Miss Gish, for the first time in the memory of the oldest inhabitant of the cinema palaces, plays a mature woman, a woman of depth, of feeling and wisdom and noble spirit.... She is not Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne, but she is yours and mine, and she makes ‘The Scarlet Letter’ worth a visit. The _Sun_ man’s notice was a fair sample of other printed opinions at home and abroad. Critics who were anxious to show that they were familiar with Hawthorne, sometimes worked themselves up over the departure from the original story, and sometimes “took it out” on Lillian and Lars Hansen, but generally they had only good things to say of the acting of these two, of little Joyce Coad and the others, and of Seastrom’s fine direction. Seastrom had created New England atmosphere on a Culver City lot, a fact not always suspected. Lillian had hoped that some of the scenes might really be made in New England, but Seastrom’s imagination had served as well—perhaps better. No fault was found here—indeed, very little anywhere. Critics who went prepared to do their worst, forgot all about it when they saw Lillian in her little Puritan cap, her expressive back in its little Puritan waist, and especially when she sat in the stocks, “for running and playing on ye Sabbath,” leaning feverishly out to drink from the cup of cold water brought her by the conscience-stricken minister. One hardened critic wrote: I retire from the field with tears in my eyes and rage in my heart, as becomes a cynic betrayed and undone. To consider her critically is beyond my powers—she simply annihilates the instinct. Of this much I am quite sure: She is a great, a very great artist, and by far the most appealing and human little figure appearing on the screen today—and the loveliest. [Illustration: “THE SCARLET LETTER” Miss Gish as Hester Prynne, with the shadow of Lars Hansen, as Dimmesdale] Three or four years ago, in a big barn of a theatre in Southern France, the writer of these pages first saw “The Scarlet Letter” and went home in a daze, waking up now and then to damn his Puritan ancestors. In the seat next his, had sat a small, intense Frenchwoman, who, at one point, had said, tearfully, to her companion: “Regardez, Léontine, regardez son pauvre petit dos!” (Look, Leontine, look at her poor little back!) And just now I read a paragraph which said: “Lillian Gish can convey more pathos with her back than any other actress with all her features.” I agree with that, and I am not going by my first impression. I have seen the picture again—very recently, with Lillian, in the New York Metro-Goldwyn projection room. Association had destroyed none of the illusion. The effect was the same—heightened. We left the crash and glare of Ninth Avenue for the comparative seclusion of a cab. Lillian said, presently: “I was too immature to play that part. She was a woman. I looked just like a child.”