Programma/Program 1:
INTOLERANCE (D.W. Griffith, Wark Producing Corp., US 1916)

Programma/Program 2:
INTOLERANCE (ABRIDGED) (Standish Lawder, US, 1975)
MANHATTAN MADNESS (Fine Arts Film Co., US 1916)

Programma/Program 3:
GRIFFITH AT THE FRONT (War Office Cinema Committee, GB 1917)
HEARTS OF THE WORLD (D.W. Griffith, US 1918)

Programma/Program 4:
GAUMONT NEWS, VOL. XVI, No. 2-L (Gaumont, UK 1918)
A ROMANCE OF HAPPY VALLEY (D.W. Griffith, Griffith’s Short Story Series, US 1919)

Programma/Program 5:
THE FALL OF BABYLON (D.W. Griffith, US 1919)

Programma/Program 6:
THE MOTHER AND THE LAW (D.W. Griffith, US 1919)

Programma/Program 7:
BROKEN BLOSSOMS (D.W. Griffith, US 1919)

Prog. 1

INTOLERANCE (D.W. Griffith, Wark Producing Corp., US 1916)
Dir: D.W. Griffith; cast: Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, Miriam Cooper, Walter Long, Margery Wilson, Eugene Pallette, Josephine Crowell, Constance Talmadge, Elmer Clifton, Alfred Paget, George Siegmann, Lillian Gish; 35mm.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.

True to what had already become his customary practice, Griffith started work on his new movie while editing The Clansman in late fall 1914. The new film, called The Mother and the Law, was intended as a companion piece to The Escape, released earlier that year. In it, Griffith recast Mae Marsh and Bobby Harron for another study of prostitution and gangs in the city slums. By January 1915, the 3-reeler was virtually complete, enabling Griffith to turn his full attention to the exhibition of his Civil War feature. In late February he left California to oversee its New York premiere and battle his antagonists in the accompanying censorship brawls. Not until May, after Birth’s controversies were at their peak, did Griffith return to his slum story, now determined to build on Birth’s success. He famously decided to expand the story, transforming Mother into an exposé of industrial exploitation. He built lavish sets (notably the Mary Jenkins ball, the mill-workers’ dance hall, the Chicago courtroom, and the San Quentin gallows); added the strike sequence and last-minute rescue; and introduced the motif of mill owner Jenkins, his ugly sister, and the wicked civic reformers.
The expansion was, in part, an effort to capitalize on the headlines surrounding John D. Rockefeller, Jr., who had stirred up controversy and resentment with the creation of the Rockefeller Foundation in 1913 and was now being raked over the coals by a government board of inquiry for his role in a miners’ strike that led to the 1914 Ludlow massacre at his Colorado Fuel and Iron Company. Griffith interwove details from that strike and the even bloodier riots that accompanied the Rockefeller Standard Oil strike in Bayonne, New Jersey, in 1914, to create his powerful new introduction. In this new, expanded version of Mother, an oppressive industrialist and a Puritanical welfare foundation provide the trigger for the misfortunes that befall Mae Marsh and her hapless sweetheart, leading not just to Bobby Harron’s wrongful murder conviction, but the confiscation of their baby, and an elaborate, greatly expanded rescue sequence involving a locomotive, racing car, telephone, and the famous gallows execution razors.
Griffith continued shooting his Modern Story through the summer of 1915, re-shooting Harron’s trial and penitentiary scenes and Marsh’s ride to the rescue. Meanwhile (in mid-September), he started work on his French story. This was the first of two momentous developments in the evolution of the film — the decision to create a historical counterpart to the Modern Story that would be told simultaneously. We have no way of knowing whether at this point Griffith intended to contrast only the French and Modern episodes — juxtaposing events stemming from the Ludlow Massacre with those ending in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in France in 1572 — or whether the idea of a 4-part structure came to him all at once. All by itself, the addition of the French sequence opened up the film in startling, innovative ways, providing a striking inversion of the Modern Story. The focus was now sharply centered on two bloody catastrophes resulting from neurotic, violent women hardened against the claims of the family in a film still aptly named The Mother and the Law. But whether or not Griffith ever contemplated stopping with the French story, from the start of the expansion the stress was on spectacle. Surviving copyright frames show that the interiors of the Louvre palace were hand-tinted [Editor’s note: or maybe colored with the Handschiegl process?], and that Griffith filmed an extended version of the deadly court intrigue involving Admiral Coligny, Navarre, and the Guise family, which he would subsequently trim.
Not until the end of the year did evidence of his second momentous decision emerge, when the famous sets for his Babylon sequence began to loom over the cottages on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard. The start of his costliest story was treated like the first day of a new production, as in a sense it was. Griffith radically reoriented and redefined his film, as now his French and Modern stories were to be set off against the Utopian pageantry of a pre-Christian hedonistic wonderland. Celebrities — including California Governor Hiram Johnson — were permitted to tour the sets. By January 1916 Griffith commandeered the full resources of the Fine Arts studio. Fourteen cameramen were available to Bitzer between program assignments, and according to The Brooklyn Citizen (6 November 1916), "eight cameras working at the same time was no unusual sight".
The Babylonian sequence took 4 months to shoot, from January to April 1916, longer than it had taken to shoot all of The Birth of a Nation. And when it was over, Griffith returned yet again to his Modern Story. Griffith, still dissatisfied with the trial and execution scenes, ordered the sets he had torn down the previous summer rebuilt. A production still of the Babylon set found by Marc Wanamaker in the late 1980s shows the gallows and portions of the courtroom set freshly constructed on the floor of Babylon’s Great Hall. He then redressed the set to shoot Lillian Gish rocking a cradle.
The result, when combined with the Passion sequence (shot in December 1915), was a conglomerate of stories and styles in search of a unifying principle. Part morality play and part 3-ring circus, the movie was of a piece with the new eclectic aesthetic that had all but buried the older ideal of organic synthesis. Along with Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha and Charles Ives’ Third Symphony, Intolerance remains one of the period’s great hybrids.
The release and distribution of Intolerance provides a more complex tale, which I described in some detail on the occasion of the Museum of Modern Art’s 1989 reconstruction (Merritt, "D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance: Reconstructing an Unattainable Text", Film History, Vol. 4, No. 4, Winter 1990, pp. 337-375). [Editor’s note: The MoMA restoration débuted in New York in October 1989, and had its European premiere at Pordenone a year later.] But from the start, Griffith continued to treat his film as what Richard Schickel called "a mighty improvisation", tinkering with it off and on for the next 10 years.
Intolerance first saw the light of day at the Orpheum Theater in Riverside, California, on 4 August 1916, where it had a 2-day run under the rather grandiose title, The Downfall of All Nations, or Hatred The Oppressor, directed by one Dante Guilio [sic] — a "famous Italian director", according to news accounts, "who is now held a prisoner by the Austrians in Vienna". According to the advertisements, Dante Guilio’s epic — self-proclaimed as "GREATER THAN ‘THE CLANSMAN,’ ‘CABIRIA,’ and ‘BEN HUR’ COMBINED" — played in 11 reels.
This was the famous performance that drained at least two members of the audience with its soporific titles and tedious detail; and in retrospect, these two — rather misleadingly — assigned it Wagnerian running times. In the 1920s, Lillian Gish remembered it as an exhausting experience that seemed to last "forever". Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, recalling the preview 6 months after he saw it, imagined that it went on for some 6 hours, though he admitted that he sat through only the first part of it. From these accounts, legends have arisen about the film’s inordinate length, but in fact the film — even in preview — appears to have been somewhat less than 3 hours. What is clear from the reviews, however, is that the film was considered slow and the titles verbose.
The Riverside screening was only the first of Intolerance’s public previews. Griffith traveled back to Los Angeles to rework both his titles and continuity, and 10 days later previewed the film again, this time in Pomona, California. The film was still The Downfall of All Nations, and Griffith was still calling himself Dante Guilio, but now the film was advertised at 12 reels and described by the man at the Pomona Progress as lasting "almost three hours". The film, performed with an 8-piece "symphony orchestra", drew a front-page rave, but the production was clearly still in trouble (The Pomona Bulletin, 17 August 1916).
Behind the scenes, assistant director Joseph Henabery recalled the sense of disillusion he and others felt at this second try-out. "I was utterly confused by the picture", he said. "I was so discouraged and disappointed... He just had too much material... But the thing that disturbed me more than anything else was the subtitles."
The local press picked up the cry. The Pomona Progress reported, "The only human interest in the drama is in the scenes where the poor little mother shows her devotion to her baby and her persecuted husband." After interviewing Griffith another reporter wrote, "There is to be a rearrangement of the thousands of scenes, a lot of work in cutting out of unnecessary scenes, and the music is to be yet made appropriate to the scenes — the reaching of climaxes in proper shape and fitting of music to the character of the scene. Mr. Griffith has many a long day of hard work yet to do on his immense drama before it is ready for the public."
Griffith reworked his film once again, and had a third preview in San Luis Obispo, followed by a private press screening at Tally’s Broadway Theater in Los Angeles. Then he finally took his film to New York for its formal début.
Opening night at the Liberty, 5 September 1916, provided a spectacle all its own. Griffith’s art director had the theatre made over into an Assyrian temple, with incense burning in a lobby festooned with Oriental decor and carpentry. Female ushers were dressed as Babylonian priestesses, while male ushers were decked out in red and black satin tuxedoes. Preparing for the performance, Griffith lived in the theatre for 10 days, supervising rehearsals not only of the 40-piece orchestra and chorus, but also of a specially designed lighting system to tint the screen various colors, and a baggage carload of sound effects machinery that, according to press reports, was so large it had to be crammed into the Liberty’s backstage. Projectionists, too, were kept on call 18 hours per day to rehearse the various speeds required to synch the picture to the sound effects and music. All told, The Moving Picture World (30 September 1916) estimated 134 people were involved in the New York theatre presentation, including 7 men responsible for "the considerable amount of explosives" used with the battle scenes.
All in all, one way or another, the first-night New York critics were stunned. For all its reputation as a critical dud, Intolerance attracted consistently favorable reviews. Trades, fan magazines, and local newspapers alike jumped on the bandwagon, expressing only minor misgivings. Julian Johnson in Photoplay (December 1916) wrote, "Here is a joy-ride through history; a Cook’s tour of the ages; a college education crammed into a night. It is the most incredible experiment in story-telling that has ever been tried." According to the New York Herald (6 September 1916), "…the Babylonian warfare thrilled a thoroughly wise audience into involuntary applause with its intense realism. Then Belshazzar’s Feast in celebration of the repulse of Cyrus took place in halls a mile in length, with the all-seeing camera moving through every foot of the spectacle." The reviewer for the N.Y. Call (10 October 1916) showed his own flair for epic in the title of his review: "The Most Majestic Thing Yet Recorded by Art of Motion Picture Director". His review began: "It makes Cabiria look like a penny-poppy show — if that’s the way you spell it." Even Alexander Woollcott, who gave Intolerance a critical drubbing in The New York Times (10 September 1916) — "unprecedented and indescribable splendor of pageantry is combined with grotesque incoherence of design and utter fatuity of thought" — thought the "scenes of wonder richly reward a visit to the Liberty…. The imagination and personal force represented in such an achievement suggest a man of stature. Really, Mr. Griffith ranks with Cyrus. They both have taken Babylon. And the Babylonian picture would in itself be worth going miles to see."
And so it went as Griffith opened his film across the country, first in Brooklyn, then in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. Griffith modified and refined the performance, adjusting parts of his film as he went along. Among other things, he and his company enlarged the vocal chorus when the film came to Chicago and Pittsburgh; in Washington, DC, he experimented with soloists rather than a chorus, singing the songs of Babylon and the music of France. When he sold nation-wide distribution rights to Intolerance in June 1917, he put in the proviso that the distributor "gives [his] entire attention to Intolerance and experiment with a lecturer" (italics added; Wark/McCarthy contract, 9 June 1917; cf. Wark/McSween agreement, 6 September 1917).
There is no hard evidence that Griffith added any pictorial footage after the New York premiere, but if he did, it would have been within days of the début. The shots in question are of the semi-nude women who pose in the Temple of Love and who are also cut into the Dance of Tammuz. Whether or not the Love Temple and Dance of Tammuz scenes that we now see appeared in time for the New York premiere is unknown. But we know the sequences were in place by mid-November because a New York enthusiast sent Griffith a 26-foot scroll of doggerel verse that refers to them. We also know they were in the film when it played Chicago, because the Chicago board of supervisors insisted Griffith take them out. The semi-nudes survived that fight, as they had similar encounters in San Francisco and Los Angeles. They were also targets in the furious battle Griffith waged with the Pennsylvania censor board. In Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, the semi-nudes were used as bargaining chips or distractions to keep the censors away from the labor strike and the anti-reform satire that several boards considered defamatory.
Sacred virgins aside, the alterations Griffith made in his film from September 1916 through late February 1917, when he finally stopped attending the American Intolerance débuts, were relatively small refinements in a strange unwieldy work that from the start had been developed as a mighty improvisation. Exactly when he deleted the expository shots from his Christ story, dropped the short distractive sequence of Coligny’s assassination from the Huguenot slaughter, or altered this or that title, is virtually impossible to chart because Griffith never stopped thinking of his film as an ongoing creation. The alterations continued through 27 February 1917, when Griffith attended his last American road show premiere, in St. Louis. After that, the original roadshow version was finally locked into place — at least until the end of June, when Intolerance’s roadshow season ended. — RUSSELL MERRITT [DWG Project # 543]

Prog. 2

INTOLERANCE (ABRIDGED) (Standish Lawder, US, 1975)
Dir: Standish Lawder; 16mm, 356 ft., 15’ (16 fps), Canyon Cinema.
Senza didascalie / No intertitles.

The first in a series of instant classics, Intolerance (Abridged) is a precise reduction of D.W. Griffith’s 1916 masterwork. Its regular screening time of over 3 hours is compressed here to 10 minutes. The film was created on a homemade optical printer automatically programmed to double-print every 26th frame. The resulting condensation of the original is a blitz of images which, despite their velocity, still conveys the essence of Griffith’s narrative line, composition, editing, and even camerawork. — STANDISH LAWDER

EVENTO MUSICALE/SPECIAL MUSICAL PRESENTATION

MANHATTAN MADNESS (Fine Arts Film Co., US 1916)
Dir: Allan Dwan; supv: D.W. Griffith; cast: Douglas Fairbanks, Jewel Carmen, George Beranger, Warner P. Richmond, Ruth Darling, Eugene Ormonde, Macey Harlan; 35mm, 2795 ft., 43’ (18 fps), George Eastman House. Conservazione e stampa 2002 / Preserved and printed 2002.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.

This early Fairbanks film has considerable charm, even if the direct influence of Griffith seems unlikely, except in the most general manner. The first reel is mainly taken up with a form Griffith pioneered, a drama of contrasts, as the film cuts between life in the West and life in Manhattan (a view of the city from the top of a Fifth Avenue bus; a view from the top of a stagecoach; a Manhattan café and a chuck wagon on the range; an effete Manhattan dandy and a Western tough guy, etc.). Perhaps the most Griffithian moment comes with the opening intertitle, which states: THE ARGUMENT OF THIS STORY CONTRASTS THE EAST WITH THE WEST IN RESPECT TO THEIR JOY-YIELDING QUALITIES — a bit like the opening explanatory titles of Griffith’s own drama in contrasts, Intolerance, if more tongue-in-cheek. A number of Fairbanks’ later films play with the contrast between East and West (such as Wild and Woolly or The Mollycoddle), but usually the pattern places an Eastern city slicker out West, encountering comic and dramatic hardships and becoming a man. The pattern here is reversed, with Fairbanks as a Westerner visiting Manhattan and being bamboozled by his Eastern friends.
Although Fairbanks’ athletic energy certainly galvanizes the film from the beginning (leaping over fences, hopping over a chair in a Manhattan club, and ultimately climbing in and out of windows and leaping from a roof), the film does not seem to be structured as an action film, as the later Fairbanks films would. Primarily, the film seems to contrast two popular genres of the era, portraying them as respectively rural and urban. On the one hand, the Western (which appears mainly in the contrasts of the first reel), and on the other, the mystery, which takes up most of the film’s second and third reels (perhaps based mainly on the serials of the era, such as The Exploits of Elaine), characterized by a creepy mansion with hidden passageways, trap doors, innocent women held prisoner, and sinister plots underway.
While the opening contrasts could be described as parallel editing, in sharp contrast to Griffith’s style, director Allan Dwan does not use parallel editing to create suspense in the mystery plot. The action is very rapidly cut, but with cuts on continuous action rather than crosscutting. The third reel, for instance, contains nearly 180 shots (plus over a dozen intertitles), surpassing even Griffith’s rapid rate of cutting in his late Biograph films. Fairbanks frequently looks directly at the camera, smiling and seeming to acknowledge his role-playing (not only at the end, the supposed privileged site of such self-conscious devices, but at several points in the film, especially during cuts to life in the West). All in all, this is a very sophisticated film, adept in cutting on action within a single location, aware of playing with genre conventions, but also not totally given over to a classical diegesis, aware of its parody nature in a self-conscious manner. — TOM GUNNING [DWG Project # 555]

Prog. 3

GRIFFITH AT THE FRONT (War Office Cinema Committee, GB 1917)
Dir: ?; ph: Frank Bassill; cast: D.W. Griffith; Philip Gibbs?; 35mm, 685 ft., 11’ (16 fps), Imperial War Museum. Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.

Characterized by Russell Merritt (Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 1981) as "as eerie a war souvenir as a film director ever collected", Griffith at the Front offers a documentary vignette of the director at a particular stage of his career, rather than a specific part of his oeuvre. Griffith almost certainly did not actually "direct" this record of his preliminary visit to the Western Front in May 1917 — an important symbolic step in his preparatory work for the project that was to become Hearts of the World — although the evidence of the material itself confirms that he was fully aware of what the camera was doing, and ensured his own starring role in most of what it covered.The film was shot by an "Official Cinematographer" supplied by the British authorities, identified by Kevin Brownlow as Frank Bassill, a former Pathé newsreel cameraman. Griffith’s own cameraman, Billy Bitzer, was not summoned to Europe until June 1917, and even then would be denied access to the Front himself — security concerns meant that permission to film at the Front was rarely given, and Lillian Gish and others would half-seriously claim that Bitzer’s full name (Johann Gottlob Wilhelm) did not exactly help his application.
The visit which Griffith at the Front records served ironically both to assist the publicity claims that much of Hearts of the World had been filmed on the real battlefields of Western Europe and to ensure that the opposite was in fact the case. The intertitles originally included with the film appear to have tried to strengthen the impression of proximity to real combat, although as Brownlow observes in his book The War, the West and the Wilderness, the feeling given by the film itself is that "Griffith, dressed for a grouse shoot, appears to be on a thoroughly pleasant afternoon outing in the midst of the bloodiest war in history". Footage of the visit was included in Griffith’s unusual on-screen prologue to Hearts of the World, where the intertitle disingenuously noted: IT HAS NO POSSIBLE INTEREST EXCEPT TO VOUCH FOR THE RATHER UNUSUAL EVENT OF AN AMERICAN PRODUCER BEING ALLOWED TO TAKE PICTURES ON AN ACTUAL BATTLEFIELD.
At the same time, however, it was this very visit that led Griffith to the conclusion which was later summarized in his notorious remark in an interview for Photoplay — "Viewed as a drama, the war is in some ways disappointing". As Brownlow points out, the remark sounds "single-minded and callous" unless it is quoted in the context of Griffith’s full text, which goes on to observe that the war "is too colossal to be dramatic". Experience led Griffith to conclude that the reality of war was difficult to shape to the needs of the kind of story he wanted to tell.
The Hearts of the World project was the initiative of the British authorities, and Griffith continued to receive their extensive support. (Russell Merritt has shown that Griffith’s own version of events — that his presence in England to promote Intolerance happened to coincide with a group of intellectuals determining that a powerful "drama of humanity" would be a useful medium for stating the Entente Powers’ case — fails to acknowledge direct approaches made to him before he even sailed for England in March 1917.) After 3 weeks shooting reconstructed battle footage with thousands of British Army "extras" on training grounds in southern England, Griffith made a second visit to France in September. [The first visit had taken place in April.] Griffith had paid the French for filming facilities, apparently including the services of French official cameraman Alfred Machin. He returned with more stories of narrow escapes and, it was alleged, up to 10,000 feet of film. Most analysts conclude, however, that very little of this authentic location material made it into the finished film, despite publicity claims to the contrary — although in this context Nicholas Reeves (Official British Film Propaganda During the First World War, 1986) points out that such analysis is based on surviving prints that are in all cases significantly shorter than the original release.
Apart from the fragment used in the prologue to Hearts of the World, it is uncertain how much of Griffith at the Front was ever seen by contemporary audiences. Merritt asserts that film taken at the time of the visit was the basis of "at least two War Office newsreels", but the work of the British Universities Film and Video Council’s BUND project (British Universities Newsfilm Database, accessible through the BUFVC website) has yet to provide confirmation of this. — ROGER SMITHER [DWG Project # 563]

HEARTS OF THE WORLD (D.W. Griffith, US 1918)
Dir: D.W. Griffith; cast: Lillian Gish, Robert Harron, Dorothy Gish, George Siegmann, Josephine Crowell, Kate Bruce, Robert Anderson; 35mm, 9881 ft., 162’ (16 fps), The Museum of Modern Art.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.

How might a modern viewer react to Hearts of the World if he or she did not know the Biographs and the two great features that preceded it, The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance? It was shot in 1917, the year when filmmakers settled on the continuity style that was to dominate Hollywood far into the future. In 1915 and 1916, Griffith had been a pioneer of the cinema. By the spring of 1918, when Hearts of the World was released, it already looked old-fashioned. By almost any standard, it represents a move into a new phase of his career — one which would see a few great films and mostly great moments in lesser films. It was perhaps with Hearts of the World that he went from being the father of the cinema to being its grandfather. Never again would he strive for the sorts of experimentation seen in The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. Despite the innovatory soft-focus cinematography in Broken Blossoms and the attempt at naturalism in Isn’t Life Wonderful, Griffith’s post-Intolerance films usually lead us to treasure isolated moments when he recaptures past strengths.
The actual transition proceeded relatively slowly. Despite the breakneck speed with which Griffith worked during the Biograph years and in making his big features, Hearts seemed to have had a downright leisurely path to completion. After being invited by the British government to make a film on the subject of World War I, he went to London just in time for the English premiere of Intolerance (7 April 1917) and the announcement of the American entry into World War I (6 April). Shots of his staged meeting with Lloyd George at 10 Downing Street made it into the prologue of Hearts. That same month he visited the trenches in France and was photographed, though this footage was probably not used in the film. Upon his return to England the planning of the film went forward, and in May the principal actors and Billy Bitzer traveled to England. The group lived in London during the summer, not, apparently, doing much work on Hearts. In May Griffith had shot some exteriors in English villages, locales that would be replicated with sets in California for the principal photography considerably later. During the summer he filmed scenes with various society ladies, intended for future projects, and his cast apparently experienced the wartime attacks on London as preparations for their performances in Hearts.
Despite the prologue’s emphasis on location shooting in France, Griffith seems to have spent only two more weeks in France, during the autumn, and the only cast member who joined him there was Lillian Gish. They shot footage around the village of Ham, on the Somme, which Richard Schickel considers to be the only French location identifiable in the film. In October the group returned to the United States, and by November the cast assembled in California for the principal filming in sets. During the lead-up to the filming, Griffith acquired some documentary footage of the fighting, which he spliced into his battle scenes. December saw a return to a frantic shooting schedule that probably recalled to many the days of the Biographs. Griffith began editing in January of 1918. Hearts premiered in April and went on to make a $600,000 profit — a success cut short in part by the Armistice and in part by the great flu epidemic of 1918-1919 (on the film’s production and release, see Richard Schickel, D.W. Griffith, pp. 340—360).
Schickel has commented on how unrealistic Griffith’s war scenes are: action, movement, and "sweeping movement" — not the grueling, static trench warfare that most of the fighting actually involved. He comments that the Boy’s two days in a shell hole come closest to that reality. In that scene, however, one has to ask what the Boy could learn after two days there that would allow him to know when to signal for the attack to begin. That one exception aside, however, Griffith’s lack of realism in depicting the war goes against his attempt to achieve authenticity by including scenes shot in France. Despite the usually seamless combination of English, French, and American-shot footage, Hearts remains as conventional in its depiction of war as the other WWI films made entirely in Hollywood.
I have suggested that Griffith moved from the experimentation of his two great mid-1910s features to a sudden conservatism of film style. This was paralleled by an old-fashioned approach to story. Schickel also remarks on how clichéd and implausible the non-military scenes of Hearts are, with Griffith trapped in stage melodrama, repeating the simplified and familiar notion of threatened rape standing in for the general horrors of war. Of course The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance had many melodramatic and outdated scenes, but they seem to fade into the background in the face of daring techniques. In Hearts of the World, the most impressive moments are usually those quiet scenes that recall the best of Griffith’s Biographs.
And the strengths of Hearts are definitely in its individual scenes, for the mechanics of the plot progression are clunky. The opening exposition introduces the characters at great length without setting up the sorts of goals and expectations that were becoming part of current Hollywood plotting. One need only look at the Douglas Fairbanks films being directed at this time by John Emerson and Allan Dwan to realize how lively the introduction of salient story information early in a film could be. Even in comparison with Griffith’s own exposition at the beginning of Birth, that of Hearts seems careless. There are almost no dialogue titles — something that continues to be characteristic of Griffith films well into the 1920s, at a time when a preponderance of dialogue titles was rapidly replacing expository titles as the Hollywood norm.
Hearts is also plagued by Griffith’s predilection for very short scenes, often only a shot or two. The first reasonably skillful sustained Griffithian sequence comes after the title THE LITTLEST ONE OF THE BOY’S THREE BROTHERS IS INCLINED TO HERO-WORSHIP. This leads directly into the first major love scene, introduced by another title, AFTERNOON. SHE READS HIS VERSE OF LOVE — DEATHLESS, UNENDING. Here the Boy observes her as she toys with a rose and reads his poetry. Throughout this action, however, there is no real conflict introduced. The Boy is attracted to the Girl, she loves him, and there seems to be no misunderstanding or other barrier to their romance. Even the introduction of The Little Disturber (i.e., the Singer played by Dorothy Gish) simply allows her to show off something of her character and to meet Monsieur Cuckoo, her befuddled suitor.
An astonishingly long way into the film, the scene in which the Singer encounters the Boy in the street introduces some dramatic conflict. Significantly, this is also the first scene to begin without an expository intertitle. We are at last left without guidance to observe for ourselves the characters’ actions and infer their motives. The scene itself is staged partly in depth along a sidewalk by a long stone wall and specifically in front of the door to the Boy’s home. The scene contains the film’s first real shot/reverse-shot conversation and creates a lively dramatic interest for the first time as the Singer’s flirtation with the Boy develops. There is even a parallel created to the earlier scene of the Boy observing the Girl in the garden. There he had ogled her ankle, and he does the same with the Singer here — though in a more shy and confused manner.
Even after this scene, however, the plodding exposition resumes, with the introduction of Von Strohm, the villainous German spy, and his relationship to the treacherous woman who runs the local village inn. Interestingly, however, the lengthy exposition ends with a scene between Von Strohm and the Girl that parallels the flirtation between the Boy and the Singer. Again the scene takes place on a sidewalk along a lengthy wall, centering around a doorway. Von Strohm notices the Girl, and as with the Boy’s interest in both the Girl and the Singer, his attraction to her is conveyed by his glance at her ankle. Just as the Singer presents a comic threat to the Boy’s romance with the Girl, Von Strohm now creates a more serious threat to that romance. A really striking touch comes at the end of this scene, as the Girl shuts the door in the German’s face, but he places his buttonhole carnation in a knothole and pushes it through toward her with the tip of his cane. This recalls the Girl’s rose in the love scene in the garden, but at the same time it is a bizarre, enigmatic gesture, perhaps suggesting defiance, perhaps seduction. A quick fade emphasizes this uncertainty.
With this gesture we can say that the film’s lengthy exposition ends. The first truly sustained and well-handled scene occurs next, beginning with the title PERSEVERANCE AND PERFUME. The Singer and the Boy meet again in the street outside his door. As she flirts with him again and tries to provoke him to kiss her, a single cutaway signals that the Girl is nearby, shopping. A medium-long shot along the wall places the Singer and Boy in the right half of the frame, the empty left portion suggesting that someone, most likely the Girl, might enter. In fact the Singer’s hesitating and reluctant movements away from the Boy carry her into depth at the left after he rejects her. It is a striking moment, since the perspective makes her suddenly seem to shrink in size in relation to him. Her return to forcibly kiss the Boy again leaves the left area unoccupied.
Once he responds to the kiss, a moment of stasis occurs, and this leads to a wonderful cut to a depth shot in the opposite direction, diagonally into depth with the couple in the right rear, still kissing, and the Girl at the far left foreground, standing still and watching. The fact that there had not been a shot showing her arriving in this space makes the revelation of her presence — and her shock at the sight of the kiss — very dramatic. Even if there had been a cut to this framing with the Girl entering from the left and stopping in shock, the revelation would have contained an element of melodrama (which would of course not be surprising for Griffith). Here he avoids it, however, and tops the moment with a cut to a beautiful medium shot of the Girl staring off right, with her hand on the offscreen door. She simply looks, with a somber expression, backing slightly away so that her hand brings the door into the frame at the right. One can forgive Griffith a lot when he gives us this kind of scene. The clumsy exposition and sentiment, the heavy, dragged-in humor and all the rest of it, are balanced out by such moments, and at this period, probably no one staged quiet pathos so discretely as Griffith.
The same mixture of melodramatic sentiment with touches of brilliant staging and acting continues throughout the film. Despite Griffith’s reputation as a great and innovative editor, some of the best moments of the film occur in relatively long takes that allow the actors more time to develop subtle emotions and to move through space in leisurely ways that exploit the various areas of a setting. The scene in which the Girl, having gone a bit mad after her mother’s death, wanders through the battlefield looking for her fiancé exemplifies this strength. In an evocative long shot, she pauses to pray to a crucifix by the roadside. The wall and broken wagon at the left create a visual interest, and the dead body lying inconspicuously at the right middle-ground draws her attention briefly as she tries to see if it might be the Boy. All during her somewhat aimless movements, the smoke of battle or an unseen burning structure drifts in from off right in the distance. The whole scene is bathed in a strange light from off right that gives it an almost eerie feel, and Gish’s performance of the Girl’s madness takes her gradually forward and diagonally out past the camera (and even out of focus) in a staging that recalls the early days of cinema and chase-film conventions. Immediately after this there is a particularly lengthy and effective take of about 80 seconds as the Girl finds her lover’s body, apparently dead. Griffith again makes the scene more poignant by refraining from cutting to a more emphatic close framing of Gish’s performance, allowing her instead to slowly lower herself to crouch over his body and finally to nestle and sleep against him on what was to have been their wedding night. Much later in the film, another fairly lengthy take with limited movement allows Gish (and to a lesser extent Bobby Harron) to emote in a virtuoso fashion during their reunion in the courtyard of the inn.
One impressively up-to-date aspect of the film’s style comes with its occasional uses of effects lighting and night-for-night shooting. Effects lights, or selective lighting created by a source within the scene, had become more widespread during the mid-1910s. The scene in which the Girl steals into a storeroom to steal food for the Boy’s three young brothers has Gish carrying an arc lamp in the form of a kerosene lantern. When she first enters, this very bright lamp provides all the light in the scene, casting realistically moving shadows as the lantern bobs slightly in her hand. This attempt at realistic lighting, however, quickly gives way to the practical necessity of allowing the action to be clearly visible. After a cutaway, the return to this locale has the Girl stealing the food, but a strong key light from the top left now provides the main illumination, while the bright lamp is relegated to the background of the set.
More impressive and unusual are the night scenes on the battlefield. Griffith had experimented with the use of flares for the night battle in Intolerance. Here one spectacular extreme long shot of the battlefield is lit only with explosions, with the troops being quite visible at the lower portion of the frame. Other shots of the fighting were also made at night, apparently using powerful floodlights to illuminate the trenches and field. Such lighting was still quite unusual in 1917. It would become common about a year later, after the introduction of powerful arc spotlights developed for military use during the war. Griffith himself makes only limited use of such shooting, quickly introducing a title — BENEATH THE RISEN MOON — to motivate a switch back to shots taken in daylight representing action at night.
Perhaps partly because it was filmed over a relatively lengthy period in different countries, Hearts of the World seems a particularly uneven Griffith feature. He would achieve more consistent, unified filmmaking in some of the simpler, less pretentious features to come. Nevertheless, Hearts marks a transition when Griffith ceases to be an innovator and becomes a director struggling, with varying degrees of success, to live up to his earlier, exalted reputation. — KRISTIN THOMPSON [DWG Project # 564]

Prog. 4

GAUMONT NEWS, VOL. XVI, No. 2-L (Gaumont, UK 1918)
Dir: ?; ph: ?; cast: D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish; 16mm, 178 ft., 8’ (16 fps), Kevin Brownlow Collection.
Didascalie in inglese/English intertitles.

This one-reel newsreel contains several items about motion picture people, and there are two on D.W. Griffith. The first is introduced with the title D.W. GRIFFITH MAKES STIRRING APPEAL IN LOS ANGELES. It shows him atop a wooden tank, tilt down over heads of a crowd to massed speakers below (I suspect these are the men who go out into the crowd to collect the money).
The second item is introduced with the title LOS ANGELES, CALIF. — MOTION PICTURE PRODUCER IS HONORED BY THE GOVERNMENT — D.W. GRIFFITH WHO DIRECTED AND PRODUCED HEARTS OF THE WORLD AND OTHER GREAT PHOTO-DRAMAS, IS PRESENTED WITH THE CHEVRON OF HONOR. Griffith is on an interior set of The Great Love with Lillian Gish as a nurse and Robert Harron as a British army officer, George Fawcett as an army chaplain and an actor resembling Neil Hamilton. Griffith finishes talking to the cast and sits beneath a Debrie camera when two officials enter and shake hands with him. MR. GRIFFITH IS THE ONLY MAN TO RECEIVE THIS DECORATION FROM THE GOVERNMENT. Once it is pinned on his sleeve, we see in close-up the rather modest cloth badge: "US War Savings Service". The officials shake hands again and they are followed by the cast. This is all that survives of The Great Love, a film which used much of the footage shot in England for Hearts of the World, and exploited the recent drama of Sir Roger Casement, Irish patriot (here called Sir Roger Brighton and played by Henry B. Walthall), who is presented as a German collaborator. — KEVIN BROWNLOW [DWG Project # 566]

A ROMANCE OF HAPPY VALLEY (D.W. Griffith, Griffith’s Short Story Series, US 1919)
Dir: D.W. Griffith; cast: Lillian Gish, Robert Harron, George Fawcett, Kate Bruce, George Nicholls; 16mm, 73’ (18 fps), The Museum of Modern Art.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.

The film was the second begun but third released of the 6 program pictures Griffith contracted with Adolph Zukor in the Spring of 1917 to make for release by Artcraft Pictures once he had returned from a trip to Europe for the London premiere of Intolerance and completed the independently produced Hearts of the World. A Romance of Happy Valley was made at the old Reliance-Majestic-Fine Arts studio at 4500 Sunset Boulevard, part of which Griffith had rented from Triangle, which still held the lease, and occupied from October 1917 to September 1919, when he moved his company to Mamaroneck, New York.
In a telegram to Albert Banzhaf on 21 April 1918, Griffith suggested that the "second Artcraft is easy and can be done in five or six weeks". Account books in the Griffith Papers (Reel 20, Vol. 15: Accounts Ledger, November 1917-December 1918) indicate that $24, 917 direct production expenses were incurred on the film in June, $38,589 in July; by 3 August, a further $5,818 had been spent; thereafter, only $6,820 more is recorded up to the time of the film’s release on 26 January 1919. Thus the bulk of the shooting must have been in June and July of 1918, so Griffith’s April estimate was not far off. (The eventual total production cost booked to A Romance of Happy Valley was $111,732.87. By the end of 1919, the film had earned $172,073, of which $96,000 was advanced by Zukor in 1918 to cover its production costs. [See Reel 20, Vol. 18, microfilm page 1294.])
A release date of 4 November was proposed (DWG to Banzhaf, 1 October 1918), then postponed to 12 November (DWG to Sol Lesser, 11 October 1918), but the worldwide influenza epidemic of 1918-19 intervened. On 11 October, Banzhaf informed Griffith that most of the major producer-distributors, including Famous Players-Lasky, had decided to release no new pictures for 4 weeks from 15 October, because most theatres were closed through fear of infection, and therefore independent producers, too, should stop production. Banzhaf suggested, however, that Griffith use the excuse that he was working on a War-related film as grounds for an exemption from this moratorium. Perhaps for this reason, perhaps also because, after 11 November, it was felt to be urgent to get War pictures into circulation before a reaction to the subject set in, it was decided to release the third Artcraft, The Greatest Thing in Life (which does, of course, have a War-related theme), before A Romance of Happy Valley, and this was done, on 8 December. Presumably because of shortage of cash, Griffith then overrode an objection from Zukor that there should be an interval of at least 2 months between Griffith Artcraft pictures (DWG to Banzhaf, 6 January 1919), and released A Romance of Happy Valley on 26 January 1919.
Until the first Artcraft films, the last "small" picture to which Griffith’s name had been directly linked was The Avenging Conscience in 1914. The first two Artcrafts released, while small by comparison with Hearts of the World, were dignified by the importance and topicality of their War-related themes. A Romance of Happy Valley thus represented a new departure, and it is clear from the advertising campaign that accompanied the release that neither Griffith’s organization nor Artcraft were sure how to present it. The main selling point was of course the Griffith name (required by Griffith’s contract with Zukor); but thereafter two rather contradictory (but perhaps complementary, insofar as they take in two different prospective audiences) strategies are proposed in the trade press and the posters designed for marquee display. One emphasized the novelty (even paradox) of a small "old-fashioned" film from the master’s hand: "‘A friendly little story of Kentucky folk’, that’s what D.W. Griffith calls his newest Artcraft Picture. Just like calling the Woolworth Building ‘a tidy little shack’ (...) With his genius he shows the bigness and narrowness of the cross roads folk" (The Moving Picture World, 8 February 1919). The other strategy played up the thrilling suspense of the ending: "Run an advertisement in your house program — before the showing — asking all persons who come to see A Romance of Happy Valley to keep the details of the big scene a secret from their friends"; "Sure, the boy’s sweet on her. So is a bad, bad man! True love certainly runs up against it hard in A Romance of Happy Valley — but the kids win out and the Bad Man gets his!" (Exhibitor’s Trade Review, 1 February 1919).
In the reviews it is the first image of the film that prevails, and there is no hint of a complaint that this is just a Biograph short blown up to 6 reels, such as producer and distributor may well have feared. Rather, the film is seen as having all the virtues of a Biograph enhanced by the progress made in film art since Griffith left that company. Wid Gunning (in Wid’s, 2 February 1919) is worth quoting at length: "The war is over. Griffith has demobilized his soldiers, converted his trenches into corn fields and stacked his guns in an armory. He is back again among simple, peaceful folk whose problems and struggles are in their own hearts. He is doing more superbly than ever, what he has done so surpassingly well in the past. Recall Griffith’s early Biographs: then consider the great advance made in photoplay technique since those days, also the development in the screen impressiveness of such players as Lillian Gish and Bobby Harron; take into account the improvement in the art of the master director, imagine a de luxe version of one of his little masterpieces, and you will have an idea of the type of picture issued under the title of A Romance of Happy Valley." Edward Weitzel in The Moving Picture World (8 February 1919) went so far as to condemn the admixture of melodrama into the idyll (though recognizing that the condemnation would not be universal): "The first half of the story is a study in character that delights by its quaintness and truth. Then comes a change in the mood of the picture that is as unexpected as a snow storm in June. And to many spectators it will be as unwelcome. From a well-balanced and consistent tale it suddenly turns into a highly colored melodrama with a convenient bank robbery, the mortgage-on-the-farm motive and an attempt on the part of the elder Logan to murder and rob a stranger who turns out to be his own son. The way this situation is juggled and the wounded bank robber made to change places with the native son, who ran away seven years before to make his fortune in the city, will be accepted by a portion of moving picture patrons, but not by all." Only Variety’s reviewer Jolo (31 January 1919) approved — or at any rate, raised no objection to — the combination: "A Romance of Happy Valley is a simple story of bucolic life (…). It progresses sweetly until the last reel, when it takes a morbid, tragic twist, the curse of which is taken off by a surprise climax."
As well as the "melodramatic" ending and novel devices, the film deviates from a simple bucolic tale in one further way: its use of personifications to give allegorical force to the moral issues at stake. The film also, of course, uses the more subtle symbolism typical of the Griffith Biographs — notably the way shots of Mrs. Logan fondling a toy horse (presumably one of her son’s childhood toys) are intercut with shots of John Jr. in New York struggling to make the toy frog swim, and a repeated gesture, John Sr. opening and closing a pocket knife, first as his fortunes are beginning to crumble and in response to a jibe from Vinegar Watkins, a second time when he waits in the kitchen, listening to the sounds of the rich stranger upstairs preparing for bed. But it also has more portentous and more naked symbolism in the figures of Vinegar Watkins and Old Lady Smiles, who are realistically motivated as local characters in Happy Valley (Vinegar Watkins’s occupation is unclear, at least in this print and the synopsis, whereas Old Lady Smiles is placed as the keeper of the turnpike gate), but have no other part in the story than as allegories of pessimism and optimism, respectively (as one of the titles puts it, THE BATTLE OF FROWNS AND SMILES). Similarly, the bank robber, who is needed to substitute for John Jr. in the surprise ending, is also the tempter who tries to lead Jennie to go back on her promise to remain faithful to John, and the credits in the title list and on the print (where the character is simply called "Judas", though the credit list in The Moving Picture World, 25 January 1919, calls him "The City Man") and the title that introduces him (A DESCENDANT OF JUDAS ISCARIOT VISITS THE NEIGHBORHOOD) accord him much more significance than necessary for a perfectly respectful wooer and minor criminal. This kind of portentousness is not uncharacteristic of Griffith, but in this film (unlike the later Dream Street), he does not succeed in carrying the symbolism through to structure the narrative as a whole, with the result that these figures seem to belong to another film except at the few points they are needed for straightforward anticipatory contributions.
Many of the features I have singled out could be seen as attempts to add weight to what might otherwise have been seen as a "mere" Biograph 1-reeler stretched to feature length. It may be that the trade press response, praising the simple bucolic tale while condemning, or expressing ambivalence about, the melodramatic trappings, encouraged Griffith to opt entirely for the simple tale in the sixth Artcraft, True Heart Susie, released later in 1919, which returns to the omniscient narration with attendant ironies of relative knowledge found, for example, in the 1910 Gold Is Not All (see Ben Brewster, "A Scene at the ‘Movies’", Screen, Vol. 23, No. 2, 1982, pp. 10-12). However, A Romance of Happy Valley is not the last of Griffith’s experiments with narration; as well as in Dream Street, they return in the last film he made before moving to Mamaroneck, his first First National release, The Greatest Question.
Another thing that may have inspired, or at least inflected, True Heart Susie is Gish’s performance. In his Moving Picture World review, Weitzel noted it as an innovation: "Lillian Gish plays Jennie and once more [is this a reference to her performance in The Greatest Thing in Life?] departs from her old line of work to create a character part that is a combination of wistful awkwardness and inward grace. Some of her business approaches dangerously near to farce, but it is funny and most persons will forgive its introduction." John Jr. is clearly the protagonist of A Romance of Happy Valley, and the ending hardly involves Jennie until the final reconciliation, but through the central stretches of the movie, she is much more prominent, and her part is much more varied. Gish’s success in creating this passive, comic yet touching heroine may well have suggested to Griffith a film in which the heroine would, without openly seizing the initiative, be the real protagonist, her partner essentially a foil.
The very existence of The Griffith Project, implying as it does that every film directed by Griffith is of interest, precludes the archival attitude that there are Griffith films so minor that they need not be preserved. Indeed, film archivists now think of their work much more as librarians in deposit libraries do, to preserve every published work. Although A Romance of Happy Valley is a "small" film, and as such may not be as successful as some of his other small films, perhaps most particularly True Heart Susie, precisely as an adumbration of certain aspects of that film, it highlights an interest in narrative experimentation in Griffith that has largely been ignored. — BEN BREWSTER [DWG Project # 570]

Prog. 5

THE FALL OF BABYLON (D.W. Griffith, US 1919)
Dir: D.W. Griffith; cast: Tully Marshall, Constance Talmadge, Elmer Clifton, Alfred Paget, Seena Owen, George Siegmann, Elmo Lincoln; 16mm, 1743 ft., 73’ (16 fps), The Museum of Modern Art.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.

Late in 1918, Griffith carved out of Intolerance two conventionally structured full-length features, The Fall of Babylon and The Mother and the Law. For both he filmed some new footage, restored unused shots from the original epic, and partially revised the intertitles and editing.
Of the two features, The Fall of Babylon was the least altered from its source. A new opening intertitle attempts to balance the spectacle of Babylon with the personal drama of the Mountain Girl: THE STORY OF A CITY — AND OF THOSE WHO LOVE THAT CITY — AND OF A YOUNG GIRL WHO COMES DOWN FROM THE MOUNTAINS TO GET A NEW DRESS — AND INCIDENTALLY BECOMES PART OF ONE OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST ADVENTURES. Most of the sequences and shots newly seen, however, bring forward the personal drama. The Mountain Girl (Constance Talmadge) now learns to "like kisses" with the Rhapsode and masters "the latest walk" via observation of city women. The re-emphasis led Variety (25 July 1919) to comment that "as the picture now stands one is fully able to appreciate the wonderful work that Constance Talmadge did in the original picture. In Intolerance she was buried in a mass of story that was hard to follow. In this version she is always on the job and one learns to look for her and to like her". Cyrus (George Siegmann) also gets slightly more characterization, as in the amusing sequence where he asks a "sacred white horse" about the advisability of attacking Babylon. (The horse nods yes.)
If most of The Fall of Babylon is not significantly altered from Intolerance, for audiences of 1919 seeing it was an entirely different experience. The new feature was integrated into an elaborate stage spectacle, as if Griffith was unwilling to allow his Babylon to be confined within an ordinary movie. The presentation, revised from city to city for different performers, began with a live prologue narrated by an actor costumed as a Babylonian priest and included musical numbers and dances intermixed with the film. The first version opened in Los Angeles in January 1919, and the most widely reported production played in New York that July, by which time the presentation was split, Variety reported, "50-50 between the stage and the screen, opening with a tableau that is part stage and part screen, a special small screen to show New York, the modern Babylon, which, after a dissolve, brings the large screen and the opening scenes of the feature". During Belshazzar’s first feast, the action shifted back to a risqué performance by a dancer named Kyra ("if it had been presented at the Olympic or the Columbia the cops would have been right on the job…Kyra shows about all that she can and keep ‘within the law,’" according to Variety). Among other interpolations were performers playing the Mountain Girl and the Rhapsode on stage and singing a duet. ("This could just as well have been discarded before the opening", said Variety. "The tenor seemed so stricken with stage fright that he could not use his voice.") Returning to the stage just before Cyrus’s final attack on Babylon was Kyra, "a most unusual person of apparently flexible bones," whose second dance "bewitched, or perhaps bewildered, the spectators" (The New York Times, 22 July 1919). That The Fall of Babylon could accommodate such interpolations reinforces how much the film remains more spectacle than narrative, even in this 1919 revision.
In the major alteration from Intolerance’s storyline, The Fall of Babylon ends in less than complete tragedy. Selective use of Intolerance’s shots of the Mountain Girl’s death eliminate the arrow into her chest and cause her to look just deeply defeated. She is brought before a panel of the conquering Persians as an oddity — a girl found fighting with the Babylonian men. Their offhand verdict is "RUN HER THROUGH THE BODY AND CAST HER ON THE DUNGHILLS", but the Rhapsode, acting as something of a defense attorney, contends that she "IS NO TRAITORESS", only a patriot. The revised "JUDGMENT IS THAT SHE BE BANISHED FROM BABYLON FOREVER". We see her collapsed forlornly outside, but the Rhapsode helps her to her feet and they walk into the distance to begin to make a "new world" together. Ishtar, "Goddess of Eternal Love", has answered "the boy’s prayers" after all.
The new scenes of the Mountain Girl’s romance at the start of the film and this new conclusion certainly allow for a lighter touch and a happier ending, if at the price of losing Intolerance’s characterization of the fighting young woman who dies heroically, freed joyfully of marriage. — SCOTT SIMMON [DWG Project # 574]

Prog. 6

THE MOTHER AND THE LAW (D.W. Griffith, US 1919)
Dir.: D.W. Griffith; cast: Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, Miriam Cooper, Walter Long, Tom Wilson, Sam De Grasse, Vera Lewis; 16mm, 2726 ft., 113’ (16 fps), The Museum of Modern Art.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.

When the second full-length feature created by Griffith from Intolerance opened in New York in August 1919, the memory of the theatrical spectacle surrounding screenings of The Fall of Babylon was still fresh. All the Moving Picture World (30 August 1919) needed to note was that "The Mother and the Law was a straight moving picture entertainment without any sort of tableau introduction or other stage effects." This film could stand on its own.
The many changes from Intolerance generally deepen and improve its Modern Story as retold in The Mother and the Law, although the complicated print history of both titles make it difficult to specify too precisely what audiences saw — or read in the intertitles — in any given year. Considered on its own, The Mother and the Law had a long gestation, incorporating shots from 1914 for an unreleased film of the same title, additions made for the 1916 Intolerance, and footage newly taken in 1918. In this it most resembles those European epics whose shooting was interrupted by World War I, such as Albert Capellani’s 1793. The cumulative coherent power of The Mother and the Law is all the more remarkable given its extended production history.
Right from the first reviews of Intolerance, Griffith’s cutting portrait of Progressive Era female "uplifters" sparked an angry response. The New York Evening Sun’s review of the opening night reported that "the discussion of the modern story began in the audience between the acts and is likely to rouse as much difference of opinion as did the race issue in Griffith’s earlier piece, The Birth of a Nation. In this modern story he frankly attacks the great philanthropic ‘foundations’ and even gets a side slap at one of the institutions of city government, the Children’s Court, which he charges with parting a loving mother, who had done no wrong of any kind, from her child" (quoted in The Moving Picture World, 23 September 1916). In revisions for The Mother and the Law, Griffith both intensified this critical portrait (especially by clarifying the tragic fate of the child) and counterbalanced it, especially by adding one entirely new sequence, shot in 1918. This disconnected new look into "Real charities founded on love" follows immediately after the harsh look into the unintended consequences — secret bootlegging and open prostitution — arising from the sweep of organized vice overseen by the Jenkins charity (a sequence that is itself moved to earlier in the film and which still includes the infamous intertitle WHEN WOMEN CEASE TO ATTRACT MEN THEY OFTEN TURN TO REFORM AS A SECOND CHOICE). In the new sequence, the doors of the Salvation Army open to provide A REFUGE FOR UNFORTUNATE WOMEN, with mothering comfort from a character played by regular Griffith mother-figure Kate Bruce. The film now also opens with a disclaimer and a defense: THIS STORY DOES NOT REFER TO ESTABLISHED CHARITIES, COURTS AND REFORMS — THE WORK OF SYMPATHETIC HUMANITY TO HELP THE UNFORTUNATE — BUT RATHER TO THOSE WHO USE CHARITY AS A CLOAK FOR SELF-GLORIFICATION, OR, AS IN SEVERAL CASES CERTIFIED BY GOVERNMENTAL INVESTIGATION, FOR AUTOCRATIC PURPOSE OF USING THEIR POWER, SECURED THROUGH VARIOUS FOUNDATIONS, TO MAKE LAWS TO SUIT THEIR OWN WILL.
A subtler revision helps to fix a problem that may have bothered Griffith or viewers, although it wasn’t mentioned in New York reviews of Intolerance. The motivation for the "Friendless One" (Miriam Cooper) to murder the "Musketeer" (Walter Long) looks slim in the original film — beyond the single-word title JEALOUSY that introduces her spying on the Musketeer as he puts the moves on the young wife (or the "Little Dear One", as Mae Marsh’s character is first dubbed) under the ploy that he can help recover her baby. Two additional motivations for the murder are suggested: An intertitle back in the mill town now identifies the Friendless One as the Boy’s "first sweetheart"; and an additional scene placed shortly before the killing shows a slap-and-kiss sexuality, shocking for its era, between the Friendless One and the Musketeer, ending with his beating her to the floor.
The most intense moments of The Mother and the Law arise from the more explicit fate of the baby after it is placed in the foster-care ward. A stark, disturbing image introduces a new scene through unexplained preparations of a tiny wooden coffin, which leads to the bureaucratic explanation given to the mother in the next room by the charity workers: OWING TO YOUR LACK OF CARE OF THE BABY BEFORE WE TOOK IT, IT HAS DIED. In a brilliant piece of narratively disconnected foreboding (also missing from Intolerance), the Boy had earlier paused with the prison work crew to stare down into a lingering shot of an open grave. The baby’s death and this prison memento mori also combine to leave audiences more in doubt about the ultimate outcome. A hanging of the Boy would not be out of place in the film’s world up to that point.
There is a subtle evolution in the philosophy behind the revised film. In several new titles the role of "fate" is now balanced by a social explanation, usually with the addition of the word "environment", as in the justification for the Boy’s first theft of a drunk’s wallet in the city: THE BOY CAUGHT IN THE MESHES OF AN ENVIRONMENT TOO STRONG TO ESCAPE. One doesn’t miss those verb-form neologisms of "intolerance" that had peppered the epic, as in its explanation that STOLEN GOODS, PLANTED ON THE BOY, AND HIS BAD REPUTATION INTOLERATE HIM AWAY FOR A TERM. In The Mother and the Law a different title comes before the Boy’s first incarceration: OUR PEOPLE, FORCED BY THESE BITTER MISTAKES INTO AN ENVIRONMENT WHERE THEY FOUNDER HELPLESSLY IN THE NETS OF FATE.
Mae Marsh’s performance, as overly busy as it sometimes is, represents a spirited fight against those nets. Especially in sequences unseen in Intolerance, her acting is amazingly complex. For that very reason those scenes must have been too much for Intolerance, because they tend to complicate characterization in place of the simpler narrative drive needed to keep the epic’s four stories moving. In particular her two visits to the Boy while he is in prison for the "frame-up" are models of elaborate restraint, mixing joy at seeing him, feigned toughness, bits of gentle mockery at their situation, and serious conversation (including informing him of her pregnancy during the second visit). More darkly subtle are Marsh’s series of reactions at her child’s coffin. As with Lillian Gish at her infant’s death in The Mothering Heart, Griffith directs young actresses to underplay this deepest of losses. Also adding to both the story’s poignancy and its social logic is a court appearance to determine the disposition of the baby after it is removed from its mother’s home by the three women, who after all represent only a private charity. The girl’s spitfire anger and physical rage at the larger women in court is presented as obvious evidence of her emotional unfitness.
Among other major scenes new to The Mother and the Law is a second early street incident when the girl PERSISTS IN HER NEW WALK TO WIN ADMIRERS. The Boy ends up having to fight a masher attracted also by her inviting style, which she has copied from a woman on the streets. The scene serves to introduce the neighborhood cop (Tom Wilson) who in Intolerance appears at the end more abruptly interested in helping our couple get at the truth behind the murder. Whether or not the cop is fooled in this scene when the girl sits on a barrel to hide the beaten masher, his interest in the couple has been established early, as has the girl’s FIERCE VIRGINITY (an intertitle phrase hard to imagine from any filmmaker but Griffith). Although other new scenes sometimes disrupt continuity, they add greatly to the film’s charm. The sequence of our couple at a dockside lumberyard (seen in a single lovely backlit shot in Intolerance) is broken in two — divided by the marriage proposal at her apartment doorway — so that the second part of the lumberyard sequence can serve as their post-wedding walk (NOT A SHOWY PLACE FOR A HONEYMOON — BUT AFTER ALL —). The newlywed husband now claims, amusingly, not at all to care for the sexy walk that first attracted him.
Current prints of The Mother and the Law end as does the Modern Story in Intolerance, just after the Boy is freed from the hangman’s gallows, the hood pulled from his head, his wife rousing him from his daze with a passionate tousling of his hair. The Museum of Modern Art’s intertitle records suggest that at some point the 1919 film may have ended with a coda set two years later: Our reunited couple will have a new baby.
The Mother and the Law will always stand as a footnote to Intolerance. But on its own it is easier to appreciate Griffith’s "Modern Story": the struggle of powerless people caught up in a harsh "environment", in unfeeling institutions and deadly labor strikes, but also freed by the new opportunities of the city, including the simple amusements of "a Coney Island day". The title The Mother and the Law reduces to its essence the imbalance of gender and political power that is at the core of the melodrama form. This 1919 film (which runs almost 7000 feet in 35mm) is also literally more than the Modern Story of Intolerance (which adds up to about 4500 feet). Perhaps if Griffith had never made that epic, it would be easier to recognize this biting urban melodrama as one of his great works. — SCOTT SIMMON [DWG Project # 575]

Prog. 7

BROKEN BLOSSOMS (D.W. Griffith, US 1919)
Dir: D.W. Griffith; cast: Lillian Gish, Donald Crisp, Richard Barthelmess; 35mm, 6087 ft., 91’ (18 fps), The Museum of Modern Art.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.

Broken Blossoms is Griffith’s most intricate film; in fact, it is probably the most intricately designed American silent ever made. Formal complexity in itself is not a virtue, of course. But the formal perfections of Broken Blossoms are ideally suited to the requirements of Griffith’s narrative. Roger Shattuck, commenting on modern painting, described one pleasure of viewing abstract painting as projecting our personal associations onto the non-representational lines. The pleasures we take from Broken Blossoms are of the opposite kind: in it, we may disrobe Griffith’s depiction of a natural world to find an underlying beauty of form.
We can respond, too, to the risks Griffith took with his new story. I do not have in mind the box office dangers — although charging $3.00 in 1919 for a low-budget 6-reeler takes a certain kind of outrageousness. But it is Griffith’s willingness to force himself into uncharted, psychologically threatening terrain that remains remarkable. In Broken Blossoms he lowers his guard. Activities obviously taboo or excoriated in The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance — miscegenation, auto-eroticism, voyeurism, opium eating, and revenge killing — are transformed into sensually satisfying activities that resonate in dangerously non-conformist ways. The few references to post-war 1919 American culture in the film, far from catering to the nation’s rampant xenophobia and mood of self-congratulation, hint at the dark side of American provincialism. For once in Griffith’s work, racial bigotry is a target for bitter reproach. The glancing allusions to munitions workers, American sailors, and the First World War are no less remarkable. In contrast to Griffith’s customary utopianism, they indicate a bleak, self-destructive society driven by violence and ignorance.
This little film, which was shot in 18 days on a modest budget of $92,000, was first regarded as a routine programmer. When Griffith sought to have it distributed as a special, Adolph Zukor turned him down, reportedly saying, "You bring me a picture like this and want money for it? Everybody in it dies!" Finally, at the urging of his own top advisors, Griffith bought his film back and toured it on the Klaw and Erlanger theatre circuit as an elegant roadshow attraction. It became a sensational hit. Then he sent it around to regular movie houses as his first release for the newly formed United Artists Corporation. Riding the wave of Griffith’s lavish publicity campaign, Broken Blossoms became one of United Artists’ first three major moneymakers.
Today, Broken Blossoms’ critical stock continues to soar; in the past 10 years, it has probably attracted more fresh analysis than even Intolerance and The Birth of a Nation. Provocative investigations of the narrative, Griffith’s unorthodox marketing and exhibition strategies, the film’s relationship to contemporaneous anti-Asian stereotypes, its promotion as an art film, and its rendering of class structure have yielded unusually interesting results.
But it is also of interest as a narrative. Unlike its overwhelming and diffuse predecessors, The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, Broken Blossoms is marked by a deceptively simple, apparently straightforward style. Perhaps for this reason, the internal organization of its narrative has generally gone overlooked. Yet, this apparent artlessness in fact reveals a mastery of the medium that in subtlety and nuance seems to me no less exciting than the more blatant experimentation of Intolerance.
Above all, Broken Blossoms is a film marked by terrific compression. The concentration of time and space give characters, objects, and decor a sustained metaphorical power that is never dissipated.
Griffith uses conventional elements traditionally employed to show the seamy life of Limehouse: an opium den, a gambling house, a curio shop, Burrows’ hovel. But, curiously, he strips these locales of their prosaic and sordid details. The stark street Cheng Huan lives on is clean and pristine; the harbor outside Lucy’s apartment motionless and near-empty. The contrast between homeland and faraway slum falls along the line of vitality versus lifelessness rather than Burke’s hackneyed notions of physical cleanliness versus grime (Burke is forever reminding his reader of "mephitic smells", "grimey paws", and "slime-ridden slums" in Limehouse). The opium den is seen literally through a romantic haze (Henrik Sartov’s soft-focus lens at work), the exotic details (musicians, instruments, a female opium eater lying on the couch) picked out in sharp focus. Although, predictably, Griffith features the intermingling of races as an illustration of sordidness, the cut-ins lend the den an air of classical order and serenity that fights against ideas of degeneration. The Hogarthian slum streets in films like Chaplin’s Easy Street and Borzage’s Humoresque give way to vacant, quiescent Hopper-like cityscapes.
The parallels Griffith draws between Lucy and the Yellow Man are substantial, but in the end the differences are more important than the similarities. Lucy neither appreciates nor comprehends the love Cheng Huan offers. The pleasures Lucy takes from the Yellow Man are those of a battered, immature creature overwhelmed by the simple appeal of material objects. The Yellow Man’s apartment becomes for her a magic wigwam that fuses with her mother’s gifts as a representation of beauty, with no associations beyond its exotic splendor. Lucy, who has an aversion to being touched (unsurprising in view of her father’s way with a whip), only lets the Yellow Man put his hand on her when she is preoccupied with the beautiful things he gives her (like the robe and Oriental hair-braid that replaces the ribbons). The doll, both literally and figuratively, becomes the source of that expression — Lucy’s attention deflected from Cheng Huan onto his gift.
The possibility of a satisfactory resolution to the relationship is constantly brought up, only to be deflected. The expressions of wonder on her face as she looks in the mirror, touches her lips, and smiles up at him, suggests that she is discovering herself, and that there may be some possibility of contact between them. But her next move is to stroke his cheek as if he were a cat and say, "What makes you so good to me, Chinky".
The Yellow Man reacts to her ignorant question with a smile, but the barriers Griffith creates by contrasting Lucy’s lower-class ignorance and prejudice with the Yellow Man’s high-caste idealism only enlarge upon the gulf created by their contrasting dreams and images of each other.
Battling Burrows’ intervention, in other words, is not really what destroys the relationship. The love affair itself is built on illusions that make it impossible for either lover to see the other straight on; there is no way the affair can grow.
From our perspective, what is remarkable is that both the potential and limitations of the relationship are so intimately associated with readings of props and decor. It is a love affair built on multiple associations given to dolls, flowers, ribbons, incense, and beautiful clothes; on lovers each locked into perceptions of objects, built on previous dreams and aspirations, that the other frequently cannot share.
By paring down the repertoire of elements within the mise-en-scène and constantly recycling them, Griffith creates a clever mystification by which details and gestures are made to appear significant by the sheer fact of their repetition rather than by any demonstrable meaning. They hint at secret affinities; secret correspondences. But they generate only booby-trap comparisons that lead nowhere. This severe compression also helps Griffith arrest — or check — narrative progression. The constant leapfrog back and forth among such scattered details buried practically everywhere within the narrative encourages us to read the film as a mosaic — taking us back and forth as we link new details with old ones even as the narrative pulls us forward. Within this context, the repetition of Cheng Huan’s advance on Lucy belongs to the plenitude of comparisons that link all three characters and their three settings, but which may have no further significance than enforcing a certain formal tidiness.
If, at any rate, the scene momentarily calls into question Cheng Huan’s heroism, the end of the film both restores and redefines it. When Lucy is stolen from him, the Yellow Man knows what he has to do. After his initial hysterical collapse (where his crouched position at the side of the bed, clutching the torn robe to his cheek, echoes Lucy’s position as she clutched her doll in bed), he rises and finds his pistol. He has lost both his idealized beloved and his pacificism, and takes violence as the only alternative. At last he confronts Battling Burrows, in a scene marked with subtle ironies and final reverses.
The assignment of weapons confounds all conventional associations of Asian and white. In Burke’s story, Cheng Huan leaves a snake as the fatal "love gift" for the prizefighter. In Griffith’s film, however, the snake imagery is associated with Battling Burrows’ whip, used to torment and beat the helpless Lucy. The hatchet Burrows reaches for has even more direct Oriental associations, as a traditional Chinese execution weapon. Cheng Huan’s six-shooter, on the other hand, is not only an emblem of Western violent justice; it is the one weapon entirely free from those all-pervading Fu Manchu-hatchet man Oriental connotations. The end recalls the beginning, with the "rightness" of the Yellow Man’s decision seen in Western terms. He exterminates Battling Burrows in an act of revenge, the Buddha’s "message of peace" discarded in favor of the Old Testament "Vengeance is mine".
After the cascading series of losses, reversals, and separations, the only solution possible is self-annihilation. Having sunk to the level of Western-style revenge-killer, Cheng expiates with an act of Asian-style hara-kiri. Confusing Chinese with Japanese custom, Griffith ends with a final interweaving of poetic suffering and Asian mysticism. The one final reference towards Western convention — this one closest to Griffith’s heart — is reversed and then dismissed as irrelevant: the melodramatic last-minute rescue. The local police, informed of Burrows’ murder, race to arrest Cheng Huan at his shop. Griffith starts to cross-cut between the police and the Yellow Man preparing for suicide, as if to set up another race for life. But, concentrating on Cheng’s ritual activities, Griffith loses all interest in the policemen’s progress, and in building Cheng’s suicide scene around prayer bells, incense, candles, flowers, and doll-like icons, he turns the scene into a reprise of Cheng’s frustrated dreams and doomed love affair. The "rescuers" are turned into uninitiated outsiders, and all notions of "rescue", like concomitant notions of police arrest, are made to appear naïve and boorish.
The authorities arrive too late, of course, and even their role as uncomprehending onlookers is minimized. When they come to Cheng Huan’s shop, as Edward Wagenknecht writes, "we see them enter but we do not go in with them" (Edward Wagenknecht and Anthony Slide, The Films of D.W. Griffith, 1975). For once in his career, Griffith skips over the climactic shot of the would-be rescuers confronting their target. To the very end, Griffith reins in the forward propulsive force of a linear narrative in order to round off his symmetrical designs. As the authorities enter Cheng’s shop, instead of showing us what they see, Griffith ends his movie as he began it: a Buddhist monk strikes the temple gong and a ship passes out of Shanghai harbor. — RUSSELL MERRITT [DWG Project # 576]