Five years after “Birth of a Nation,” D.W. Griffith directed this five-hankie melodrama based on a hugely popular stage play. If you're fond of rambling 19th century novels or four-week 1970s TV miniseries, with tragic heroines and broad casts of colorful characters, here's the 1920 silent film equivalent. Lillian Gish stars as Anna (“But we may as well call her Woman” intone the title cards), who undergoes 147 minutes of trial and tribulation before she can find happiness.

Yep, that's a two and a half-hour silent film. I sat down the other night thinking “Well, let's see how much of this we can get through tonight.” But 145 minutes later I was still on the couch, completely engrossed, bellowing “Look out for the waterfall!” Griffith knew what he was doing, it seems. And thankfully there are no Klansmen to be found at all.

The first half of the plot is straight out of “Tess of the D'Urbervilles.” Anna's mother sends her to the big city to request financial help from wealthy relatives. (Mothers: Do not do this.) Anna falls afoul of a heartless, resplendently lipstick-clad seducer (Lowell Sherman; and yeah, I know the silent film actors all wear lipstick, but he just wears it so very well) and returns home bearing a shameful bundle, ending up in a home for fallen women. Eventually she finds work with a farm family. Can she find love with the family's kind, strapping son (the achingly beautiful Richard Barthelmess)?

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