December 1: Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages (1916 -- D.W. Griffith)

★★★★★

The word to describe Intolerance is “scale.”  Nothing here is modest or subtle.  Rather than one story, this one has four, and they’re not only spread over thousands of years but they’re weighty subjects like the fall of Babylon to the Persians, the massacre of the Huguenots by Catherine de Medici’s Catholics, and the life of Jesus Christ.  It’s hard not to admire Griffith’s ability to even imagine such a project, not to mention actually setting out to accomplish it.

Griffith’s ambition here doesn't stop at his choice of subject matter; what he puts on screen is every bit as impressive to look at.  His contemporary tale of the poor who are oppressed by capitalism and by self-righteous Reformers still manages to open with an opulent ball and elaborate costumes.  Likewise, the depiction of Charles IX’s France has some lavish royal sets and decoration as well as scenes filled with running crowds and soldiers surging from one side of the screen to the other.  The crowds appear, too, as Jesus struggles to Golgotha with the cross.  But it’s in the Babylonian story that Griffith goes all out for spectacle in Intolerance.  Thousands of extras dance on an elevated courtyard surrounded by undulating pillars that rise several stories from carved bases and end in large elephants.  In the interiors, Babylonians wear elaborate costumes, jewelry and make-up, and the battle scenes are replete with siege towers, basins of burning oil, and hundreds of soldiers scaling walls and being repulsed.  At one point, the camera itself takes wing, perhaps mounted in on early dolly, as it photographs a Babylonian performance.  The whole movie is visual extravaganza.

Griffith, too, ups the editing ante in Intolerance.  The previous year’s Birth of a Nation had clearly shown the power of cross-cutting to create suspense, and Griffith was quick to apply that lesson in Intolerance.  In the contemporary story, he cross-cuts scenes of the execution with scenes of the rush to get exculpatory evidence to the prison, for good measure tossing in a racing scene and a few impediments to the car carrying the evidence.  There is similar use of this editing technique in the Babylonian and the French stories as characters rush to warn others of the imminent threat bearing down on their respective beloveds.  But Griffith amplifies this technique of building suspense by cross-cutting beyond what he accomplished in Birth of a Nation because he cuts between the stories as he cross-cuts within each story.  Thus, the story of the Mountain Girl rushing to warn Belshazzar is cross-cut with the story of Prosper Latour rushing to warn Brown Eyes.  And this intercutting of stories builds suspense in a way impossible in the one story of Birth of a Nation because both the Mountain Girl and Prosper fail to save the object of their affection, suggesting that The Dear One might, too, fail to save The Boy.  With four storylines to play with, Griffith ramps up the suspense in Intolerance exponentially over that in Birth of a Nation.

All of which is not to say there are no problems with this early spectacle.  One of the biggest drawbacks is the muddled point of all the excess and suspense.  Only three of the stories in fact deal with intolerance – the Modern, the French, and Jesus’ – while intolerance doesn't seem to be an issue in the Babylonian.  And if we consider the subtitle, “Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages,” we only cover the Modern, the French and the Babylonian because we don’t find love as an element of the Jesus story.  And the film's odd ending of the peaceful soldiers, the angels and the divine light hardly seems appropriate to the stories we've seen either, especially given their tenuous thematic links.   Likewise, the woman rocking the cradle, the image idée fixe of the film, doesn't have a clear significance.  With the large time span of the stories, there’s no real reason to affirm the universality of Intolerance’s themes, as some maintain the image does.

Intolerance also suffers from expressing some of Griffith’s own intolerance.  The meddling do-gooders in the modern story come in for special scorn with their hypocrisy and their coldness.  With their holier-than-thou attitude, they take away The Dear One’s baby to turn over to irresponsible handlers; in fact, it’s the do-gooders’ need for more money that motivates the factory owner to squeeze his workers until they all strike and end up unemployed in the city.  Elements of the other four storylines imply criticism of these same women.  Jesus criticizes the public piety of the Pharisees, forgives a prostitute, and even makes wine; all these actions fly in the face of the values and practices of the modern do-gooders.  In the French story, religion is primarily a weapon, another indictment of religious people, and the sympathetic couple of the Babylon story are hedonistic lovers who aren't married.  If there is any unity among the four stories, it’s a shared critique of do-gooders and their manifestations in various ages.

Intolerance is a sprawling film of great excess, and it’s hard not to get caught up in its technical achievement and thematic grasp.  The film is far from perfect, but it is one of cinema’s great pleasures.