[3] “Early in the film Gish, as Prynne, loses her bonnet chasing a songbird through a summer glade.

When the wind catches her waist-long tresses, Gish appears for an instant as if she had stepped into a painting by Botticelli...Seastrom seizes on Gish's sensuality throughout the film...bringing this largely faithful adaptation down squarely on the side of love and ardent sensuality.”— Film critic Paul Malcolm[4] 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.

)[5] She asked production manager Louis B. Mayer specifically to make The Scarlet Letter: his agreement was reluctant, 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.