The western : from silents to cinerama (1962)

Indians on the rampage in the Cherry Valley. Panoramic action from Griffith's America (1924). children, cowering in a cabin under attack, are threatened with death. The film had more character development than Fighting Blood, greater and even more creative use of the panoramic shot, and far more savagery in the battle scenes, although Griffith was never sadistic, but rather always managed to suggest extreme brutality with astounding conviction. Perhaps the only finesse really lacking from Fighting Blood and The Battle at Elderbush Gulch was the running insert, or riding close-up, a device he was to develop to perfection with the ride of the Klansmen in The Birth of a Nation. It has always been a source of some regret that, apart from two good program films made between 1916 and 1919 (Scarlet Days, a Griffith personal production and The Martyrs of the Alamo, a Griffith supervised production), Griffith never made a full-length Western epic. But if he turned his back on the Western as such, he never forgot the lessons he learned from his early horse operas, and the development he pioneered and perfected he used with striking success in other genres. In his last big historical epic of the silent era, America (1924), one saw familiar scenes: the American colonists besieged in their little fort by hordes of redskins, Neil Hamilton racing to the rescue with a band of