An epic tale. Four stories interlocking and sweeping in their power to show how intolerant people can be. Constance Talmadge, who plays in two of the stories, is best as the Mountain Girl in The Babylonian Story, who gains her freedom after a Judge forces to marry. She is saved by Prince Belshazzar (Alfred Paget) and tries to return the favor when she exposes a plot to destroy the city. The sets in this story were magnificent for the time. The battle scene was as good as any today. The race in the chariot to save Babylon was thrilling. In the modern tale, we see self-appointed guardians of the public morality (early CPS?) ruining lives based upon their twisted views. They steal Mae Marsh's baby after her husband (Robert Harron) is jailed on trumped up charges. Jealousy and deceit leave one person dead and a race between a car and a train to save another. The film could have been edited as two of the segments were not really necessary, and the ending left a lot to be desired. In all tales, we see competing religions; Bel vs Ishtar, Pharisees vs. Christ' Huguenots vs Catholics, and do-gooders vs the common people.

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Gish apparently thought that Griffith was under pressure while making "Intolerance" and had ruined a good movie; perhaps he did, and that is why one's first reaction -- after the initial "wow!" and "gosh, this is a long movie!" -- is a reflection on how good this movie might have been.



The promise is there of something very special, notably in Griffith's superb use of screen spectacle (Babylon, the upper and lower class parties, and the mill strike in particular) contrasted with haunting close-ups of raw human emotion (most notably perhaps in the scene where the Boy sees the Dear One grieving for her father, as well as the expressions on the Friendless One's face as she waits to kill the Musketeer and then afterwards as her guilt keeps bringing her back to the scene); and of delicacy and innuendo, as in the scene where the Dear One and the Boy fight about "letting him in" (having sex) with the door between them, contrasted with the raw sexuality and brutality seen in scenes of the Love Temple and a few decapitations during the Babylonian segments; and overall, the success Griffith has in combining these particular story lines of modern labor and reform issues, the story of Christ, the slaughter of French Huguenots way back when, and the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus the Persian, into one narrative.



It's just not tight enough, though. One wishes for a bit more editing to bring out the common threads in each story line. ***Spoiler alert*** The ending is also unsatisfactory, killing off two of the story lines, and in the third, bringing everything down to a rather boilerplate "can they get to the governor in time" chase sequence. The coda is also a little disconnected, both because of the rather minimal treatment of the New Testament story line earlier in the movie and its sudden prominence here, as well as by Griffith's use of new scenes of modern warfare, etc., being transformed into tolerance rather than the ones we have just spent almost 3 hours getting familiar with.



One gets the sense that Griffith was indeed pressured into a "let's wrap this up" end to the thing before everything had clarified in his overall vision. It could have been truly exceptional. Nonetheless, it sets a bar for film technique, spectacle, and propaganda that people still aim at today; which is not to complain. "Powerful" and "influential" are not bad ways to describe a film.



You just have to wonder, though, what might have been....



A note on the soundtrack -- this version definitely needs something, but when the movie was released, it apparently had a full orchestration. Wouldn't it be wonderful if that score has survived somewhere and now is just waiting to be rediscovered!

- September 8, 2008Lillian Gish was right, but still a good movie