INTOLERANCE: 1916 177mins. Director: D.W. Griffith Cast: Lillian Gish (Eternal Mother), Robert Harron (The Boy), Bessie Love (The Bride of Cana), Mae Marsh (The Dear One), Howard Gaye (Jesus Christ)
Seeing D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance more than a century after its release packs as hard a punch, a very beautiful punch, that is, as it did for audiences who had not seen a work by Griffith since the previous year’s Birth of a Nation. Intolerance outshines Birth of a Nation in so many ways (technically, conceptually, and even innovatively) it is astounding to conceive them as of the same creator. This may have contributed to an enduring misconception. Intolerance was taken then and continues to be taken as Griffith’s apology for the incendiary racial sentiment of his previous film. Indeed, Griffith may have felt the timing was right, having personally responded to the blowback after the film’s release. However, Intolerance was in initial stages of planning before production began on Birth of a Nation. His working title, “The Mother and the Law”, was pushed aside when Griffith undertook his first breakthrough and only returned to and subsequently built upon once Birth of a Nation proved a success. Undoubtedly, Griffith knew he was going to rattle some cages with Birth of a Nation, so sharp an attack was it on the sacrifices made to save the union, but he was likely taken aback by the scale of the response which extended beyond the “radical” publications and cities he thought it would be relegated to. To calm the storm he used to advantage the nature of his next film, but this was an afterthought and Intolerance was an independent creation from a man who to his death believed he had done no wrong.
“He didn’t feel he had anything to apologize for,” biographer Kevin Brownlow told the New York Times. A case could be made that Griffith felt he was owed an apology and this movie was his plea. In his own limited way, Griffith fashioned himself a humanitarian. Injustice was a reoccurring theme in his work. It was only natural that once secure in his independence as a filmmaker he would make a plea for humanity, as he saw it. Intolerance, more so than Birth of a Nation, is his cumulative work. Everything Griffith developed and aspired to throughout his years at Biograph leads up to what can be called his crowning achievement.
Griffith and, in fact, the movies as an institution, outdid themselves with Intolerance. It may have been 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. Goodwill aside, though, Intolerance is the greater achievement. The idea, used several times throughout the ensuing decades in The Hours, Cloud Atlas and The Tree of Life was an innovation in 1916. Over the course of three hours, the film intercuts between four stories, each from distant eras in history starting with the fall of Babylon, the Crucifixion of Christ, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre of 1572 to a contemporary tale set in the slums of big city, all connected by the theme of bigotry throughout the ages.
Amidst this sweeping epic is a clue as to why Griffith would follow it up with a return to the modest melodramas of his early years with Broken Blossoms in 1919. The most heartfelt of the four intertwining stories in Intolerance is also the simplest. Set in the early 20th century and foregoing lavish sets for the stark walls of tenement housing, it tells the story of a young girl, referred to simply as the Dear One (Mae Marsh), who moves to the city after her father is laid off at the factory for his part in a strike. After the hardships of life bring the old man to his death, the girl is swooned over by a smooth-operating boy (Robert Harron) who also made his way to the city after the strike. Both the Uplift Society (a biting spoof of the Temperence movement) and the local gangsters pose a dark cloud for their happiness.
The set-up here was a throwback for Griffith, his early innovations now enhanced. Early-on Griffith pioneered the close-up and he never used it to better effect than the look of anguish on Mae Marsh’s face and the haunting look of prisoners peering out of their prison cell doors. Griffith may not have invented cross-cutting but he was the first filmmaker to realize its potential in Birth of a Nation. Here he uses it to even better effect in a race against time climax involving a train to stop and an eminent execution. Throughout most of the movie, the cross-cutting is a jump through the centuries that becomes increasingly erratic as tension builds toward the climaxes.
Writing about the film in 1959 in Classics of the Silent Screen, Joe Franklin observed, “Griffith didn't tell his stories episodically, one by one, but told them simultaneously, in parallel action. He began by devoting long stretches of film to each story, to establish the period and the characters. Then as the film progressed, he cut more rapidly from story to story to emphasize the injustices common to all eras. And as all four stories reached their climaxes, he cut with fantastic fluidity from one story to another— from Cyrus' chariots racing to destroy Babylon to Catherine's troops about to massacre the Huguenots, and back to the modern story with the condemned boy starting his walk to the gallows. Not only was the idea vast in conception, but it was magnificent in execution, each cut almost mathematically planned long shot of one story to long shot of another, closeup to close-up, and so on. The rhythm and tempo increased until, in the words of Iris Barrv, it was "like watching history pour across the screen like a cataract."
Intolerance was, and is, the most advanced example of film technique. Almost every device you see on the screen today came from, or was perfected in, this picture. But as entertainment it baffled and exhausted its audiences, which were not only unused to social indictments, but just couldn't grasp the meaning of it all. Today's audiences are better able to understand it, but they are no less exhausted by it.”
There are many powerful shots here, among them 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. These fleeting moments represent the full blooming of Griffith’s vision and idea for his early short A Corner in Wheat.
Conversely, the visually impressive but straightforward retelling of the last days of Jesus Christ (Howard Gaye) is devoted the least time, perhaps because life in ancient Jerusalem 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 morality then and now. In both stories the villains are not only the aggressors (e.g. the soldiers that nail Christ to the cross or the factory magnets that fire on the strikers) but, rather, the moral authorities that initiate the violence. In the modern segment the Uplift society sets the destruction in motion by convincing the Jenkins family, owners of the mill, to donate to their righteous cause. To do this, Jenkins cuts wages, setting off a strike, the violent response and the subsequent misfortune of the sacked works now forced into the city. Likewise, in Jerusalem, Christ was condemned not by the soldiers who performed the execution but by the Pharisees who consider Christ a threat. In the Renaissance tale, Catherine de’ Medici (Josephine Crowell) does not personally partake in the massacre, but her smile as it unfolds indicates she takes credit for it.
“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.
Even in the scenes of ancient Judea, which are few,, Griffith's attention to human expression is evident in stunning close-ups of the impoverished citizens bearing a visual power that would not be seen until Soviet cinema found its voice.
As Frank Beaver noted in Michigan Today, “The film’s influence on post-Revolutionary Russian filmmakers was well-noted by Vsevolod Pudovkin, who was inspired by Griffith’s cross-cutting editing constructions and his development of historical screen epics. Pudovkin, initially a chemist, says he turned to filmmaking after seeing Intolerance. His Mother (1926), a historical drama about the abortive Russian uprising at Tver in 1905 — owes much to Griffith in both narrative familiarities and editing technique. The great French director Abel Gance — J’Accuse (1919), Napoleon (1927) — was an avowed admirer of Intolerance and Griffith’s innovative editing and camera techniques. Numerous other directorial greats from Erich von Stroheim to Stanley Kubrick have spoken of the impact that Griffith’s historical epic had on their own screen efforts.”
It is a pity that Griffith didn’t dig deeper into the violence against the Huguenots. Of the four stories, it is the most overt plea for tolerance. The conniving Queen-Mother manipulates her son, Charles IX (Frank Bennett) to authorize an extermination against the Huguenot of Paris to prevent an uprising, reminding him of previous acts of violence as a scare tactic. Little insight is given into the religious strife inflicting the Paris of Charles IX nor the motivations behind them. The film skirts historic complexities to crystallize its message. In line with Griffith’s love for sentimentality, a subplot involving the attempted assassination of of Admiral Coligny (Joseph Henabery), which would prove the catalyst for the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, was cut and the focus shifted to a love triangle between Brown Eyes (Margery Wilson), a shy Protestant girl and her Catholic lover Prosper Latour (Eugene Pallette) and the mercenary soldier (Allan Sears) who falls for her. The plot suffers little, however. When the slaughter begins, the horror and carnage in the streets, with its brutal realism, makes for the film’s most powerful moment.
Without a doubt, the most amazing segment of Intolerance is the fall of Babylon following the war between Prince Belshazzar (Alfred Paget) and Cyrus the Great (George Siegmann), circa 539 B.C., which was allotted roughly half the footage and for good reason. The set for this segment alone cost $250,000, a sum unthinkable in 1916. It is Griffith’s answer to his 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, marble elephants lining the archways and wide enough to fit the film’s over three thousand extras. On its own, this piece was a production tour de force.
Franklin concurred, “In terms of purely popular entertainment, its Babylonian sequence came off best. The sheer massiveness of the sets have never been equaled. Griffith almost built a full-scale replica of old Babylon!
The big battle scenes remain the most enormous, and the most expertly directed, in all movie history. Despite a screen full of huge scaling towers and thousands of battling extras, Griffith so unerringly composed his shots that the eye of the spectator was automatically concentrated on the detail he wanted noticed. The excitement and realism of these scenes have never been surpassed— from overall grandeur to individual vignettes, such as those horribly convincing medium shots of heads being lopped off in the course of battle!”
Craft, however, was not where Griffith had his soul. Spiritually, he returns to the themes of his featurette Judith of Bethulia with a tale of impossible love at a time of war. The bacchanals of Babylon, the opulent sets and the thrilling attack by the Persian army as they make their way up the wall protecting the city are what impressed then and impress today, but this isn’t where Griffith wants to stay. He zeroes in on the story of Mountain Girl (Constance Talmadge), a tomboy who becomes infatuated with the sympathetic Prine Belshazzar (Alfred Paget) after he rescues her from a cruel fate at a bride auction and ultimately dies in battle, sacrificing herself for the noble man she secretly loved.
A human face to epic cinematic carnage is never a waste but it is unlikely that this tale of unrequited love will be what audiences remember of the Babylonian scenes. The sheer spectacle that could rival the work of DeMille, the cross-cutting between the approaching chariots of Cyrus and his army and the blissful feast at the palace of the unsuspecting Belshazzar and the attention to detail made film history.
Almost a decade after the release of Intolerance, Photoplay offered this retrospective, “While the major movements in the main current of screen evolution in this period were in the drama of business and commercial aspects of the machinery of picture selling, D.W. Griffith made the year of 1916 memorable in film art with Intolerance.
Intolerance is worthy of a monograph, but it can only be discussed as an incident of the time here. Only eight years have passed since it came to the screen. Most screen efforts can be reasonably evaluated within the month of their presentation, but it is probable we shall not know the complete meaning of Intolerance for many more years to come. It may take half a century to decide whether Intolerance was merely one of the curious experimental divergences from type to be found among the fossils of every evolution, or if it is to be classified as a contribution to the direct line of progress toward forms of screen expression now not to be anticipated.
In any event Intolerance was extraordinary, and remains yet the most entirely remarkable expression of the screen art. The history of this production is most intimately integrated with the motion picture.
When Griffith returned to California from his terrific round of censorship struggles in connection with the presentation of The Birth of a Nation his mind was occupied with reflections and calculations. Doubtless he was seeking, half-consciously, a solution of the problems presented. In these reveries of conflict he reviewed similar struggles down the course of history, the endless wars against intolerance, social, religious, economic. Nothing had ever availed, it seemed, but exposition and understanding. That much, he decided, the screen might do for itself.
Still with the idea half formed in mind, he cast about for a notion by which he might portray on the screen, visually to the millions, the thing as he saw it. There must be some way to fuse together into one argument all these diverse and distant evidences of history.
Then came to hand Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and on a familiar page:
". . . endlessly rocks the cradle,”
The metaphor of the poet supplied the literal pictorial suggestion that Griffith was seeking, a thread to join his tales of intolerance.
All through that night Griffith, abandoning sleep in the fervor of his conception, pondered and fitfully wrote piles of notes. By dawn he had outlined the skeleton of his screen preachment to be.
Griffith had in hand a modern melodrama suitable to his purpose. It was "The Mother and the Law" with Mae Marsh and Robert Harron in the leading roles. The story was laid on a capital and labor background with tinges of the plot influence from the Steilow case. This picture had been scheduled for release through the Mutual Film Corporation, only to be withdrawn at the time of the New York Motion Picture Corporation's secession and the formation of Triangle.
His bigger idea, on the theme that he called "Love's struggle through the Ages," and which more actually was the villainy of hate through the ages, was now to use "The Mother and the Law" as the modern example in a composite review of historic intolerances.
As the notes fell together the Griffith story moved like a Bach fugue, written in Wagnerian thunder, through Babylon of 539 B.C., through Judea in 27 A.D., and France of 1572. The transitions and interludes were to be filled with a picturization of the idea from Whitman, described by Griffith as “A golden thread, binds the four stories — a fairy girl with sun-lit hair — her hand on the cradle of humanity — eternally rocking — .” This came to the screen with Lillian Gish photographed in mysterioso half-lights.
So with zealous abandon the Griffith lot in Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, became a maelstrom of costly construction. There he built Babylon with its walls three hundred feet high, the architectural pretentions of mediaeval France, and the streets of ancient Judea. The most stupendous expenditures were incurred. There were weeks on end when the daily payroll of the literal armies of actors totaled $12,000 a day. The banquet hall scene for the feast of Belshazzar cost just a quarter of a million dollars.
The cast included many famous screen names, among them, Sam de Grasse, Joseph Hennabery, Tully Marshall, Elmer Clifton, Signe Auen, Bessie Love, and Ralph Lewis. Count Eric von Stroheim played a Pharisee, and becoming a director since has developed a habit of shooting everything to the vast Intolerance scale, regardless. Constance Talmadge played "the Mountain Girl," a role which brought her first attention and opened the way to a star career, beginning under Selznick auspices soon after.
When the totals were cast up at the end Intolerance had cost $1,900,000. It was some thirteen thousand feet in length, cut from three hundred thousand feet of negative. Let us recall in contrast now that Edison spent $24,000 inventing the motion picture, and that at the end of 1895, the first year of production, the total cost of all the motion pictures in the world to that date was $110,000. Intolerance in thirteen thousand feet was just twenty years after Annabelle the Dancer in thirty-five feet, the sensation of 1895.
Intolerance opened at the Liberty theater in New York, the scene of The Birth of a Nation triumph, on September 6, 1916. It played in legitimate theaters in all the major cities here and abroad. It was inevitably a sensation and the topic of considerable debate. Despite a considerable patronage it was unprofitable. The American audience of the motion picture then numbered probably some twenty millions. It would be a reasonably accurate estimate that less than half a million could know what Intolerance was about. Whole audiences came away from the theaters, awed and overwhelmed with the immensity of the spectacle and bewildered by the picture fugue treatment of the theme. Mostly the theme was lost. Griffith, who, above all others, had evolved a screen technique of close-up and cut-back to clarify plot movement and to make attention unconscious and automatic, had betrayed them. Here was a picture which required conscious attention, some thought and a reasonably capable memory. The public, measured in terms as represented by the average of the motion audience, does not go to the theater to intellectualize. That is no indictment of the motion picture and its following. The public never goes anywhere to intellectualize. Audiences are to be counted in thousands, students are solitaries, each in his niche, to be counted one at a time. There is no box office revenue in units of one. Intolerance told its real story to a few thousands, but it needed the patronage of millions to make it commercially rival The Birth of a Nation which it considerably surpassed as an expression of ideas. One may fancy that the Babylonian spectacles of Intolerance shown alone as a complete production would have done about as well at the box office as the whole potpourri composite.”
Half a century later the evaluation referred to did come from an uncharacteristically ecstatic Pauline Kael. “No simple framework could contain the richness of what Griffith tried to do in this movie,” she wrote in 1968. “He tried to force his stories together, and pushed them into ridiculous patterns to illustrate his theme. But his excitement — his madness — binds together what his arbitrarily imposed theme does not. Intolerance is like an enormous, extravagantly printed collection of fairy tales. The book is too thick to handle, too richly imaginative to take in, yet a child who loves stories will know that this is the treasure of treasures. The movie is the greatest extravaganza and the greatest folly in movie history, an epic celebration of the potentialities of the new medium — lyrical, passionate, and grandiose. No one will ever again be able to make last-minute rescues so suspenseful, so beautiful, or so absurd. In movies, a masterpiece is of course a folly. Intolerance is charged with visionary excitement about the power of movies to combine music, dance, narrative, drama, painting, and photography — to do alone what all the other arts together had done. And to do what they had failed to. Griffith’s dream was not only to reach the vast audience but to express it, to make of the young movie art a true democratic art.”
As a true testament, the legacy of Intolerance in the new century was noted by Armond White in National Review.
“For many critics and scholars — myself among them — D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance is the greatest film ever made. A century later we are as close to its subject as we are distant from its art. Political specifics, moral arguments, and movie styles may look different today, yet the only real difference is Griffith’s still-daring ingenuity, which calls for a more open-minded reception than in our simplistic habits we are accustomed to: It calls for an optimistic, united popular audience, which Griffith took for granted,” White wrote. “From the psychological precision of the acting to the eye-dazzling imagery of the legendary Babylon-court tableau, Intolerance personalizes political history, conflating it with love. Griffith used cinema to examine both history and love deeply, proposing that, in his view, they are undeniably inextricable. That is still the boldest of all political propositions. Try to find a contemporary politician or filmmaker who would dare.”
