THE SCARLET LETTER

(1927, Victor Sjöström) Stunning adaptation of Hawthorne's novel, with Lillian Gish, as adulterous Hester Prynne, giving “one of the most beautifully sustained performances in screen history” (Pauline Kael). Restored from the original camera negative by UCLA Film & Television Archive in cooperation with Warner Bros., George Eastman House, and The Packard Humanities Institute.

REVIEWS

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"There isn't an actress on the screen today, and perhaps there never was another, who can move like Lillian Gish: it's as if no bones, no physical barriers, stood between her intuitive understanding of the role and her expression of it."
– Pauline Kael

"Gish goes from stillness to seething moments of anxiety and fear, with a few shafts of pure defiant pleasure thrown in. Sjöström's production, shot at MGM, has a richness of austerity – the black-and-white Puritan-era costumes are almost abstract in their simplicity; the rooms are stern, bare, uncomfortable. But, outside, the woods offer a kind of stippled erotic paradise."
– David Denby, The New Yorker

"Hawthorne's beautiful novel is superbly caught in Sjöström's direction
and in the remarkable performances of Lillian Gish and the Swedish Lars Hanson."
– Georges Sadoul

"Lillian Gish gives a landmark performance in this version of the Hawthorne novel.
 Sjöström's version remains the definitive effort."
– Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader

"One of Gish's great performances...
What holds the film together above all is Sjöstrîöm's extraordinary feeling for rural Americana."
– Tom Milne, Time Out (London)

"NOT TO BE MISSED! Gish brings intense spiritual strength and poetic grace
to American literature’s most famous adulteress."
– Cullen Gallagher, Our Town Downtown