RetroClips

Lillian Gish did her own stunts here, no double, on real breaking ice during a New England blizzard in temperatures below zero -- about twenty takes a day for three weeks left her with frostbitten fingers and nerve damage in the hand she trailed in the freezing water, feeling she said she never fully got back. Griffith himself was frostbitten on one side of his face directing the scene. Gish had spent the weeks beforehand taking daily ice baths and walking the streets coatless to prepare her body for the cold. None of it was faked: the ice really was breaking apart under them as the cameras rolled.