"Is Real Life Interesting?" That's the challenge D.W. Griffith's True Heart Susie sets for itself-and for its audience-in its opening title. After his historical epics The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, Griffith retreated to small-scale melodramas of rural life. Or was it perhaps an advance? More and more, his most assured work looks to be his films of 1919-20 (among them Broken Blossoms, A Romance of Happy Valley, Way Down East, and tonight's feature), unburdened by his overreaching ambition or his unreconstructed Southern ideology. Few of Griffith's technical tricks or innovations in film language are in evidence in True Heart Susie, which finds instead apparently casual mastery in landscape and acting. The storyline could hardly be simpler: callow country-boy Bobby Harron is the object of the lifelong devotion of the innocent "Susie Trueheart" (Lillian Gish), even in the face of his entrapment by a vampish, "painted" Chicago girl. Indeed, the morality is parallel to the film-form aesthetic: simpler is better. Lillian Gish's performance has the unflamboyant mastery that she expressed best: "Virgins are the hardest roles to play. Those dear little girls-to make them interesting takes great vitality." Self-denying yet strangely manipulative, Susie now makes for a fascinating study in traditional women's roles-something Griffith acknowledged backhandedly in dedicating the film "To the Women of the World-enslaved by Civilization." In a sense, True Heart Susie does return, if not retreat, to the spirit of the best of Griffith's early Biograph Company one-reelers, represented tonight by our opening short, A Child of the Ghetto (1910), a taut little parable of city inhumanity and rural renewal. It was this populist Griffith, with his social concerns lyrically expressed, that King Vidor studied over and over while a ticket-taker and projectionist in Galveston, Texas, in 1910. Scott Simmon