Intolerance (1916) is a landmark American epic that interweaves stories of prejudice and inhumanity from four historical eras, ranging from Babylon to the modern day. Many future stars, such as Lillian Gish, appear in major roles, while others, like Erich von Stroheim and Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., appear as extras. Director D.W. Griffith intended Intolerance to stand as a rebuke against evil and injustice, and as a rebuttal to the severe criticism that he received after the release of his previous picture, The Birth of a Nation (1915).
Deciding that his next career step needed to be something bigger than his just-finished film Mother and the Law, the producer-director decided to use it as just one part of a multi-story super-epic. Intolerance's four separate narratives take place in entirely different eras. They do not play out one after another, but instead simultaneously. Griffith frequently cuts between them, bridging centuries in a single cut. The idea is that their common theme of injustice and intolerance will be reinforced as a constant part of the human condition.
The story thread taken from Mother and the Law is about a modern working class couple in crisis. After a cruel industrialist orders troops to fire on a labor demonstration, they are forced to move to a city slum. The Boy (Bobby Harron) is hired by a gangster. Nosy social 'Uplifters' see his wife, the Dear One (Mae Marsh), struggling to raise her baby, and decide to take it away from her. The Boy is sentenced to the gallows for a murder he did not commit.
In the second, French storyline, religious persecution leads to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572, with a Catholic Mass Murder of Huguenots. Innocent young Brown Eyes (Margery Wilson) is a victim. The third story takes place in Judea, and depicts events in the life of Jesus Christ (Howard Gaye), ending with his crucifixion.
The fourth narrative is an epic tale of ancient Babylon. Prince Belshazzar (Alfred Paget) opens his empire to a wider number of religions and prepares to marry his Princess Beloved (Seena Owen). Unknown to the Prince, the High Priest of Bel (Tully Marshall) is so fearful that his power has been diminished, he betrays Babylon to the conqueror Cyrus the Great. A lighter story involves the mischievous Mountain Girl (Constance Talmadge), who avoids a marriage auction and eventually becomes a fierce, devoted warrior for the Prince. After Babylon's high walls repel a direct assault by Cyrus' army, the High Priest follows through on his treachery. The Mountain Girl races to warn Belshazzar in time.
Griffith adds one more structural element. Like a repeated refrain in an epic song, the film repeatedly returns to a single image of the Eternal Mother (Lillian Gish) by a cradle, accompanied by a phrase from Walt Whitman: "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking." Griffith uses the image as a buffer between the stories.
The film's highly original narrative structure hasn't been used again, at least not on this scale. The historical and Biblical stories amplify the theme of social intolerance in the Modern Story. Griffith switches between the parallel narratives at least 50 times, often comparing internal content. For instance, the guilty verdict in the Modern Story is delivered just before Pontius Pilate hands down his judgment on Jesus in the Judean Story. The idea is that there is but one human drama, and our personal conflicts are replays of experiences shared by everyone who ever lived.
The most written-about part of Intolerance is the drawn out, suspenseful conclusion, in which the crosscutting between the stories accelerates to a dizzying climax. A car carrying the Dear One races to save the Boy from the hangman's noose is intercut with The Mountain Girl's chariot as she hurries to warn Babylon of the Persian attack. The cutting pace becomes fairly frantic. Griffith's idea is to superimpose the excitement of one storyline onto the next, multiplying the drama. As most of the stories end tragically, the suspense heightens as the final climax approaches.
The four stories vary in filming and acting styles. Most scenes in the Modern Story are staged in conventional 1916 terms, in boxy sets with a static camera. But Griffith will also use dynamic shots taken from moving vehicles. Other scenes in the city slums express a gritty naturalism that matches the unwholesomeness of the occupants, including the femme fatale (Miriam Cooper). The French story shows off fancy costumes, while The Judean episodes resemble dioramas From The Bible, with reverent graphic embellishments, such as when a cross is superimposed over the Jesus character. Griffith acknowledged that he made the Babylon sequence on a grand scale to out-spectacle the Italian epic Cabiria. The enormous set is certainly bigger than anything in the Pastrone movie, but Griffith wasn't comfortable moving the camera as much as the Italian director. Beyond the enormous moving 'elevator crane' angles, we see only a few shots that track with Belshazzar as he walks.
But Griffith takes every opportunity to display extravagant violence in the Babylon battles. Break-apart dummies are beheaded on camera and spears are plunged into screaming victims. We also see experiments with erotic imagery. Cecil B. DeMille must have been impressed by the license shown in Griffith's harem sequence, which abounds with artful nudity. Griffith defines intolerance rather loosely, as the absence of Love of One's Fellow Man. He's against greedy industrialists, power-mad High Priests and religious bigots. But the need for villains occasionally makes Griffith seem intolerant as well. The "Uplifters" that take away the Dear One's baby are presented as sexually frustrated spinsters looking to make other people suffer. We aren't convinced that Griffith would feel any differently about the progressive feminist reformers that in 1916 were beginning to make progress against terrible social problems in the slums. But Griffith displays a knack for feel-good sentiments likely to be welcomed by movie audiences. His epilogue shows armies on a battlefield dropping their weapons as the skies open up to admit an angelic host. It's still a highly emotional climax.
The epic, three-eighths-of-a-mile-long sets that were created for the Babylonian sequence towered above the streets of Hollywood, but probably not as high as its reputation in Hollywood legend. It is hard to imagine now how the set must have appeared to the citizens of Los Angeles. In the age before skyscrapers dotted the Los Angeles horizon, the Babylon set, towering 165 feet above the Hollywood bungalows, and by far the most expensive set ever made by that time, looked like an ancient city springing up from beneath Los Angeles itself. Griffith's conception of the grandeur of the Babylon sequence was inspired by Quo Vadis (1912) and Cabiria (1914), both made in Italy. In turn, Intolerance influenced other silent epics, such as Robin Hood (1922) and The Thief of Bagdad (1924).
The undisputed hero of the construction of the Babylon set, as well as other sets in Intolerance, was Frank "Huck" Wortman, the chief carpenter, set builder and stage mechanic. A rough, down-to-earth man who chewed tobacco and spat out of the side of his mouth, it was Wortman who saved Griffith thousands of dollars in production costs by imagining and improvising new ways of making huge sets look the part. The beautiful archways in the Jerusalem set, for example, were ingeniously created by bending thin boards and coating them in plaster. Overall, Griffith depended heavily on Wortman to raise the Babylon set to newer, more stupendous heights. Everyday the sets kept growing larger and higher than the original plans called for. There was a very real fear that they would collapse, so whenever a nighttime windstorm fell upon the city, Wortman and several other crewmen would jump into their cars and race to the set in order to reinforce the cable supports. While the publicity for Intolerance greatly exaggerated the sets as reaching 500 feet high, the truth behind the legendary sets placed the bar for future epic movies in terms of grandiosity and workmanship.
Critics have been debating the strengths and weaknesses of this gargantuan motion picture for well over a century. The extras on the Cohen Film Collection’s 2013 DVD restoration tell us that original audiences had no trouble understanding the multiple story structure. The film's reported box-office failure may have occurred because Griffith insisted on touring it with an expensive full orchestra. Another factor is that it was released during WW1, at a time when many newspapers and politicians were lobbying President Wilson to enter the war. That's not optimal timing for an essentially pacifist movie.
Director/Producer: D.W. Griffith
Screenplay: Tod Browning, D. W. Griffith
Cinematography: G. W. Bitzer, Karl Brown
Art director: Walter Hall
Production designer: D.W. Griffith
Set design: Frank "Huck" Wortman
New Score by Carl Davis
Principal Cast: Olga Grey (Mary Magdalene), Lillian Gish (The Eternal Mother), Robert Harron (The Boy), Joseph Henabery (Admiral Coligny), Lloyd Ingraham (Judge of the Court), Elmo Lincoln (Belshazzar's bodyguard).
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