Classics of the silent screen (1959)

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. In terms of purely popular entertainment, its Babylonian sequence came off best. The sheer massiveness of the sets have never been equalled. 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! Intolerance had a profound influence on film-making everywhere. The Russians, for instance, invited Griffith to come over and take charge of their entire movie industry. And, though he declined, the film was used as a sort of textbook to instruct their top directors— Eisenstein, Pudovkin, etc.— all of whom showed quite evidently in their films how much they had been influenced by Griffith, and indeed, admitted that influence quite openly. Many of the men who worked on the film as Griffith's assistants— W. S. Van Dyke, Erich von Stroheim, and Robert Harron and Mae Marsh as the young married couple in the modern story. Tom Wilson is the friendly policeman. This interesting scene was edited out of the final release version. Constance Talmadge as the Mountain Girl. others— went on to become top directors, while almost all of its players subsequently became top-ranking stars. Mae Marsh's performance in it, beautifully and sensitively underplayed, remains one of the supreme performances of the silent screen. Everybody in it, from Walter Long and Miriam Cooper, to Lillian Gish (seen only as a woman rocking a cradle, in the symbolic scenes linking the separate stories), was just right, but, next to Mae Marsh, the biggest hit was Constance Talmadge. As the rowdy mountain girl in the Babylonian sequence, she displayed the wonderful, almost Fairbanksian, sense of fun that was soon to make her one of the screen's top comediennes. In fact, everybody benefitted from Intolerance but its creator, Griffith. The enormous production costs ate up all his profits from The Birth of a Nation, and most of his other resources as well. And it was such a resounding box office flop that he spent years paying off every nickel of the debts it incurred. Its failure would have stopped a lesser man dead in his tracks— but Griffith went right on making movies, good commercial ones to make money and the occasional film made for art alone (such as the unusual and sensitive Isn't Life Wonderful?) which lost it all again. Griffith had a colorful, if checkered, career ahead of him, and many more great films. But he was never again to make a film of the stature and magnitude of Intolerance. Nor, for that matter, was anyone else.