In 1996, Broken Blossoms was included in the annual selection of 25 motion pictures to be added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress.

After being beaten and discarded one evening by her raging father, Lucy finds sanctuary in Cheng's home, the beautiful and exotic room above his shop.

As Cheng gazes at Lucy's youthful face which, in spite of the circumstances, beams with innocence and even the slightest hint of a smile, Battling enters the room to make his escape.

After returning to his home with Lucy's body, Cheng builds a shrine to the Buddha and takes his own life with a knife to the chest.

[5] Shot entirely in the studio, Broken Blossoms is notable in that most of Hollywood productions at the time "relied heavily on location work to provide any kind of effective atmosphere".

[8][9] As such, Broken Blossoms is “the fusion of directorial and acting style.”[10] Griffith was unsure of his final product and took several months to complete the editing, saying: "I can't look at the damn thing; it depresses me so.

[12] “The enthusiasm which Broken Blossoms awakened in 1919 can hardly be overstated; Griffith was everywhere felt to have opened up new dimensions in the cinema and raised it to a level of great tragic art.”—Edward Wagenknecht in The Movies in the Age of Innocence (1962).

[14] According to Lillian Gish's autobiography, theaters were decorated with flowers, moon lanterns and beautiful Chinese brocaded draperies for the premiere.

[15] Contrasting with Intolerance's grand story, set and length, Griffith charmed audiences by the delicacy with which Broken Blossoms handled such a complex subject.

"[16]The scenes of child abuse nauseated backers when Griffith gave them a preview of the film; according to Lillian Gish in interviews, a Variety reporter invited to sit in on a second take left the room to vomit.

[20] Unbroken Blossoms, a play about the making of the film told from the perspective of the two Chinese American consultants hired to work on the project, premiered at East West Players in Summer 2024.

Literary critic Edward Wagenknecht places Broken Blossoms thematically among the works of Shakespeare and the ancient Greek dramatists, “who wrought their material out of sordid material.”[24] Broken Blossom might have been merely a subtly lighted, skillfully directed slum melodrama [but] was lifted into a world of aesthetic purity and clarity, so that the audience went away uplifted as well as terrified.

Gish, on her part, claims that she improvised the child's tortured movements on the spot and that when she finished the scene there was a hush on stage, broken finally by Griffith's exclamation, "My God, why didn't you warn me you were going to do that?