One of the most imaginative and ambitious film-makers in the early part of the century, D.W. Griffith firmly made his mark with the epics, Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). However, proving that size does not matter, he produced his masterpiece in the tragic melodrama, Broken Blossoms (1919), in which an innocent young woman, luminously played by the 23-year-old Lillian Gish, is brutally downtrodden by her guardian (Donald Crisp) and befriended by a Chinese immigrant (Richard Barthelmess). The result is tender, intimate, poetic and heartbreaking.