By comparison, The Birth of a Nation was just a nibble.
Orphans of the Storm was a crumb.
Way Down East was nothing more than a diet plate—the celery and carrot sticks of D.W. Griffith’s career.
But Intolerance…now that was a ten-course, food-spilling-off-the-edges-of-the-table feast when it came to early silent motion pictures. When writing about Intolerance, you don’t just say it was big, you say it was B-I-G (accompanied by fireworks, blaring trumpets and a ticker-tape parade, if your budget allows).
Certainly, there were bigger, longer movies in the silent era—the original versions of Abel Gance’s Napoleon (1927) and Erich Von Stroheim’s Greed (1925) clocked in at six hours, twenty-eight minutes and nine hours, respectively—but Intolerance (released in 1916) has the look and feel of something with such immense scope that it’s likely to burst the confines of the theater or, worse, your TV screen [*if you’re viewing Intolerance at home, have a towel handy to mop up the overspill from the Babylonian scenes].
Watching Intolerance is like trying to ogle centuries of history through a peephole. Yet, somehow, Griffith had the brazen ambition and ego to cram it all onto tiny frames of celluloid.
Believe it or not, the two-and-a-half-hour film began as a 45-minute melodrama based on a recent headline-making strike at a chemical factory where workers had been killed by the militia. That story forms just one of four interwoven sagas in the final product:
The Modern Story: Three groups of characters intersect—a mill owner named Jenkins (Sam de Grasse) who rules his workers with an autocratic fist, a vivacious girl known only as the Dear One (Mae Marsh) whose father works in the mill, and the Boy (Robert Harron) whose father also labors for Jenkins. Neither the Boy nor the Dear One know each other—at least, not at the start of the movie. Eventually, the plot of this chapter revolves around a murder trial and a last-minute attempt to save a character from the gallows.
The French Story: Set in 16th-century France when Catherine de Medici and her son King Charles IX persecuted the Protestant Huguenots (in “a hotbed of intolerance,” cry the title cards), this part tells how another happy-go-lucky girl, this time named Brown Eyes (Margery Wilson), has a tragic romance with a Huguenot while the executioner's blade and the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre loom in their future.
The Judean Story: Otherwise known as “The Greatest Hits of the New Testament,” this section is a mini-biography of Christ (Howard Gaye), going from the water-into-wine Wedding at Cana to the final trudge toward Golgotha.
The Babylonian Story: Filled with eyeball-exploding detail in sets and costumes, this highly-regarded section records the downfall of Prince Belshazzar's Babylon at the hands of King Cyrus the Persian, thanks to the “intolerance” of some dark-browed and treacherous High Priests. Another vivaciously bouncy maiden, known as The Mountain Girl (Constance Talmadge), gets entwined in Babylonian court politics through a series of circumstances.
None of the stories hold much water, however. When stacked up against the visual splendor of the movie, the plots are muddled and uninteresting. By the same token, none of the characters engage us on an emotional level; most of them are symbolic types anyway, bestowed with generic-label names like The Dear One, The Friendless One and The Rhapsode. Even Jesus is known as The Christ (though He is certainly the one we most readily and emotionally identify with).
As a history lesson, Intolerance can be sloppy and condescending. Griffith’s constant shifting back and forth in the cinematic time machine breaks the rhythm of narrative and if we’re not already familiar with the ancient history, we’ll probably become “unstuck in time,” to borrow a Vonnegut phrase. But that’s all right, because Griffith is always on hand to plaster his unique brand of superior morality on the title cards with extraneous “notes.” NOTE: Huguenots—the Protestant party of this period.
But as a Sunday school lesson, you can’t find a finer pulpit-pounder than D.W. Griffith and his “stamp-every-frame-with-symbolism” style. The director excelled at giving audiences Something to Think About when they left the nickelodeon theaters. Sure, the white-knuckle chase scenes were his bread and butter, but he was just as compelled to pump hearts and brains full of patriotic-religious blood while he had them captive in the dark theater. Griffith felt compelled to fight a storm of immorality and intolerance (an early title card announces “each story shows how hatred and intolerance, through the ages, have battled against love and charity”). Griffith was surrounded by sin in the pre-Jazz Age years. This was, after all, the same year Margaret Sanger opened up the nation’s first birth control clinic. And, in the previous year, Audrey Munson, playing a model for a sculptor in the film Inspiration, became the first actress to shed her clothes on screen (of course, there’s plenty of bared and barely-bared flesh on display in Intolerance).
As for content, Intolerance is easy to dismiss as an antique by today’s standards; but when it comes to style, it’s a grand achievement. To fully appreciate Intolerance, you must bear in mind that many of the things we take for granted in today’s movies—things like close-ups and pans and tracking shots—were invented or refined by Griffith. Here in Intolerance, we can see these first early syllables in the language of moviemaking.
When we first meet Brown Eyes, the camera does a continuous track, all the way smack dab up against her eyes. In one of the movie’s most legendary shots, the camera does the opposite—pulling back on a crane in a long, slow high-angle view of Belshazzar’s outdoor court teeming with extras in a victory celebration over Persia. The colossal set featured 300-foot walls adorned with massive sculptures of elephants rearing up on their hind legs—the detail in this one shot is, quite simply, mind-boggling (and remember, effects like miniatures, processing and computer graphics were still a thing of the future back then). The final bill for Intolerance amounted to about $1.9 million. Needless to say, Griffith’s financial backers were alarmed and trembling before the picture opened to its huge success.
One of my own favorite shots in the movie is actually a very simple, low-budget one: after Jenkins, the mill owner in the Modern Story, cuts his workers’ wages by 10% and is besieged by a strike, Griffith cuts to a long shot of the lonely man seated in the center of his vast, richly-furnished office. It’s a quiet moment in an otherwise loud and grandiose silent film.
If you’ve never seen Intolerance and have even the slightest interest in the history of movies, you owe it to yourself to dig up a copy at your local VideoRama (the DVD version is quite good and includes a scroll-through text essay on the production history and includes clips comparing different versions). If you’re able to tolerate Griffith’s sermonizing, then it’s a tolerably good movie.
D.W. Griffith's towering epic of man's inhumanity to man throughout the ages, "Intolerance" is considered the greatest film of the silent era and perh...More at HotMovieSale.com
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