The Scarlet Letter (1926)

 Victor Sjostrom's "The Scarlet Letter"

Signing on to an MGM contract, Lilian Gish wanted to flee her ingenue roles. After doing King Vidor's "La Boheme," she decided that she wanted to adapt Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter." Louis B. Mayer, the production manager, was incredibly reluctant, concerned that MGM would object to such a frank depiction of adultery. However, Gish wanted to point out the bigotry of the Puritans from the novel as a allegory to contemporary bigotry. She felt that the Swedish were closer to and would understand the Puritans better than anyone in America would, so she hired Swedish director Victor Sjostrom. She had long been a fan of Sjostrom's and had wanted to work with him for a long time. Particularly, she loved the Swedish acting method he employed, in which silent actors show more restraint to their performance, rather than acting animated. Shooting took a couple of months, until Gish learned that her mother had a stroke in London. Gish wanted to get to her mother as soon as possible, so Sjostrom created a shooting schedule that crammed the final two weeks of shooting into three days of non-stop work. The crew worked without complaint so that Gish could catch the earliest possible train to New York to get on a boat to London. The final product was a fine adaptation of the novel, and continued to prove Gish's breadth of capability. She had such a good working relationship with Sjostrom that the two of them collaborated again on 1928's "The Wind."