One of the great American films of the 1920s. Lillian Gish had enough public veneration and star power to pacify morality watchdogs and MGM about her turning Hawthorne's 1850 literary classic about adultery into a film. She also revitalized Sjöström's artistic career in California by handpicking him to direct; Gish imagined Scandinavians closer in feeling to seventeenth-century Puritans than contemporary Americans. Lars Hanson was imported to play Dimmesdale and performed his dialogue entirely in Swedish. Sjöström created the most austerely “Scandinavian” production of his nine Hollywood features, transplanting earlier themes of nature, conformity, desire, and Lutheran-Protestant angst into a New World milieu. From the outset, one falls under the spell of a pre-industrial universe both alien and uncannily familiar-an insular theocratic society bordered by seductive wilderness. Gish's fearless performances here and in The Wind make her work with Griffith seem like overtures to the operatic arias to come.