It was a novel Hollywood didn't want to touch in the mid-1920s, even though the 1850 classic was brought to the screen six times earlier. The recently-established Will Hays office had its censorship fangs out. A story about a married woman who gets pregnant by a lover was cause for alarm for most movie studios.
Lilian Gish, one of silent film's major star, had long wanted to bring Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Scarlet Letter' in an updated version to the screen. Contracted to MGM in a three-picture deal, she convinced the studio's head of production, Irving Thalberg, she could deliver a tasteful version of Hawthorne's book without moralistic tongue-waggers complaining. With a script by Frances Marion, which follows the novel closely, MGM's August 1926's "The Scarlet Letter" has been praised as the best version of the book in a long-line of past and future movie adaptations.
Its success can be attributed to Gish herself, who portrays Hester Prynne. She hasn't heard from her husband who traveled overseas for several years from their Puritan Boston, Massachusetts, home in the mid-1600s. She becomes pregnant from a man whom she doesn't disclose the name. The Gish version departs from Hawthorne in a couple of major ways: the film begins a year earlier than the author's, showing her condemned to a stockade for leaping and dancing after her song bird escapes its cage. It's there where she meets the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale (Lars Hanson). Also, the films unveils the love relationship between the minister and Hester, not keeping secret of who's the father of the baby.
Another reason for the movie's overall financial popularity is Swedish director Victor Sjostrom's unique directing. He allowed Gish the freedom to display her attractiveness by literally letting her hair down in a clandestine meeting with Dimmesdale in the woods, reflecting Hester's modernistic independence. Gish had the choice in selecting the director, and she picked Sjostrom because she "felt the Swedes were closer to the feelings of New England Puritans than modern Americans." She also favored Hanson as Dimmesdale from his 1924 performance in "The Saga of Gosta Berling." Hanson, who knew very little English, elected to speak his lines (it was a silent movie after all) in Swedish while Gish spoke English in scenes where they're together. Homesick actress Greta Garbo, recently arriving in America from Sweden after signing a contract with MGM, was a near daily presence on the set since she was comfortable speaking her native language with Hanson.
With two weeks of filming to go, Lillian found out her mother suffered a stroke in London and reportedly dying. Dorothy, her sister, urged her to catch the first boat to England to attend to her. In a near impossible request, Lillian asked Sjostrom she needed to leave in three days to travel by train to New York City, then on to a liner to London. The director didn't flitch. He designed an almost around-the-clock schedule to film all of Gish's parts-as long as the crew agreed to the grueling sleepless itinerary. The workers heartedly agreed.
"The Scarlet Letter" is still admired for Sjostrom's creation of an environmental rise en scene that underscored the film's characters' emotion and psychology by its pastoral recreation of a 17th century village. Even though the residents of Salem, MA, where the story takes place, were insulted by their forefathers' portrayal in the film, the American Film Institute nominated it as one of the most passionate motion pictures ever made as well as nominated Hester Prynne as one of movie's most admired heroes.
