187 – Broken Blossoms (1919)

Oh boy. This one is gonna be rough. The next entry in Roger Ebert’s The Great Movies is D.W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms. Aside from being one of the pioneers of the feature film format, Griffith is probably best known for The Birth of a Nation, a movie heavily derided for its racist depiction of African Americans and its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. Griffith learned his lesson after that one, making films like Intolerance and Broken Blossoms, which attempt to show a more accepting view of other ethnicities.