The Scarlet Letter (MGM, 1926)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, November 24) Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase,” hosted by Jacqueline Stewart, showed a quite fascinating film: The Scarlet Letter (1926), second in a series of five silent films Lillian Gish made as an MGM contract player between 1926 and 1930. Gish had been a protegée of legendary director D. W. Griffith and had starred in many of his films from the early teens to 1921, including The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, Hearts of the World, Broken Blossoms, Way Down East and Orphans of the Storm. But by the mid-1920’s Griffith’s star had fallen as audiences started looking beyond his late-Victorian sense of morality and Gish started getting restive and was ready to move on. After a series of independent productions, including The White Sister (1923), Gish signed with MGM and for her first film for them selected La Bohème, Henri Murger’s 19th century novel about starving writers and artists in Paris that had also been the basis for Puccini’s sensationally successful 1896 opera. For her second MGM film Gish wanted to make Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter, a tale of 17th century Puritan New England in which Hester Prynne (Lillian Gish) has a daughter out of wedlock and is immediately shunned by her whole community. She’s sentenced to stand on a gallows for three hours and for the rest of her life to wear a scarlet letter “A” (for “adulteress”) and both her and her innocent daughter Pearl (Joyce Coad) to live in shame. Hester nobly refuses to name the father of her baby girl, and in Hawthorne’s book he takes his own sweet time telling his readers that it’s really Arthur Dimmesdale (Lars Hanson, the only actor who made films with Greta Garbo on both sides of the Atlantic: The Saga of Gösta Berling in their native Sweden and Flesh and the Devil and The Divine Woman in the U.S.).

Dimmesdale is the compassionate Puritan minister of colonial Boston and is trying to push against the insane moral strictures of the Puritan colony – though he’s also conscious of his position and is all too aware of just how far he can push before the religious community pushes back and ultimately disgraces him. The film, directed by Victor Sjöstrom (a Swedish-born director who had come to MGM in the early 1920’s and whose U.S. films credited him as “Seastrom”) from a script by Frances Marion (who, unusually for the silent era, wrote the intertitles as well), comes right out and makes it clear from the get-go that Dimmesdale is Hester’s lover and the father of her child. Marion also establishes that Hester’s husband was someone she was forced to marry by their families in England just before she emigrated to Boston, and he never was truly a husband to her (i.e., they never had sex). She explains all this when Dimmesdale proposes marriage to her on the eve of his voyage to England to present some really important petition from the Massachusetts Bay Colony to the royal government (we’re never told what the petition is or why it’s important), and she turns him down because she’s already married even though she has no idea where her husband, Roger Prynne (Henry B. Walthall, Lillian Gish’s leading man in The Birth of a Nation), is.

It turns out Roger Prynne also emigrated to Boston, but was captured by Native Americans and held hostage by them for seven years, and he only escapes once Hester’s daughter Pearl – whom Dimmesdale formally baptized in an attempt to spare her the shame of being illegitimate – is six years old and the other children are routinely throwing mud at her as a mark of moral contempt. Roger Prynne learns by accident that Dimmesdale is Hester’s lover and Pearl’s father, and he says, “My revenge will be infinite” – leaving both Hester and Dimmesdale in fear as to what he means. When the two finally plot their escape on a Spanish ship that has conveniently docked in Boston, Roger Prynne books passage for himself on the same ship and Dimmesdale, after preaching a powerful sermon advocating for tolerance that the Boston locals hail as the best thing they’ve ever heard from him, dies at the scaffold where Hester was shamed years earlier and opens his chest to reveal his own scarlet “A,” which looks like a brand – though in Hawthorne’s novel it was hinted that it was stigmata. What happens to Hester and Pearl after that is left powerfully ambiguous in the film, though in Hawthorne’s novel the husband dies, she inherits a fortune from him, and she and Pearl flee to England to claim it, returning to Boston years later until Hester’s death, after which she’s buried in a grave near Dimmesdale’s with the epitaph, “‘On a field, sable, the letter A, gules’ (‘On a black background, the letter A in red).”

The Scarlet Letter was a highly personal project for Lillian Gish, who had to fight Will H. Hays, Warren G. Harding’s postmaster general who was appointed by the major Hollywood studios as their morals czar following the twin scandals of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle’s rape trial in 1922 and the still-mysterious death of director William Desmond Taylor the same year. At the time motion pictures were merely considered a “business,” not a form of “speech” protected by the First Amendment, thanks to a 1912 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that was not reversed until 1953. So the studios lived in fear of mandatory government censorship of movies; some states (most notoriously New York) had their own state censor boards, and the studios hoped Hays, with his political connections, would help them forestall federal censorship by uniting the studios to police themselves, each other and the industry as a whole. Among his first actions in this job was to compile a list of books that under no circumstances could be made into movies, and The Scarlet Letter was on it. But Lillian Gish was determined to make a film of The Scarlet Letter and to star in it as Hester Prynne, and so she lobbied the women’s organizations that were the key forces behind the various campaigns to keep the screen “moral.” Her strategy ultimately worked, and Hays withdrew his ban on The Scarlet Letter so MGM could put it into production as a Gish vehicle. (Gloria Swanson used this as a precedent in her own campaign to make another story on Hays’s Index Filmum Prohibitorum, W. Somerset Maugham’s “Miss Thompson” and its successful play adaptation, Rain.) Gish picked Swedes as both her director and her co-star because she felt Scandinavians were more like New England Puritans than 1920’s Americans.

She recalled in her autobiography that she and co-star Hanson couldn’t talk to each other because she knew no Swedish and Hanson knew no English – though director Seastrom could talk to them because he was fluent in both languages. That didn’t stop her from requesting Hanson again as her co-star in The Wind two years later – an awesome film that’s considerably better than The Scarlet Letter and gives Gish, Hanson and Seastrom a lot more to work with than Hawthorne’s moral tale. What strikes me most powerfully about The Scarlet Letter is the sheer moral absurdity of the regimen the Puritan church in colonial Massachusetts imposed on the colony’s residents. In one scene parishioner Giles (played as a comic-relief character by house MGM comic Karl Dane) is upbraided for sneezing in the middle of a church service, and a church minion carries a stick literally to bop on the shoulder anyone who breaks the rules of decorum of the service. In another, a pair of young lovers are forced by the mores of the time to communicate to each other only through speaking tubes, since the laws of the colony forbid them to converse normally until they’re actually married, in which case they’re allowed “chaste caresses.” And even before she gets pregnant and has a child out of wedlock, Hester Prynne is publicly shamed for “running and playing during Ye Sabbath.” This warning about the dangers of Right-wing Christianity run amok is unexpectedly timely after the last Presidential election, in which a profane man like Donald Trump whose career is a living contradiction of all the values conservative Christianity allegedly holds dear (an adulterer, a gambler, a greedy businessperson, a usurer, a con artist, an urbanite) has been hailed as almost literally a Second Coming that will bring about the reforming of America as a Christian-nationalist dictatorship. One does get the impression from watching or reading The Scarlet Letter today that 17th Century Puritan Boston is really the time and place Trump’s political movement feels America was “great” and to which we need to be returned – forcibly, if necessary – to “make America great again.”