Man, I feel like I should get $50 and a t-shirt.
Yes, it was good. But it was long. Why couldn’t it have suffered the same fate as Greed?
The Babylon sets are jaw-dropping. Mae Marsh gives an awesome performance. So does Constance Talmadge, but I don’t think she equalled Marsh.
I am still marvelling at the Babylon sets. The ending was spectacular.
One thing that bothered me was that none of the plots really had anything to do wiht intolerance! Maybe the Jesus story or the Huegonots, but the modern tale? The Babylonians? The “intolerance” connection was pretty weak.
Pretty amazing.
One of my all-time favorite films—but it is a challenge, like reading Dickens. You can’t just sit down for a jolly evening’s viewing, it’s a commitment. Turn out the lights and pay attention. And it did suffer the same fate as Greed—more than an hour is gone forever from the modern releases, dammit.
As for the “intolerance”—
• The Modern story: intolerance of The Reformers for the drinking and whoring of the lower classes.
• The St. Bart’s Massacre: pretty much self-explanatory.
• The Jesus story: again, intolerance for the new religion.
• The Babylonian story: the weakest in point of “intolerance” (for the dying, wild civilization?), but the best of the lot.
It was originally going to be just the Modern Story, called The Mother and the Law, but when Birth of a Nation was justly pilloried for its bigotry, Griffith decided to make this epic as his expiation (also, to compete with Italy’s recent successful huge historical epics).
No spoilers—but did you cry as helplessy at the end of the Babylonian sequence as I always do? That iris fadeout on “Dutch” Talmadge is a killer . . .
About twenty-five years ago (to REALLY date myself), my favorite local tavern got one of those new-fangled big screen teevees.
One Friday night, the newspaper listings announced that Intolerance would be shown in its entirety, sans commercials, on the public station. Seeing a rare opportunity to indulge both my life’s overriding passions — drinking beer in convivial surroundings and watching old movies — I raced to the tav and begged the barkeep to change channels. He was reluctant, not surprisingly, but luckily there were no big games on, so he indulged a regular in his bizarre request.
At first, the reaction of the other patrons was predictable — they walked in, stared in puzzlement at the funny old flicker on the big tube for a few seconds, then sat down to raucous conversation. Soon the noise levels were what you’d expect from a young, boozy crowd on a weekend night — somewhere near the decibels of a boiler factory or a carrier flightdeck.
Absorbed as I was in the final half-hour of the film (and floating happily on a sea of brew), it took me awhile to realize something was amiss. Was I suddenly alone?!
I turned around and saw every eye in the house was riveted to the screen, every mouth either shut or solemnly sipping beer. These thoroughly modern twenty-somethings were as lost as I’d been in the brilliant pacing and still-stunning spectacle of the final Babylonian battle scenes, and the movie held them in an iron grip from that point to the end.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more compelling example of the power of great art to reach across time.
Of the couple of times I’ve seen it, one of those was with on a big screen with live orchestral accompaniment. That always helps, but in the case of Intolerance it particularly makes it much less of a slog. It’s a film that was clearly always intended as an Event.
That said, I always feel that Griffith overreached himself structurally with this one. But there are the great moments where he does have all four strands under control simultaneously.
Any idea whatever happened to the Babylonian sets? IIRC, they were the largest ever constructed for a film (at least as of a few years ago- there have been a few epics since, but CGI is so used today that I doubt anybody would actually build sets that elaborate). I’ve never seen the film but the stills I’ve seen indicate that they were if anything LARGER than the actual gates and palaces of Babylon.
I have seem heartbreaking stills and film clips of the Babylon sets being demolished. I imagine a few usable parts were recycled in other movies, but the bulk of it was just torn down and thrown away or burned.
One hopes someone stole a huge elephant or Babylonian goddess for their backyard . . .
I’ve seen a lot of silent movies, but have missed seeing Intolerance. Is it available on video?
There’s an annual silent film festival at Washburn University here in Topeka. Maybe I should suggest they show it. They did once show another film starring Lillian Gish, Broken Blossoms. Such a sad movie. The scene where Gish(playing a young girl) was trapped in a closet by her berserk father, was as tense and scary as anything shown nowadays.
On the other hand, I’m sitting alone in the house at midnight and I suddenly hear this tinny, very soft volume music from an indeterminate location. Having been looking at “ghost pictures” and listening to “ghost recordings” earlier today did not help my initial attack of great anxiety.
Then I realized it was the linked page coming through the headphones I still had attached to the computer!
I can’t remember now if it survives in the current release (it’s been awhile since I’ve seen it), but that huge Babylonian set involved one of the first and most amazing tracking shots ever: filmed from a roller-coasterlike set of tracks, it opened on the set you see. Then it dollied slowly in, closer and closer, until it lit upon a close-up of a pair of doves drawing a miniature chariot.
And talk about editing: notice how in the beginning of the film, you see 15, 20 minutes of each of the four stories? Then as the action picks up, you are jumping from story to story in a matter of seconds, without ever losing the thread of any of them?
IIRC, the majority of the tracking shot is intact. I am trying to buy the Griffith Masterworks Kino set, which has it restored completely, with commentary from someone.
And it’s even more mind-blowing when you consider just how primitive the movie-making process was at the time: if you look carefully during the scenes where we’re introduced to the high-society dame in the Modern Story, you can see tablecloths and dresses ruffling in the breeze — in (supposedly) interior shots! She and a few friends are in close-up; through the door behind them we see an immense ballroom with dozens of couples dancing — and it was all shot on sets open to the elements, so there’d be enough natural light to film it.
And it’s even more mind-blowing when you consider just how primitive the movie-making process was at the time: look carefully during the scenes where we’re introduced to the high-society dame in the Modern Story, and you can see tablecloths and dresses ruffling in the breeze — in (supposedly) interior shots! She and a few friends are in close-up; through the door behind them we see an immense ballroom with dozens of couples dancing — all shot on sets open to the elements, so there’d be enough natural light to film it.
