| The Scarlet Letter | |
| Director: | Victor Seastrom |
| Producer: | Victor Seastrom |
| Starring: | Lillian Gish Lars Hanson |
| Editing: | Hugh Wynn |
| Music: | William Axt (uncredited) David Mendoza (uncredited) |
| Distributor: | Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer |
| Runtime: | 115 minutes |
| Country: | United States |
| Language: | Silent with English intertitles |
The Scarlet Letter is a 1926 American silent drama film based on the 1850 novel of the same name by Nathaniel Hawthorne and directed by Swedish filmmaker Victor Sjöström (credited as Victor Seastrom).[1] Prints of the film survive in the MGM/United Artists film archives and the UCLA Film and Television Archive.[2] The film is now considered the best film adaptation of Hawthorne's novel.[3]
The film was the second one Gish made under her contract with M-G-M and a departure from the ingénue roles she had performed in service to director D.W. Griffith. (Her first M-G-M picture was directed by King Vidor, an adaption of La bohème with co-star John Gilbert, in which she played the pathetic consumptive Mimi.)[4] She asked production manager Louis B. Mayer specifically to make The Scarlet Letter: his agreement was reluctant, due to M-G-M's concern that censors would object to a frank depiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne's character, Hester Prynne, whose romantic indiscretions unleash a wave of reactionary bigotry. Director Seastrom disabused these expectations with an opening intertitle "establishing Prynne's [Gish's] ordeal as 'a story of bigotry uncurbed.'"[5]
Shooting took under two months. The production cost a total of $417,000 when factoring out $48,000 overhead costs.[6]
The film made a profit of $296,000.[7]
The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists: