Way Down East is a beautiful and satisfying picture.

With the gathering together of a relatively small cast and less than half a dozen stellar film artists, D.W. has taken a simple, elemental, old-fashioned, bucolic melodrama and milked it for 12 reels of absorbing entertainment.

[Lillian Gish's] virtuoso performance makes the heroine's growth from gullible innocence to bitter experience credible.

Mr. Griffith has the eye of a landscape painter of the first flight.