The Mothering Heart

D.W. Griffith, Biograph, June 1913, two reels. Lillian Gish is the young wife who tends a garden and a puppy, then a marriage that sours when Walter Miller's husband takes up with an idle woman at a club. She goes home to her mother (Kate Bruce) and has the baby. G.W. Bitzer on camera. A print survives at MoMA. Gish plays the grief in small gestures, against the usual Biograph semaphore.