Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1916)

30 Photoplay Magazine Those workmen had no objections 10 the Overlord spending his pocket money tor Tracts or YV'arming Pans or Brass Tablets, but they wanted $2.00 for slowly stifling their souls in the vats of his works. The Overlord said them nay, and they struck, and the Overlord employed goths and ostrogoths in the guise of deputy sheriffs and constables as is the custom of Overlords since the trade in Hessians and Swiss mercenaries has gone into desuetude; and the wage scale of $1.60 a day was maintained, and the men all came back to work in submission, — all except nineteen. These nineteen could not testify to their humble change of view because the Overlord's little army of private grenadiers had exercised the military basic principle of Frightfulness ; the missing nineteen had had their heads shot off and had thus escaped the righteous punishment of being sent to jail for ingratitude. On that feeble incident of ignorance of man's kinship, of hatred of gentleness and right, Griffith built the theme of "Intolerance;" he cast back five thousand years into the supreme civilization of Babylon and there planted one of his incidents ; he walked down the aisles of Time to that St. Bartholomew's Day when hatred and fear cut the throat of the best thought and patriotism of France, and there he planted another romantic incident ; with the living Christ in Nazareth he finds a living theme; and then to yesterday, or today or tomorrow as you like, he came and rooted there another, making the quadripartete of romance, of truth, and ingenuous fearlessness of the evil that is in all hearts ; the substance of his unanswerable charge is that all the evil, cruelty and wrong of the world comes from man's implacable belief that what each man believes to be true, is true, and all else is false, wicked, and should be destroyed. In making his first big picture Griffith while using no scenario, did have the memory of reading the Thomas Dixon novel to guide his progress, though, as you will remember, the picture is far from following the details of the story. In this •'Intolerance" he had little more than his own idea of the incident in the Industrial Commission's report on the Christian charity of its Overlord, and the intolerable audacity of those nineteen laborers, who were blinded by their intolerance of be lieving they were entitled to more of Life than $1.60 a day would buy. At the first "runoff" of this picture in the little projecting room of his studiu, Griffith had as audience one of the foremost war correspondents of this era. — a man with not a shred of emotion left to him ; a night editor of thirty years dealing with the dramatic of life, and to whom the dramatic had become a puerile everyday incident ; a city editor who was on intimate terms with all the grinning skeletons of a big city, and a writer of a long life spent in chronicling most of the tragedies and comedies of a huge country, with the machinery of the stage direction of them at his fingers tips. When the last foot of film had passed these sat silent, the fibre of their natures torn and ravelled ; they could say nothing : one rose and without phrase grasped Griffith's hand. Those four world-worn men had been shown not only the futile hypocrisy of the rest of the world, but their own as well. And then from the darkness of the little room came the sound of the voice of Griffith ; possibly he felt from the silence of his audience that the picture had failed to impress ; possibly he was moved himself : he is as facile in betraying his emotions as the Sphynx. He told of his last visit to his Kentucky homestead : of an admirable, gentle-hearted. Christian-spirited, high-bred woman of near relationship, of deep orthodox belief ; of how this woman whenever she saw a well-known Christian Scientist of the place approaching, would cross the street ; of how a Catholic priest had installed a chapel of his faith there and of how all of all the other creeds combatted his work. It was an epitome of the story of Babylon we had just seen; the glorious city of a glorious civilization where one of the first and one of the best Bibles had originated,— and all of it made the victim of hate and jealousy and greed. Remembering that this later picture attacks with the precision of mathematics all intolerance, the result of its effect in the "tryouts" in neighboring places to where it was produced might give the Devil a richer idea than ever of the comedy of human seriousness. So far none of the creeds, theories, or