The Scarlet Letter (1926 film)
The Scarlet Letter is a 1926 American 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). Prints of the film survive in the MGM/United Artists film archives and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. The film is now considered the best film adaptation of Hawthorne's novel. Production. 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.) She asked production manager Louis B. Mayer specifically to make "The Scarlet Letter" and he reluctantly agreed, 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.'" Shooting  took under two months. The production cost a total of $417,000 when factoring out $48,000 overhead costs. Reception. The film made a profit of $296,000. The film is recognized by American Film Institute in these lists: