone endwall, more like a Spanish mission than a New England church. Still, the film comes across as a sort of emotion-laden puppet show, stripped of the novel's complexity and depth, and yet that's the way silent films often work best.
Review of The Scarlet Letter
