'Intolerance' (D. W. Griffith, 1916)

Title: 'Intolerance'

Release Year: 1916

Director: D. W. Griffith

Cast: Lillian Gish, Vera Lewis, Mae Marsh, Fred Turner, Robert Harron.

Plot: 'Intolerance' tells four different stories in four different periods of time, tied together by one connection; intolerance. They're; the fall of Babylon (539 B.C.), the crucifixion of Jesus in Judea (27 A.D.), the St. Barholomew's Day Massacre in France (1572) and a modern story set in 1914 which shows intolerance in moral puritanism and the disputes between capitalists and strikers.

Review: 'Intolerance' was made as a response to the criticism received by previous movie of the same director 'The Birth of a Nation', where Griffith was largely accused of racism.

Apart from its main topic, the movie also highlighted for its technical and story telling achievements, including all the advances from Griffith's last movie and adding a complex new one; the division of the film in four indepented stories. Jumping forwards and backwards from one age to another, the intention was to describe what intolerance had meant through the ages (although Griffith never condemns racism in any of them).

'Eternal Motherhood': a symbolic image of a mother swinging her child that was used in the film to connect the different ages 

However, despite it surely was a major innovation at that time, people, unprepared for such a level of complexity, didn't get the message and, contrary to Griffith's previous movie, 'Intolerance' became a huge economical failure of which he'd never recover completely.

I did understand the movie. We're now exposed to movies that ask more of us than they did in the 1910s. But even getting the message, it was awfully boring. Mainly because I could only find a version with no background music, but anyway, I found the development of the stories very inconsistent; the Babylon and modern ones extended through almost the entire run of the film while the crucifixion only lasted a few minutes and the French part almost didn't appear at all. This leaves the film with only two major -very long- stories and whereas the modern age one was sort of entertaining and included some romance and last minute rescue scenes that gave tension to the story, the Babylon one was excruciatingly slow and at some points I felt like dying. The only positive point I can find over the rest of the movie is that I found Mae Marsh' performance as a suffering mother her most realistic and convincing one yet.