Prog. 3
THE DRUMS OF LOVE (La legge dell'amore) (United Artists, US 1928)
Regia/dir: D.W. Griffith; cast: Mary Philbin (Emanuella), Lionel Barrymore (Duke Cathos de Alvia), Don Alvarado (Count Leonardo de Alvia), Tully Marshall (Bopi), William Austin (Raymond of Boston), Eugenie Besserer (Duchess de Alvia), Charles Hill Mailes (Duke de Granada); ??mm, ?? ft., ??’ (22 fps); fonte copia/print source: ??
Didascalie in inglese/English intertitles
From the time of his first Biograph films, D.W. Griffith was always seducible by solemn “art”. Presented with art director William Cameron Menzies (fresh from Roland West’s 1927 The Dove, for which he would win an Academy Award) and cinematographer Karl Struss (himself fresh from F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise, also 1927, for which he too would win an Academy Award), Griffith came up with a story inspired by doomed lovers Paolo and Francesca for a film that is beautifully crafted but off-balance in structure and slow in pace. Variety’s positive review (“a sweet comeback for Griffith”) nevertheless recognized that it would be a hard sell to the mass audience: “Drums of Love is a loge section film. The art centers will love it. That’s sure. Its basic appeal is to the playgoer who thoroughly enjoys the Theatre Guild.” The most telling initial notice was from the New York Telegram: “Reviewing a Griffith picture is like nothing else in the experience of an American picture fan. For, after all, D.W. has been our first and foremost, our best beloved, our pet genius whom we could always count on when the great lords from overseas – the Murnaus, the Lubitsches and the Stillers – arrived with their great bag of tricks to show us how it is done. And that’s why it’s so tarnation sad when the Grand Old Man turns out a Drums of Love.”
Were it not such an extraordinarily dark tale, it would be easier to see this strangely titled film (“drums” of love are nowhere to be found in it) as Griffith’s first “Hollywood” movie. When he had last directed in Los Angeles in 1919, he had still been his own producer. Now he was back with an excellent employee’s contract for what turned out to be the first of four features produced by Joseph Schenck (initially at his appealingly named Art Cinema Corporation) for release through United Artists, of which Schenck was also president. These films would essentially put an end to Griffith’s career.
The structure and style of The Drums of Love are unconventional, and not without interest. After a static scene of the Alvia brothers swearing eternal love for each other at their father’s deathbed, shot with Karl Struss’ recognizably misty diffusion, the perspective switches to a sequence more characteristic of Griffith. The brothers lead troops to victory in a large-scale battle against the Duke of Granada’s forces. It’s the sort of scene, however, that would usually climax a Griffith film, and here it’s tossed off perfunctorily. Most of the rest of the film will rely for spectacle on unconvincing glass-shot effects. Unusual for Griffith too is the fluid mobility of the camera in early scenes, especially of carefree Emanuella at her father’s home. The tone of the rest of the film seems also to weigh down the camera.
The performances are so varied in expressiveness as to lead to a disastrous imbalance in the film as a whole. Top-billed was Mary Philbin, a pleasant-enough actress who was developing an odd career repeatedly playing the lovely consort of deeply deformed but good-hearted men, after The Phantom of the Opera (Rupert Julian, 1925) and The Man Who Laughs (Paul Leni, 1927, but released widely only after Griffith’s film). Dolled up in a Goldilocks wig and “recently home from the convent”, she is here paired with Don Alvarado, one of the low-rent Latin Lover replacements after Valentino’s death. His acting range appears so extremely limited that, by the climax of The Drums of Love, his character’s passion and guilt register as a Kuleshov test – an identical expression distinguished only by whether it is edited next to Emanuella or a portrait of his brother: “Sometimes there is a lethargy about his actions,” in the New York Times’s understatement. The human interest in the film arises from the convincing and even endearing performance of Lionel Barrymore as Duke Cathos; it was “this actor’s outstanding camera achievement to date,” in Variety’s verdict. When Emanuella first sees Cathos, he’s shadowed in Expressionist darkness that emphasizes his heavy brow, broad mustache, and hairy hands, but he’s also immediately rather winning in mocking his own hump and letting her know that she’s quite free to withdraw from the marriage “and none will be the worse”. (It’s her father who again forces the union.) Barrymore provides the rare flashes of wit in a film too weighed down by intertitles penned by Griffith with his former publicist Gerrit J. Lloyd; “it would … have been far more satisfactory to include in the captions phrases that were less hard and contained an element of charm,” noted the New York Times. As the un-comic jester, Tully Marshall skulks around melodramatically, as if testing out the character he will use to drool on Gloria Swanson later that year in Erich von Stroheim’s Queen Kelly (1928). It becomes evident that Griffith’s rooting interest in all this court intrigue is entirely with Barrymore’s sad, lonely, deformed duke, and we too become increasingly impatient with pampered Emanuella for preferring the dim, handsome brother. The Drums of Love comes close to being a fascinating film – if we weren’t forced to spend so much time with the two lovers.
The difficulty that Griffith and Schenck had in marketing the film is evident in the survival of two different last reels. The plot description above recounts the film’s original story as seen at the Los Angeles and New York premieres. After Cathos is informed by the jester of the liaison between his brother and his wife, they enact a long, heavy finale of guilt, honor, sacrifice, and murder. Emanuella declares “I must die”. Cathos kisses and stabs her, then even more regretfully must stab his brother: “Death before a stain on our honor.” Anticipating another Lionel Barrymore film, Duel in the Sun (King Vidor, 1946), the two dying lovers crawl toward each other, even while they beg Cathos’ forgiveness, and Struss’ photography gets even mistier. In a strikingly composed and dark coda, Cathos kisses the hands of the two bodies on a bier and walks slowly off, tormented and more hunched than ever. “The closing incident” might be a problem, the New York Times hinted. Variety elaborated that “doubts have been expressed as to whether the beauty values here can overcome the tragic double killing at the finish,” but noted that “Greta [Garbo] passes on in both Flesh and the Devil and Love …”. However, MGM had come around to revising the end of Love (Edmund Goulding, 1927) – an adaptation of Anna Karenina – so that Anna and Vronsky live happily ever after, a version released widely earlier in January 1928. Griffith and Schenck apparently decided to try the same thing. In the revised final reel of The Drums of Love put into general release by late February 1928, the brothers again fight and Emanuella again recognizes “I must die”. However, this time Cathos stabs the ever-intrusive jester, and is mortally wounded in return. There is no record that the revised ending improved the film’s box-office appeal. – Scott Simmon [DWG Project # 618]

Prog. 4
THE BATTLE OF THE SEXES (La battaglia dei sessi) (Art Cinema Corp., US 1928)
Regia/dir: D.W. Griffith; cast: Jean Hersholt (J.C. Judson), Phyllis Haver (Marie Skinner), Belle Bennett (Mrs. Judson), Don Alvarado (Babe [Jim] Winsor), Sally O’Neill (Ruth Judson), William Bakewell (Billy Judson); 35mm, 7846 ft., 87’ (24 fps), [sonoro/sound??]; fonte copia/print source: George Eastman House, Rochester, NY.
Didascalie in inglese/English intertitles.
Few films can offer as revealing a perspective on Griffith’s late-1920s career as his 1928 remake of The Battle of the Sexes. Remakes were a rarity in Griffith’s career anyway, but his two versions of this story were separated by a gap of 14 years – turbulent years that saw a world war, the rise of the Roaring Twenties, and vast social changes with which, we have often been told, Griffith could not keep up. In a sense The Battle of the Sexes disproves that notion, for it takes place in a world very different from that of 1914. Unfortunately only a fragment of the 1914 Battle of the Sexes is known to survive, but from that fragment and from contemporary publicity and reviews we can gather a sense of the tone Griffith took in that version. As Donald Crisp strayed from his loving wife and children to dally with an adventuress, there can be little doubt that Griffith depicted such infidelity seriously, delivering a stern warning to anyone (erring husband or adventuress) who would threaten the sanctity of the home – a warning not unlike those he had delivered more than once in his recent Biograph films.
What a difference in 1928! The plot is the same, but the 1928 Battle of the Sexes is framed as a comedy, complete with wisecracking titles and designed almost exclusively for entertainment value. An index to the contrast between the two versions can be seen in their casts. The straying husband, played in 1914 by rock-solid Donald Crisp, is portrayed in 1928 by the short, pudgy, vulnerable, and frequently ludicrous Jean Hersholt. The temptress, as played in 1914 by a young Fay Tincher, was attractive enough but clearly a lightweight. In 1928, as played by blonde bombshell Phyllis Haver, she’s the star of the picture. Her golddigger (in updated late-1920s parlance), a voracious glamour girl with a heart of brass, is both firmly in control of the plot and thoroughly likable, quite the most entertaining thing in the film. Hersholt hasn’t a chance against her formidable charms, and his character becomes more sympathetic as a result.
Griffith has not, of course, abandoned his value system altogether, and midway through the picture he shifts gears. The damage wrought upon the businessman’s family is clearly meant to be taken seriously. Here again, however, the film’s cast works against a severely moralistic preachment: the members of the businessman’s family, the bedrock of the original film, are played in the remake by the weakest members of the cast. Belle Bennett, fresh from notable “mother” roles in such films as Stella Dallas (Henry King, 1925) and John Ford’s Mother Machree (1928), was probably an obvious choice to play the wife/mother, but she registers little or no impression; as Variety observed, she “is inclined to be monotonous in her simplicity”. Sally O’Neill and Billy Bakewell, as the businessman’s children, are hardly a match for Lillian Gish and Bobby Harron in the original, and their disconcertingly strenuous efforts to project youth and vivacity are no help at all.
The surviving fragment of the 1914 The Battle of the Sexes is the scene in which the businessman and his paramour are discovered at a cabaret by his family. Comparing this fragment with the corresponding sequence in the remake allows us to see how Griffith’s technique has changed in the intervening years. The 1928 version has been expanded in every way: more camera positions, more varied activity by the principals and by the other nightclub patrons (with a running gag involving a diner at a nearby table), not to mention a much larger and more glamorous nightclub – surely a reflection of how such places had changed in real life during the 1920s. This eye-popping nightclub set is the work of William Cameron Menzies, who recycled it the following year in Roland West’s Alibi.
The fluidity of the sequence, and the rest of the film, is further enhanced by occasional dolly or tracking shots. Billy Bitzer had photographed the 1914 The Battle of the Sexes (along with several hundred other Griffith films) single-handed, but for the remake he was teamed with the distinguished cinematographer Karl Struss, whose mobile camera had recently been used to good effect in Sunrise (F.W. Murnau, 1927), among other films. Perhaps the most striking of the moving-camera shots in The Battle of the Sexes comes as Belle Bennett, in a daze, wanders deliriously on the roof of the apartment building. As she totters dangerously near the edge, the camera, in a sudden point-of-view shot, plunges sickeningly straight down the side of the building.
Another technical note: The Battle of the Sexes was released late in 1928, the key transitional year of the talking-picture revolution. It was released with a synchronized score, augmented with sound effects, and in Phyllis Haver’s singing scene the sound of her voice was loosely synchronized with her singing image onscreen. This was apparently the film’s one concession to the talkies, but it was enough for Variety to classify it explicitly as a sound film. Griffith, for his part, was unhappy with the soundtrack and registered a futile complaint with United Artists over the music in the opening and closing scenes. Where Griffith had envisioned a tender arrangement of “Together” or “When You and I Were Young, Maggie” in these scenes, the score supplied up-tempo comedy music instead.
Although the 1928 Battle of the Sexes vividly illustrates the tremendous social changes that had occurred since 1914, it seems a little unfair to suggest, as some writers have, that Griffith was prostituting himself by producing a mere “entertainment” film. After all, the golden-era Griffith had never been averse to entertaining his audiences. And even if Griffith had wanted to reinvent himself at this late date, there would have been little chance. (Before The Battle of the Sexes was released he wrote to his distributors, quoting some studio visitors who had compared the film to the writings of Chekhov, and urging that this idea be conveyed to the critics!) In any case, if the Battle of the Sexes remake was intended to restore Griffith’s reputation as an up-to-date director, the attempt was unsuccessful. Critics were unanimously disappointed in the film, more than one comparing it unfavorably with Paramount’s The Way of All Flesh (Victor Fleming, 1927), which had featured a similar plot situation and Belle Bennett and Phyllis Haver in comparable roles. If Griffith’s standing in the industry he had done so much to build was to be restored, some other film would have to do the job. – J.B. Kaufman [DWG Project # 619]

Prog. 5
LADY OF THE PAVEMENTS (La canzone del cuore) (Art Cinema Corp., US 1929)
Regia/dir: D.W. Griffith; cast: Lupe Velez (Nanon del Rayon), William Boyd (Count Karl von Arnim), Jetta Goudal (Countess Diane des Granges), Henry Armetta (Papa Pierre), Albert Conti (Baron Finot), George Fawcett (Baron Haussmann), Franklin Pangborn (M’sieu Dubrey, dance master), William Bakewell (a pianist); ??mm, ?? ft., ??’ (22 fps), [sonoro/sound??]; fonte copia/print source: ??
Didascalie in inglese/English intertitles.
While hardly box-office failures – they ultimately grossed approximately $625,000 each, making just enough money to break even – The Drums of Love and The Battle of the Sexes were disappointments for director D.W. Griffith and producer Joseph M. Schenck, both financially and critically; the latter film, especially, was savaged by critics as being, among other things, “badly acted, unimaginatively directed and thoroughly third-rate” (Richard Watts, Jr., New York Herald Tribune), as well as being “tricked out here and there with evidences of distinctly bad taste” (Katherine Zimmerman, New York Telegram). Griffith’s chronic inability to find suitable properties for himself, coupled with his increasingly heavy drinking, had caused Schenck to lose confidence in him even before The Battle of the Sexes was finished.
As that film was being readied for its premiere, Schenck announced that Griffith would begin production on The Love Song, working from a script by Sam Taylor that was, in turn, based on a story by German author Karl Vollmoeller. Taylor was an industry professional with strong credits, having collaborated with Harold Lloyd as a writer and director on several of his most successful features – among them, Grandma’s Boy (Fred Newmeyer, 1922), Safety Last! (Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1923), Why Worry? (Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1923), Girl Shy (Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor, 1924), and The Freshman (Sam Taylor and Fred Newmeyer, 1925) – as well as directing Norma Talmadge releases under Schenck’s supervision. His solidly crafted shooting script for what would become Lady of the Pavements offered Schenck the hope of a box-office success.
Griffith was given two rising stars as his romantic leads – Lupe Velez, who had recently appeared opposite Douglas Fairbanks in The Gaucho (F. Richard Jones, 1928), and William Boyd, an actor who would later make his mark as Hopalong Cassidy. Jetta Goudal, a dark beauty who had gained some notoriety as an exotic vamp, was cast as the vindictive countess. Karl Struss, assisted by Griffith veteran G.W. Bitzer, beautifully photographed William Cameron Menzies’ evocative sets. Gerrit J. Lloyd’s titles were well-suited to the Ruritanian flavor of the story and avoided the Victorian prose so characteristic of Griffith’s more personal films.
The result of all this was a well-made film, one that paid tribute to the wonders of the Hollywood studio system. Like many American releases of the late silent period, Lady of the Pavements was a polished production that entertained its audiences through a deft combination of attractive onscreen talent, obvious high production values, and efficient behind-the-camera support. Without a doubt, Lady of the Pavements was a stylish entertainment, and with it Griffith revealed that he was able to suppress his natural inclination to dominate a project, disappearing into the spirit of the piece just like any other contract director. Unfortunately, Griffith also was utterly unsuited to the milieu of the Second Empire, a historical period for which he had little feel and even less interest; as a result, for all its stylishness, the film is curiously cold, without substance or wit.
What one admires about Lady of the Pavements is its surface, not its soul. For all of the flawed and unsuccessful films he had directed during his career, never before this could Griffith have been accused of making a film lacking conviction. Here, two of his three lead actors work as if he is barely even on the set. In the case of supporting players Henry Armetta, George Fawcett, and Franklin Pangborn, Griffith gives them a great amount of latitude, allowing them to experiment with their characterizations in such a way as to suggest that he understood they would infuse his film with what little vitality it might hope to have. Jetta Goudal and William Boyd sleepwalk through their parts. Only Lupe Velez gives any indication of having worked through her character with her director, searching for the connective tissue that would explain, however tenuously, Nanon’s growth from a heedless cabaret performer to an elegant, intelligent woman deserving of love and respect. Such a wide variety of performances can make for a light-headed experience, and without a director’s careful consideration of how all the many and varied pieces should fit together, one can have the uncanny experience of watching several films at once. As well considered and clearly drawn as it is in terms of its art direction and photography, Lady of the Pavements is unfocussed in its characterizations. This is a terrible flaw in a film whose story so clearly depends for its success on a light and unified touch, and the fault sits squarely on the shoulders of its director.
Of course, what else could one expect from a project that Griffith did not initiate, and for which he had little, if any, empathy? He did attempt one bit of old-fashioned camera trickery, as a way to put some sort of personal stamp on the project. At the film’s end, when Nanon returns to the cabaret from which she was plucked, she sings a mournful song, and, while looking out at the audience, sees her husband, von Arnim, in every man in the audience. This wonderful moment was accomplished by special-effects expert Ned Mann, who filled the Smoking Dog cabaret with 13 William Boyds by exposing the camera negative 36 times. Reviewers of the day commented upon this, but only in passing, and as a way of suggesting what the film might have been had enough care and thought been applied to it.
Ultimately, Lady of the Pavements had its true success as a vehicle for Lupe Velez. It was released with a synchronized orchestral score, into which was interpolated at several key moments her rendition of an Irving Berlin song composed specially for the film, “Where Is the Song of Songs for Me?”. Velez released a Victor recording of this tune to some success, and she made a series of personal appearances at theaters around the country in support of the release. In a way this was the ultimate embarrassment for D.W. Griffith, who now found himself in the position of being an unwitting foil for Lupe Velez and her ascent up the Hollywood ladder of fame. It must have been a terrible blow to Griffith to find himself shunted to the side as Velez took center stage and received more press attention than the film itself. He had always known that to give up his independence was the one sure way to compromise his talent and power, and this project only confirmed him in his belief that the film industry had little use for filmmakers like himself.
Griffith traveled to New York with Joseph M. Schenck in January of 1929 for the premiere of Lady of the Pavements, moving into the Astor Hotel for 6 full months. During this time, he attempted to straighten out his personal affairs, and just as importantly he set about looking for a property with which to break into sound films. Before long, he would settle on a subject that would give him the opportunity to demonstrate both to his colleagues in the film industry and to the public at large that he was still a creative talent to be reckoned with. – Steven Higgins [DWG Project # 621]

Prog. 6
ABRAHAM LINCOLN (Il cavaliere della libertà) (Feature Productions, US 1930)
Regia/dir: D.W. Griffith; cast: Walter Huston (Abraham Lincoln), Lucille La Verne (midwife), W.L. Thorne (Tom Lincoln), Helen Freeman (Nancy Hanks Lincoln), Una Merkel (Ann Rutledge), Kay Hammond (Mary Todd Lincoln), E. Alyn Warren (Stephen A. Douglass), Jason Robards (Herndon), Gordon Thorpe (Tad Lincoln), Ian Keith (John Wilkes Booth), Cameron Prudhomme (John Hay), Fred Warren (General Grant), Oscar Apfel (Secretary of War Stanton), Frank Campeau (General Sheridan), Hobart Bosworth (General Lee), Henry B. Walthall (Colonel Marshall); 35mm, ??? ft., ??’ (24 fps), sonoro/sound; fonte copia/print source: The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Versione originale in inglese / English dialogue.
In 1929, D.W. Griffith was at a crossroads in his career. He had long ago lost his status as an independent producer when he gave up his Mamaroneck studio in 1925 and agreed to work under contract for Adolph Zukor and Famous Players-Lasky. None of the 3 films he made at their Astoria facility (Sally of the Sawdust, That Royle Girl, and The Sorrows of Satan) had found favor with movie audiences of the time, and he subsequently signed with Joseph M. Schenck and United Artists in 1927 to make 5 films, the first 3 of which (The Drums of Love, The Battle of the Sexes, and Lady of the Pavements) proved to be the lowest point of his career, both critically and commercially. The fact that he was a contractual employee at the studio he had co-founded only 10 years before simply added insult to injury. Griffith now found himself in the position of having to prove himself, yet again, while also facing the challenge of having to make his first sound film.
Unlike many filmmakers of his generation, D.W. Griffith viewed the advent of sound films as an opportunity, not a crisis in the making. He was quoted in the Exhibitors Herald-World of 21 January 1929 as calling for an amalgam of the best of silent film technique with the expressive possibilities of sound: “The dialogue picture can only succeed…when [it] is essentially a silent picture with the addition of dialogue. When this is done successfully you will see the greatest entertainment the world has ever witnessed. […] We must preserve all the speed, action, swirl, life and tempo of the motion picture today. Add dialogue to that and, boy, you will have people standing in their seats cheering.”
Of course, this enthusiasm was expressed in conjunction with the release of Lady of the Pavements, and so might be seen as a simple attempt to drum up some publicity, but it must also be noted that Griffith had experimented with sound as far back as 1921, when he presented Dream Street in New York City with a spoken prologue, recorded on an early sound-on-disc system. In addition, The Battle of the Sexes and Lady of the Pavements were presented in their major city runs with synchronized musical tracks, the latter film interpolating as well several sequences of Lupe Velez singing the Irving Berlin composition “Where Is the Song of Songs for Me?”. Griffith was never one to dismiss a technical innovation out of hand, something to which his many Biograph films will attest; even allowing for a bit of hyperbole, we may assume that he meant it when he declared in the New York Sunday World of 24 March 1929: “I am nutty over talking pictures …”.
It was his boss, Joseph M. Schenck, who doubted the wisdom of sound films, but by 1929 he had no choice but to follow the industry into the unknown. Schenck was dissatisfied enough with Griffith’s recent poor showings at the box office to consider firing him, but Griffith campaigned vigorously for a chance to prove himself in sound. Abandoning contemporary subject matter, he returned to first principles, sure in his conviction that his greatest strength lay in his ability to make the American past come alive on film. Griffith approached Schenck with several historical subjects, among them a history of the Confederate States of America, a subject dear to his heart, and a history of Texas. Schenck turned down these and other proposals as the losses from Lady of the Pavements mounted. Finally, Griffith returned to California from his extended stay in New York, stopping off in Texas to “take the cure” in Mineral Wells, and brought with him an idea to film the life of Abraham Lincoln. Schenck approved the project.
The producer saw immediately that such a film was a prestige production, and budgeted it accordingly; however, negotiations between Griffith and United Artists were contentious, with the studio actually insisting that the director take a cut in salary. Matters were resolved only after significant concessions were made on both sides, not the least of which was Schenck’s agreement to let the last film in Griffith’s 5-film contract lapse if both sides found it convenient to do so. With this possibility of regaining his independence now in reach, Griffith plunged into the Lincoln project.
The popular authority on Lincoln at that time was Carl Sandburg, the Chicago-based poet and journalist whose 2-volume The Prairie Years, the first in his series of 6 biographical volumes on the 16th President, had been published to great acclaim 3 years before. Griffith approached Sandburg to write a script for the film, and the poet did eventually offer some ideas, but his fee was too high and Griffith looked elsewhere for a writer. He found one in Stephen Vincent Benét, a young poet whose epic poem, John Brown’s Body, had just won the Pulitzer Prize. Benét eventually wrote many drafts of a script, all of which were severely altered or rejected by Schenck’s studio representative, John W. Considine, Jr., who took final credit as “Story and Production Advisor”.
The title role was given to Walter Huston, a veteran stage actor who had only recently begun to work in film, and whose commanding physical and vocal presence added a much-needed integrity and unifying force to the episodic unfolding of Lincoln’s life. Mary Todd Lincoln was played with engaging comic flair by Kay Hammond, while Ian Keith portrayed John Wilkes Booth as the self-dramatizing egotist described so vividly by his contemporaries. Smaller roles were cast with equal care; most notably, famed silent film actor Hobart Bosworth played Robert E. Lee with tragic sadness, and Frank Campeau brought a convincing grit and energy to the pivotal role of Phil Sheridan. Henry B. Walthall, whose greatest fame derived from his role as the Little Colonel in The Birth of a Nation (1915), lent quiet dignity to the minor role of Colonel Marshall, Lee’s aide-de-camp. The only role for which Griffith showed an inexplicable blind spot was that of Ann Rutledge, played with what must be described as simpering absurdity by Una Merkel, a brilliant comic actress woefully miscast as Lincoln’s mythical first and only true love. The sets were designed by William Cameron Menzies and photographed by Karl Struss. The music, most of it sourced with great subtlety to action in the film, was arranged by Hugo Riesenfeld.
Although clearly a big-budget film for 1930, Abraham Lincoln certainly does not approach the epic sweep of films like The Birth of a Nation or Orphans of the Storm when it comes to masses of extras and battle scenes composed across a broad canvas. With the exception of Sheridan’s Ride, which actually implies its epic scale through judicious camera angles and a strikingly sophisticated use of sound, there are no great battles scenes in Abraham Lincoln. This is as it should be, for the point of Griffith’s film is not to recreate battles, but to show the effect the war had on Lincoln, and, by extension, the American people. As a result, it is actually one of the most intimate and non-violent war films ever made in America. – Steven Higgins [DWG Project # 624]

Prog. 7
[PROLOGUES TO THE BIRTH OF A NATION REISSUE] / [CONVERSATION BETWEEN D.W. GRIFFITH AND WALTER HUSTON ON THE BIRTH OF A NATION] (D.W. Griffith, Inc., US 1930)
Regia/dir: David W. Griffith; cast: D.W. Griffith, Walter Huston; ??mm, ?? ft., ??’ (24 fps), sonoro/sound; fonte copia/print source: Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Versione originale in inglese / English dialogue.
This interview between Walter Huston and Griffith was planned as the prologue to the 1930 reissue (with soundtrack) of The Birth of a Nation, but it was probably not used. Huston and the crew had come off Abraham Lincoln. It was photographed by Karl Struss, Griffith’s regular cameraman at this period. The assistant director was the veteran Herbert Sutch, the head electrician was Edward Seward, and the children were Byron Sagee, Betsy Heisler (the daughter of Stuart Heisler?), and Dawn O’Day, a child actress who grew up to be Anne Shirley. Since the crew came from Abraham Lincoln, one can safely assume that Griffith directed it and that the assistant cameraman was Stanley Cortez. – Kevin Brownlow [DWG Project # 626

THE STRUGGLE (D.W. Griffith, Inc., US 1931)
Regia/dir: D.W. Griffith; cast: Hal Skelly (Jimmie Wilson), Zita Johann (Florrie Wilson), Charlotte Wynters (Nina), Evelyn Baldwin (Nan Wilson), Jackson Halliday (Johnnie Marshall), Edna Hagan (Mary Wilson), Claude Cooper (Sam), Charles Richman (Mr. Craig); 35mm, 6927 ft., 77’ (24 fps), sonoro/sound; fonte copia/print source: The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Versione originale in inglese / English dialogue.
In 1929, the D.W. Griffith Company was awarded a big tax refund for a 1920 overpayment. The company treasurer invested the money in stocks without telling Griffith, and, while the market crashed in the fall of 1929, these investments proved to be good in the short term. The company got a small bank loan as well, and The Struggle went into production in a rented studio in the Bronx in the summer of 1931. The need to keep costs down contributed a documentary-like quality to this melodramatic tale: scenes were shot in the Bronx streets, others at the Stamford Rolling Mills in Springdale, Connecticut. The film was previewed in Connecticut in late November 1931.
Sadly, Griffith’s hopes for this film were doomed. He was sure that if he could manage to produce a film on his own again, he could make a success. He believed that his years of failure were the result of working for others with insufficient control of his own product. It is painful for anyone who has closely followed the career of D.W. Griffith to have to say that the results were laughed off the screen by its first audience. When audiences laugh at a presentation not intended to be funny, it is usually because it makes them uncomfortable and embarrassed. It is a common phenomenon with spectators when viewing films made in their youth to be embarrassed by what moved them in their innocence. Now we can discover that The Struggle was not the least of Griffith’s films, even if it is far from the great ones. When talking pictures became accepted as the norm, audiences tended to giggle at silent films: 1931 is too early for that reaction. Mary Pickford, hearing her own popular silent films producing laughter in the audience years later, decided to buy up and destroy her old films. Fortunately, she was dissuaded. This is not the case of The Struggle, of course, since it was not a silent film. But the film did resemble the old Biograph silent one-reel melodramas in plot and tone: the best of the Biograph films had had a strong emotional effect on their audiences, and the embarrassment factor could have played a role for the 1931 audience. In 1931, of course, the audiences felt the cynicism and “sophistication” of the intervening years of the Jazz Age. The reaction could also be attributed to the addition of dialogue to Griffith’s typically melodramatic scenes, perhaps the same shock experienced by audiences when they first heard John Gilbert make florid declarations of passion aloud. In Broken Blossoms, a drunken brute abusing a cowering Lillian Gish was chilling and terrifying. The same scene in The Struggle, a drunken Jimmie Wilson abusing his little daughter, with the addition of sound effects and dialogue, was received as comedy.
Griffith’s reaction to hearing laughter at the premiere of The Struggle was to hide out in his hotel room and refuse to see anyone. One of the trade papers declined to review The Struggle out of respect for Griffith’s former greatness; other reviews were devastating. United Artists, which had advanced some of the costs in exchange for distribution rights, withdrew the film and cut it hastily to try to distribute it before word of its failure spread. It never got more than a few showings in Philadelphia. Some years later it was revived briefly as a “laugh” movie under the title Ten Nights in a Barroom.
The scenario for The Struggle could have come from one of many of the Biograph one-reelers that dealt with alcohol problems, such as The Drunkard’s Reformation (1909), The Expiation (1909), or Drink’s Lure (1913). The Drunkard’s Reformation was especially close to the plot of The Struggle. The documents in The D.W. Griffith Papers at the Museum of Modern Art record an inquiry during the preparation of The Struggle into the copyright situation of Charles Reade’s play Drink and its predecessor, Emile Zola’s L’Assommoir, showing that this old temperance drama was in Griffith’s mind. These documents also record Griffith himself as the author of the continuity, in May 1931, although as often before, he is not credited on the film: he and Anita Loos and John Emerson were all three paid for the script by the Griffith company, David Wark Griffith, Inc. Anita Loos and John Emerson were by then highly successful writers of film and stage comedy. Why they were selected or why they agreed to write for this project is a mystery. Like most people who had ever been associated with Griffith, they would have been moved by old friendship and loyalty, but they were surely the wrong choice for this film. The only place one might recognize their touch is the prologue, set in the pre-war period before Prohibition, in a beer garden. Here light-hearted people sit and gossip happily over their draught beers about movies and movie stars.
A product of the Progressive Era, the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors, had been in existence since 1919. The unpopular Prohibition Amendment was often disregarded, especially among people who thought themselves sophisticated, and provoked the rise of a new criminal class providing bootleg liquor. For many, breaking the law of the land became a joke, until Prohibition was brought to an end in 1933. The Struggle starts out as a criticism of Prohibition: people drank less and more healthily in the days before it was passed. Bootleg liquor was poisonous. But in the progress of the film, the theme changes emphasis to the horrors of alcohol addiction and its destructiveness to the family. The theme of family and the threats to its security weaves through Griffith’s films from beginning to end.
By 1931, the talking film had taken over the industry. Much of sound film technology had been stabilized, most theaters had become equipped to show it, and small theaters unable to modernize were being forced to close or to change purpose. Various changes independent of the arrival of sound film, but occurring simultaneously, changed the look of photography: studio lighting changed from arc lights to incandescence; panchromatic film stock replaced orthochromatic. Griffith, always wanting to be in the forefront of technological change, used the new dynamic coil microphone to pick up the dialogue of The Struggle, a microphone which was not to be in widespread use until the late 1930s. This gave more freedom to the placement and movement of the mike.
The Struggle contains one of the most moving scenes ever staged by Griffith. To his countless images of the happy family, he has added a haunting image of a broken home. When Hal Skelly as Jimmie Wilson returns to his apartment, he finds it empty of furniture and people. His wife has gone, the furniture is on the sidewalk, and his daughter has been sent across the way to stay temporarily with a neighbor. Skelly looks out the window, where we can see his daughter with the neighbor’s children, listening to a radio. A sermon is being broadcast, followed by organ music, the hymn “Abide With Me”. The sound comes from another space than the one we are in, and is an imaginative use of the new possibilities of sound in film. The children do not see or hear Skelly. He slumps against a wall, his family lost to him, a picture of despair. If the opening-night audience laughed at such an intimate scene, one can understand what drove Griffith to hide out in his hotel room. – Eileen Bowser [DWG Project # 627]

 

Video prog.

Griffith non visti: un Biograph "perduto" (più tre dispersi)
Unseen Griffith: a "lost" Biograph (plus three missing in action)

THE REVENUE MAN AND THE GIRL (Biograph, US 1911)
Regia/dir: D.W. Griffith; cast: Dorothy West, Edwin August, Gladys Egan, Charles Hill Mailes, Charles H. West; 8mm, riversamento su/transfer to Betacam, 14’ (16 fps); fonte copia/print source: Andy Benz Collection, Neckarsulm.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
The moonshiner’s daughter is first seen caressing and kissing her pet dove. Carrying hollowed gourds to be used as “jugs” for the distilled brew, she is sent by her father to assist at the illegal still. Meanwhile, pair of revenue men sneak through the forest, intent on discovering the still. Coming upon the girl’s cabin, the revenue men arrest and disarm two moonshiners, then begin their trek to take the arrested men back to jail. Alerted to the men’s arrest by the younger daughter, the moonshiners arm themselves and track the revenuers to the point at which they are handing the arrested men to other unidentified law officers. In the gun battle between the revenue men and the moonshiners, the girl’s father and one of the revenuers are killed. The other revenue man, frightened and disoriented, runs from his pursuers, loses his rife in a fast-moving creek, and reaches a temporary hiding place exhausted and unarmed. The girl, discovering her father’s corpse and that of the slain revenuer, mourns her parent and promises vengeance against revenuers even as she abuses the revenue man’s dead body. With the father buried and mourned, the girl, armed with a rifle, joins the remaining moonshiners in pursuit of the hidden revenuer. She stalks the fugitive through the forest, spies him, and is about to take aim, when her pet dove drops from a tree directly onto the revenue man. He picks up and caresses the dove, feeds it (revenue men always carry birdseed just in case, especially when they’re on tax raids in Kentucky, where white doves tend to plummet suddenly from trees), and releases it. Observing the revenue man’s kindness to the dove and moved by his gentleness, the girl is now disposed to be kinder to the revenue man. She takes him to her cabin, hides him beneath her bed, and pretends to be asleep when the moonshiner posse comes in pursuit. Having successfully saved the revenue man, the girl sends him on his way, but he hangs back, declares his love for the girl, and, after some hesitation on her part, gets her to confess her affection for her. We last see them as, backs to the camera and her belongings in a bundle tied to a stick, they stroll from the forest onto a country road leading to town. – David Mayer [DWG Project # 361]

SAVED FROM HIMSELF (Biograph, US 1911)
Regia/dir: D.W. Griffith; cast: Joseph Graybill, Mabel Normand, Charles Hill Mailes, William J. Butler; 8mm, riversamento su/transfer to Betacam, 16’ (16 fps), fonte copia/print source: Andy Benz Collection, Neckarsulm.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
A young hotel clerk engaged to be married invests his life’s savings in the stock market. When the stocks’ value begins to drop, his broker alerts him that it is essential he send another $2,000 in order to prevent a total loss. The temptation offered by a large amount of money deposited at the hotel for safekeeping almost proves too much, but the man is prevented from incriminating himself by his fiancée’s influence. – Charlie Keil [DWG Project # 379]

TWO DAUGHTERS OF EVE (Biograph, US 1912)
Regia/dir: D.W. Griffith; cast: Claire McDowell, Henry B. Walthall, Florence Geneva, Robert Harron, D.W. Griffith, W. Christy Cabanne, Harry Carey; 8mm, riversamento su/transfer to Betacam, 12’ (16 fps), fonte copia/print source: Andy Benz Collection, Neckarsulm.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
“Deep in the breasts of most women, underneath the painted exterior of many, lie the same natural spontaneous instincts of true womanhood. This is the truth brought out in this drama dealing with love and sacrifice of two women. One possesses a husband, a child, and money, and the other is doing a song and dance in the chorus of a cheap musical show. The child becomes lost one afternoon while the parents are visiting in the neighborhood of the theater, and is found in the arms of the chorus girl. The mother snatches the child away, fearful lest it should become contaminated with such company. By a peculiar twist of fortune, in the months that follow this incident, the husband becomes enamored with the charms of the pretty chorus girl and neglects his wife so that she is forced to leave him. Soon afterward, he loses his fortune, and when the chorus girl turns against him, he is left to realize his bitter condition. The mother, unable to find employment, as a last resort applies at the theater, where she met the other woman months before. At first the girl laughs at the mother, but is afterward touched by her sorrow and destitute condition. Following the mother into the dressing-room, she gives her jewels that rightfully belong to her; jewels that the husband has squandered his money upon. It proves the mother’s temporal salvation, and the chorus girl returning home with her, is now allowed to kiss the child. The husband is forgiven and the little family of three go out to start life over again, while the chorus girl retires into the background with sad and longing eyes. It is a story of vivid contrasts.” The New York Dramatic Mirror, 25 September 1912, p.32 [DWG Project # 427]

THE LITTLE TEASE (Biograph, US 1913)
Regia/dir: D.W. Griffith; cast: Mae Marsh, W. Chrystie Miller, Kate Bruce, Robert Harron, Henry B. Walthall, Viola Barry, Lionel Barrymore; 8mm, riversamento su/transfer to Betacam, 21’ (16 fps), fonte copia/print source: Andy Benz Collection, Neckarsulm.
Didascalie in inglese / English intertitles.
Tomboyish mountain girl Little Tease has her head turned by a smooth-talking, charismatic stranger she finds wandering through the woods. The stranger persuades Little Tease to run away from home, but in the valley she discovers his true colors. In a hotel, she sees him making love to another woman, and considers shooting him. Instead she runs away and finds work in a roadhouse, where her childhood sweetheart urges her to return home. Pride keeps her at the roadhouse, but the mountain flower her sweetheart leaves behind stirs irresistible family memories. She starts up the mountain while, by degrees, her father moves out of his bitterness while reading his Bible. Softened by his reading, he opens his window to let in the sunshine, sees his daughter at prayer over her mother’s grave, and calls her back into his arms. – Russell Merritt [DWG Project # 468]

BIRTH OF THE MOVIES: THE STORY OF D.W. GRIFFITH: FROM THE MEMOIRS OF LILLIAN GISH (Philco Television Playhouse, WNBT-TV, New York, 22 April 1951)
Regia/dir: Delbert Mann; prod: Fred Coe; scen./teleplay: H.R. Hayes, Robert Alan Aurthur; direttore tecnico/technical director: Orland Tamburri; scg./des: Otis Riggs; make-up: Dorothy Nixon; cost: Rose Bogdanoff; annunciatore/announcer: Jay Jackson; cast: John Newland (D.W. Griffith), Lillian Gish (se stessa/herself), Paul Mann (Billy Bitzer), Jean Pearson (giovane/young Lillian), Bruce Gordon (Burton), Robert E. Simon (Merril), Ben Lackland (Pickett), Brandon Peters (Billings), Gordon Peters (Crawford), Richard Abbott (West), Ken Rockefeller (regista/director), Philip Rhodes (Charles), Frank Sutton (Bill), George McCoy (macchinista/stagehand), Eden Bitzer (segretaria/secretary); prologo+epilogo/prologue+epilogue: Fred Coe, Lillian Gish; DVD del 16mm kinescope / DVD copy of 16mm kinescope, 60’ (sonoro/sound).
Versione originale in inglese / English dialogue and narration.

In 1939, Lillian Gish began a long and unsuccessful effort to sell a film script she had prepared on the life of D.W. Griffith. According to Charles Affron, the impressionistic account of Griffith’s accomplishments (called, at different times, The Birth of the Films or Silver Glory), was rejected by several Hollywood studios because it lacked conventional “story value”. What it did contain was an attack on the studio system, which Gish accused of abandoning the artistic vision pioneered by Griffith in favor of economic and commercial considerations. The rise and fall of Griffith’s career was the chief object lesson in this mythology, which bemoaned the loss of a golden age.
A decade later, a new golden age had arisen in the East. Between 1948 and 1954, the most creative work in American television was being transmitted live from the New York studios of CBS and NBC. Not film, not theater, and not radio, these broadcasts were energized by the efforts of a group of young innovators who flourished under the chaotic conditions associated with the birth of a new medium. Lillian Gish, who appeared on a number of these programs, felt that the working conditions – especially the hot lights, “unflattering” photography, cramped studio spaces, and incredible pressures of time and budget – recalled those of the nickelodeon era 40 years earlier.
At NBC, the chief creative force behind these broadcasts was the producer Fred Coe, who Gish, echoing her high regard for Griffith, called “the father of the medium”. Coe may not have seen himself as the successor to D.W. Griffith, but many of those around him certainly did. Like Griffith, Coe was a tall Southerner (born in Alligator, Mississippi, in 1914), whose interest in drama inevitably led him to New York City. But instead of finding success on Broadway, both Griffith and Coe would make their reputation in a new dramatic form which, by fortunate coincidence, was ready to blossom at just the moment they arrived in town.
Live television was regarded as a producer’s medium, and while Coe continued to direct occasionally, he exercised creative control through script development and casting. Coe understood the unique power of the close-up in television, and believed that the new medium was especially suited to intimate character analyses. This required stories specially crafted to take advantage of television’s strengths (and avoid its weaknesses). Coe’s Philco Television Playhouse, which he produced weekly beginning in 1948, was the first live dramatic series to emphasize original stories over adaptations of existing material. Accordingly, the Coe style depended more on the contributions of staff writers like Horton Foote, Paddy Chayefsky, Gore Vidal, and Robert Alan Aurthur, than on the work of his directors, who included Delbert Mann (a colleague from the Nashville theater) and Arthur Penn. The high point of the Coe style was probably Marty (broadcast 24 May 1953), directed by Mann and written by Chayefsky. It is worth noting that this was the opposite of the approach taken at CBS by Coe’s rival, Worthington Miner, who gave greater authority to his directors (Franklin J. Schaffner, George Roy Hill) and preferred the broad social themes illustrated in such productions as 12 Angry Men.
Birth of the Movies, Aurthur’s first teleplay, solves the script’s “impressionistic” problems by turning the show into a combination docu-drama and illustrated lecture. Gish and Coe appear on screen at the beginning to introduce the episodes, which Gish narrates. At first, the character of “Lillian Gish” in this dramatization is played by Jean Pearson. But in the last act, which rehashes her failure to sell Silver Glory in Hollywood, Gish enters the diegesis directly to play the final scenes with “Mr. Griffith” herself. These scenes are not only the most interesting dramatically (they suggest late Orson Welles more than D.W. Griffith) but also provide, however briefly, the insight into character more typical of Coe’s work. Silver Glory (and the first two-thirds of Birth of the Movies) really does lack “dramatic value”. Griffith invents this and that, Miss Lillian’s favorite stories are illustrated (“We’ve had to take many liberties with facts and time,” she warns us), and a surprising amount of footage from Intolerance and The Birth of a Nation is spliced in. But this is an original teleplay, not Silver Glory. What interested Coe was not a catalogue of Griffith’s achievements, but what happened afterwards: to the industry, to Griffith, and to the relationship of Griffith and Lillian Gish.
Viewers, especially those connected to the film and television industries, were taken aback by what Variety called “an unfair slap at the film industry”. The industry wasn’t all that bad, its reviewer suggested, and D.W. Griffith wasn’t the only pioneer worthy of notice. Perhaps this reaction was itself part of another myth, that of the cats-and-dogs antipathy said to define the relationship between film and television in those years (in fact, Coe had fired an earlier salvo 2 years before, when he dramatized Budd Schulberg’s Hollywood exposé, What Makes Sammy Run?).
He could not have predicted it, but within a few years Fred Coe’s television career would be sidelined by the same patterns of commercial development that had marginalized D.W. Griffith. Although Philco Television Playhouse was one of the highest-rated programs in America in 1951, changes in the industry (including a shift of production to California, a place both Coe and Gish despised) doomed the romantic, psychologically nuanced character studies that Coe preferred. He returned to the theater, where his productions included All the Way Home, The Miracle Worker, and A Thousand Clowns – some of which he had originally developed as teleplays, and would later repackage as independent feature films.
Coe died in 1979. Lillian Gish, who had been unable to attend Griffith’s funeral, delivered one of the eulogies at Fred Coe’s service. After she spoke, she walked down the aisle of the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church and gently put her hand on the casket. “Oh dear Fred,” she said. “We will never forget you.” Gish had made sure that no one would easily forget D.W. Griffith, not just with Birth of the Movies, but through decades of lectures, interviews, and a best-selling memoir. Fred Coe, by comparison an almost invisible creative figure (his biographer Jon Krampner called him “the man in the shadows”), is still waiting for a myth-maker of his own. – Richard Koszarski