Intolerance was taken as
D.W. Griffith’s apology for the incendiary racial sentiment of Birth of a Nation. Griffith may
certainly have felt the timing was right. He was, after all, well aware of the
riots he provoked with his first feature. Intolerance,
however, was in part being planned before Birth
of a Nation, pushed aside when Griffith undertook his first breakthrough,
and only returned to and expanded on once Birth of a Nation proved a success,
now made as a lifelong aspiration first and as peace offering last if at all.
“He didn’t feel he had anything to
apologize for,” biographer Kevin Brownlow told the New York Times. If anything, Griffith felt he was owed an apology
and this follow up was his plea. In his own limited way, Griffith fashioned
himself a humanitarian through his art and inhumanity was a reoccurring theme
in his work. It was only natural that once secure in his independence as a
filmmaker he would make a tribute to mankind, with all the styles, techniques,
and morals he had cultivated at Biograph. Intolerance,
more so than Birth of a Nation, is
his cumulative work. Everything Griffith developed and aspired to throughout
his career is fitted into the three hour epic.
In
terms of sheer scale, Intolerance is
a most impressive sight. Griffith and, in some ways, the movies outdid
themselves with it. It was likely out of sensitivity that the American Film
Institute replaced Birth of a Nation
with Intolerance when it updated its
list of the 100 greatest American films in 2007. But, goodwill aside, when the
two films are compared, Intolerance
makes the better case for defining cinema as an art form.
It even offers an explanation as to why Griffith
would next return to the modest melodrama of his early years with Broken Blossoms in 1919. The most
heartfelt of the four intertwining stories in Intolerance is also the simplest. Set around 1914 and foregoing
lavish sets for the stark cramped flats of Griffith’s Biograph days, it tells
the story of a young girl (Mae Marsh) who moves to the city after her father
loses his job at the factory for his part in a strike. After the hardships of
life in the slums bring the old man to his death, the girl is swooned over by a
smooth-operating boy (Robert Harron) who also fled the country after the
strike. Finding his way in the streets he falls under the control of a
neighborhood rough played by Walter Long.
In every respect, this segment is
classic Griffith. There are harrowing close-ups of the girl’s anguished face
when the society “uplifters” come to take her baby away after her husband is
framed for a crime and sent to jail, most of the action takes place in dimly
lit tenement buildings, and it concludes with a race against time as the girl,
a kindly police officer, and the Governor hurry over to stop the execution of
the boy.
What retains power in this segment more
than a hundred years later are the shots of the struggling workers looking on
for their chance as the strike goes terribly wrong, impoverished slum-dwellers
watching police raid their neighborhood with dismay, and the brutality that
ensues when the factory guards turn on the strikers. In these fleeting moments
Griffith achieves the social impact he had been working toward since A Corner in Wheat.
Conversely, the most elegantly designed
piece is devoted the least time, perhaps because the struggles of Ancient
Jerusalem in the years leading up to the crucifixion of Christ (Howard Gaye)
was a story so popular with early filmmakers (Griffith himself gave Jesus
Christ a majestic appearance in the last shot of Birth of a Nation) there was little else Griffith could bring to it
but draw parallels between the moral eyes of the town then and today. For in
both this story and that of contemporary times the villains are not only the
guards that crucify Christ or fire at the strikers, but the social watchdogs
who bring pain and suffering to the very souls they claim to help all under the
guise of cleaning up the city. Despite having little experience outside of the
world of ballrooms and cocktail parties, the women of the puritanical society
believe themselves in touch with the impoverished residents of the tenement
houses. Organizing raids on their streets with the funds they raised ostensibly
for charity, their crusade results in the young girl losing her baby to foster
care.
“The purpose of the production is to
take a universal theme through various periods of the race’s history: Ancient,
Sacred, Medieval, and Modern times are considered. Events are not set forth in
their historical sequence or according to the accepted forms of dramatic
construction, but as they might flash across a mind seeking to parallel the
life of the different ages,” Griffith wrote.
Critic Vachel Lindsay observed the
pattern as well. “The days of St. Bartholomew and the Crucifixion signal back
to Babylon sharp or vague or subtle messages. The little factory couple in the
modern street scene called The Dear One and The Boy seem to wave their hands
back to Babylon amid the orchestration of ancient memories,” he wrote in The New Republic.
The crucifixion itself is handled with
little fanfare, but what a beautiful camera work throughout! The reconstruction
of Cana, the sprawling shots of the open markets combined with Griffith’s
clever use of animal footage (the modern story offers many fine shots of
assorted barnyard fowl and in the story of old Jerusalem he finds an
interesting subject in a camel) leave a stunning mark on the picture.
It is a pity that Griffith didn’t dig
deeper into the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572. Of the four stories, it
is the one most directly tied to intolerance. Catherine de Medici (Josephine
Crowell) is portrayed as the hateful engineer of the massacre unwilling to
accept a truce between the Catholic royalty and the Huguenots but the film
never uses this as more than a mere background, having little interest in the
religious and politic complexities of the period/ True to Griffith’s style, a
subplot involving the assassination of Admiral Coligny (Joseph Henabery) was
cut and the focus turned on Brown Eyes (Margery Wilson), a shy Protestant girl and
her lover Prosper Latour (Eugene Pallette) and the soldier (Allan Sears) who
falls for her. But the romantic triangle is thrown into a mess when the
slaughter begins and the carnage in the streets makes for one of the film’s
most powerful moments.
Like the contemporary story, the episode
chronicling the fall of Babylon following the war between Prince Belshazzar
(Alfred Paget) and Cyrus the Great (George Siegmann), circa 539 B.C. , takes up
roughly forty percent of the film. It is Griffith’s true answer to his Italian
rival, Giovanni Pastrone, whose Cabiria
predated Birth of a Nation by a
year. In itself, the set, built by Frank
Wortman, became part of Hollywood folklore with the city walls towering a
hundred feet high, three-eights-of-a-mile long, elephant lining in the
archways, and wide enough to fit the film’s over three thousand extras. Taken
singularly, this piece is Griffith’s tour
de force.
Craft, however, was not Griffith’s
primary motivation and it shows when he abandons the background of the
treacherous high priests who betray their citizens when they turn their worship
from the god Baal to Ishtar. Instead of reconciling the two gods, the priest,
in vengeance, shares the city’s military secrets with the Persian army. It’s
the religious animosity between Babylon and Persia that brings death and
destruction. The point is made clearly in the film, but this isn’t where
Griffith wants to stay. He zeroes in on the story of Mountain Girl (Constance
Talmadge), a tomboy who is sold by her brother to wife auctioneers for her
unorthodox behavior and then sentenced to be stoned to death. Both times she is
saved by Belshazzar and, in return, she runs away on a spy mission to follow
the renegade priests and dies fighting for the city.
As stunning as the entire piece is,
Griffith’s decision to spend most of it on a micro story cheats it of a larger
impact and wider context. This was Griffith’s fundamental weakness as a
filmmaker; he could not resist simpering manipulative melodrama. Cross-cutting
and other technicalities were his genius and weepers his passion. However, as
in two of the other four stories (the Biblical one ultimately remains under
used), any objections to the narrative are compensated for by sheer spectacle.
The siege and fall of the great Babylon makes for a rising climax and is a
technical triumph by any measure. Every detail is built to impressive from the
moving battle towers of the Persian army to the crane shots of the city wall and
the scrambling armies on both sides flinging burning oil, torches, and arrows
in all directions. In these last moments, Griffith achieves what no other
captured before him, human suffering as Babylon crumbles before our eyes.
Combining Griffith’s love for schmaltz
and his gifts that earned him the title of the father of cinema, Intolerance is justly regarded as his magnum opus, representing everything he
was leading up to from the start of his career. All of his recognizable
trademarks are here (intense close-ups, intercutting, spectacle, and also the
melodrama and his short-sightedness), and it’s hard to imagine the film not
being everything he hoped it would be. It is a cinematic monument to his style
and vision as a filmmaker both of which he had been developing for almost a
decade. With Intolerance, Griffith
not only left a mark on cinema but also encapsulated in one movie, his vices
and virtues as an auteur. Intolerance
struggled to make up for its then unheard of $2.5 million cost and began
Griffith’s financial ruin, but for the director it was all worth it. Intolerance is the most revealing of his
works. Technically it is the work of a true genius. At its core it’s the sort
of marshmallow drama only D.W. Griffith could stomach.
