INTOLERANCE (1916)

Directed by D.W. Griffith

I often wonder what people were used to watching back in the olden days of cinema. This is called spectacular, and in some ways it is, though if anything was released today nearing its sense of pacing and editing, it would be ISHTAR-ed right out of town.

Why Griffith decided to make this, I know only from what I've researched on it. Apparently, THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915), now considered infamous due to its racist foundations and glorifying of the Ku Klux Klan, made a killing at the box-office and also inadvertently caused a rebirth of racist hatred in the United States. Griffith felt shitty about this, and decided to take an anti-moralist film he was working on, THE MOTHER AND THE LAW, and expand it into an epic four storied piece interwoven with the symbolic shot of Lillian Gish rocking the cradle of humanity.

The real shame here is that the modern story is far and away the most compelling of the four. While the sets of the other three are amazing by any standards (the film supposedly cost Griffith $40-50 million in today's dollars... I'm guessing all of it was spent on the sets and practically none of it on the cast of thousands), the stories are only somewhat... I'd wager if each were its own separate short piece, I'd have been able to sit through each one. Spliced together the way there are, it makes the whole thing tiring.

But, of course, the version I saw was 150 minutes long, with an apparent mix of classical music thrown in (with no sense of mood or timing). I'll still take this over a Carl Davis synth score any day of the week, but with half an hour cut out of it (I'd wager the Jesus story, since my version included, at most, 15 minutes worth of Christ), I can't review the editing, since its obviously been tampered with. I can't review the music either, since there isn't really any.

What I can review is the story (or -ies, what have you), the production designs, the acting, and the cinematography. The historical significance of this is essentially set in stone. Interweaving stories had never been done before and was ahead of its time (we can agree on this with confidence because the film flopped in supreme ISHTAR fashion, bankrupting Griffith's studio). It's been called "the greatest movie ever made" (I would agree that it's better than the best of what came before it: THE BIRTH OF A NATION, and that it held this title until, oh, BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN... so, what's that, 9 years?) "the only film fugue" which it could be, I dunno, I doubt it, since "fugue" is not entirely limiting enough for one hundred years of cinema to have only accidentally produced "one" of them. A masterpiece along the lines of Beethoven's Fifth and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel? Hell no. Kubrick's 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY comes closer, and even that, with its moments of sheer brilliance, is still far from perfect. We haven't seen that work of majesty yet. Too many elements, too many deadlines, too many chances to compromise the artform.

So, INTOLERANCE does do its part to be placed among the greatest films ever made for its time. For all time? The titles are simply too pretentious, the acting too over-expressive, the characters caught between human complexities and archetypal broad strokes, and the pacing too intent on wallowing in the spectacle of it all. Babylon is awesome. But there's so much irony in us being asked to be awe-inspired by the settings and the revelry, while the revelry itself is what ends up wrenching victory from the hands of the on-again, off-again protagonists. A title card directs us to look at this "intolerance" (oh the drinking games that could be played off the over-insertion of that word!), then notes at the bottom how amazingly amazing the set is, lest the camera not be up to task in rendering us speechless. In France, the "evil ruling Catholics" slaughter the peaceful Huguenots (read: Protestants... and by read, I mean literally, you will read that Huguenot means "Protestant" (read: WASP)). Catherine is essentially doing what the modern antagonists, the Uplifters, as they're called, would be doing to the "drinkers and poor partygoers"if they could, and to drill the point home that we're not supposed to like her, her cohort holds a little puppy and is addressed in the text as "effeminate" (read: gay). Later on, Belshazzar, before committing suicide shares a kiss with his main general. The connotations here are a bizarre mix of biases and prejudices, and the filmmaker is brutally intolerant in deciding who we should be tolerant of.

Played in chronological order, these scenes play out thus (and I'm gonna go ahead and tell the ending to all but the modern story, since that's the only one Griffith truly gives a second thought about): In Babylon, a Rhapsode (read: pussy) falls in love with a Mountain Girl (read: feminist). She in turn falls in love with the king, who saves her from being married off by preposterously giving her a card of feminine independence (I shit you not). This leaves her free to trick the Rhapsode into letting her in on the secret that the priests, pissed that the king has abandoned their religion for that of his future queen's, are going to conspire with Cyrus of Persia to conquer Babylon (which from history, we know he did). Mountain Girl tries to warn the king, but the revelrous and licentious horde gets in her way and she doesn't make it in time. Everyone dies.

In the next story, Jesus hangs out with sinners while the Pharisees judge him. He says awesome things, and then (in this version, anyway), is summarily executed for no damn good reason whatsoever. He dies.

In the third story, the gay Catholics notice that a noble visitor is more impressed by the white Protestants. So they kill all the Protestants. (That's basically it).
In the modern story, the Uplifters, presented as rich old women who are fine with frolicking about until they realize one day that men no longer find them attractive, snuff out "immorality" in society with an unbridled sense of hypocrisy, self-righteous quick-triggered judgment, and INTOLERANCE. The protagonist of the story is mowed down in their crusade and goes from living a poor, but happy life with a little garden and a daddy who loves her into living in a rundown apartment, her baby in social services, and her husband in jail. Further complications will ensue, but I leave those to the viewer.

The message here is simple: Partying it up is awesome... unless you're rich, and then you're a capitalist/monarchist whore (no, wait, that's not it).... Bad people are easily identified by their money, hypocritical nature, shrewishness, effeminancy, and general non-Protestant religious tendencies, while good people are easily identifiable because they're young, Protestant (although I think Griffith tried to cover this by making his modern girl protagonist vaguely Catholic), and in love.

Actually, the only message here is: "Why can't we all just quit fighting and get along?" Nobody went to see this film because the question was already answered the year before, when Griffith made this little movie about how life would be great if the North hadn't fought the South and then put the evil slaves in power over them to steal their lands and rape their women. It's not the bigotries you see that you're danger of... it's the millions that you assume don't exist.

6.92/10