Way Down East (1920)
Way Down East is a hundred-and-three-year-old masterpiece, starring the beautiful, virginal Lillian Gish as a young girl, Anne Moore, living with an elderly mother, who sent to her rich relatives "way down east"; where, like Mabel Normand's Mickey, or Unity as portrayed by Mary Pickford in Stella Maris, she is a "fish out of water." Her lack of graces and social caste is underscored by the narrative; which, oddly was a common plot device of the time. In Mickey, it is used for comic effects. In Stella Maris and Way Down East, the point is to emphasize the tragedy of the central character's situation. It is class-conscious, yet, condescends to the lower classes, as if they were simply fairy tale princesses cleaning out the ashes of the hearth, while their ugly step-sisters while the night away dancing. Once they meet "Mr. Right," a Prince Charming hailing from the "right" sort of stock, the right kind of people, they are allowed to cast off their rags, acquire beauty and social graces, and live "happily ever after" in a bourgeois dream of Victorian romance and staid, tried-and-true, conservative American values. That is not quite Stella Maris, but it seems the summation of Way Down East.