D. W. Griffith | Judith of Bethulia / 1914

the saving warrior

by Douglas Messerli

 

D. W. Griffith and Frank E. Woods (screenplay, based on the drama by Thomas Bailey Aldrich), D. W. Griffith (director) Judith of Bethulia / 1914

 

The general complexity of D. W. Griffith’s images cannot quite hide the fact that the scenario for his film Judith of Bethulia (1914) is rather straight-forward, despite our recognition that the historical drama is a grotesquerie rare in early US cinema, based as it is on the apocryphal tale from The Book of Judith adapted from the 1896 play, “Judith and the Holofernes” by Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

     The heavy walls of the city of Bethulia, we are told, stand in the path and protect, as well, Jerusalem. There is not historical evidence of such a city where everyday life as portrayed in the early scenes is beautiful in its very ordinariness.

     Naomi (Mae Marsh) goes to the well, outside the town gates, with other women to fetch a large jug of the precious liquid and is there met by her young lover Nathan (Robert Harron). At the open market inside the gates the rabbi meets with others, various beggars plead for alms (among them a young Dorothy Gish), and a young mother (Lillian Gish) shows off her new baby. Within her home the holy widow, recognized as a spiritual icon throughout the city, Judith (Blanche Sweet) performs her daily devotions with her faithful servant (Kate Bruce) before strolling through the market, blessing the baby and providing alms to the beggars.

    Meanwhile, so the visual narrative reveals, the Assyrians are on the rise as Nebuchodonosor (Nebuchadnezzar who in reality was the King of the Babylonians, not the Assyrians) sends out his Prince Holofernes (Henry B. Walthall) to destroy the cities of the West. They arrive en masse at the very moment that Naomi has returned to the well to fill a second jug of water and Nathan has returned his to reaping of the hay. The workers quickly rush back toward the city gates, Nathan attempting to find and save Naomi who has hidden against the wall of the well. She is taken prisoner, while Nathan is forced with the others in find safety within the city walls.

       Holofernes’ forces lay siege to the city, as Holofernes himself arrives on the battleground pitching a huge tent, wherein he is entertained by his female dancers, headed by a woman (Gertrude Bambrick) who sensuously performs the Dance of the Fishes, which ends each time with her sprawled out before Holofernes’ throne/bed before his attendant sends them off.

       When leaders, one by one, return to report that they cannot make any progress in entering the walled-city, Holofernes grows angry and punishes several of his men as traitors while also torturing some of the captives. Naomi is tied up to a post where she remains throughout most of the film.

 

     Griffith quite stunningly films some of the Assyrian forces’ attempts to climb atop and breach the walls of Bethulia, while also cinematically capturing the impressive looking long haired and bearded Holofernes and his head attendant, a eunuch (J. Jiquel Lanoe) who performs in total “camp” style long before there was any term for it.

       After several other of his soldiers report their inability to breach the city walls, Holofernes determines to wait out the locked-up citizens until starvation and famine take their course. The last of the water is carefully doled out to citizens, as they begin to starve and in total dehydration cry out to the rabbi and city leaders to find a way out of the stalemate. The child the woman has shown off in the earlier scene is now apparently dead. A small group of townsmen, including Nathan, attempt to make a run to the well, but are attacked by the watchful Assyrians and forced to quickly retreat back to safety, some of their group dying in the process.

       Praying and watching her fellow sufferers, Judith also talks with the city leaders, but they have no answers. She determines to take the matter into her own hands, realizing that in doing so she shall have a role in history. Dressing as a startlingly beautiful harem woman, she along with her maid dare to leave the city and seek out Holofernes.

       Because of her beauty, she is immediately led to the Assyrian Prince and he is quickly stunned by her appearance as she lies to him, hinting that she has a way to lead him to Judean mastery. He orders his Eunuch to create a tent for her as well, as she admits to herself that the villain is “noble,” by which she means, presumably, not only is he kinder and more charitable than she had expected, but is attractive to her. Perhaps for the first time in her life since her husband’s death, she is perceived as a good-looking woman, and she clearly is excited by the realization.

      LGBTQ historian Susan Stryker also reminds us that Judith is now herself attired as a kind of transsexual. Whereas before her costume was closer to the sackcloth and ashes, the dress which she dons before her journey, is represented as being in “drag” of a sorts, dressed as a true beauty of the harem, a woman in disguise as surely as Mae West was throughout her life.* She enters, moreover, a world of castration—headed by the transsexual figure portrayed by the head Eunuch, who makes it quite apparent that he both disdains and approves of her “costume” and now transgendered beauty—while she performs a male warrior role in her intention to behead the enemy, both the acts of castration, the Eunuch's and her beheading signify here incidents of de-gendering or the fulfillment of transgender desires.

       Her understandable indecision in carrying through her intentions, accordingly, must be understood in this context, in her realization that she has so highly succeeded in performing the drag role that she has found a loyal suitor, the pulls between her true masculinized self and her performance as a more traditional woman now being played out literally in the battlefield. That despite the temptations, she succeeds in her mission, beheading the intruder and saving her people, is a testament to her commitment to her “real” self as a transgendered being and her religion over the societal lure of heterosexual normalization.

       If the director himself was not entirely aware the pyscho-sexual situation he has playing out in his film, it is quite clear that actor Lanoe perceived precisely what was going on; playing her facilitator, delighting in hooking up the two, even while he recognizes her to be in drag. And Griffith must certainly have known in hiring him that French actor Joseph Jiquel Lanoe, who performed on stage and in over 100 Biograph films, was a gay man. 

       Interestingly, once the central figure of militant heterosexual virility is beheaded, Judith carrying off the head with her, the Assyrian soldiers immediately spin about like so many crazed and confused gay queens, deserting in their rush across the desert to their homeland. In the actual story of Judith, she laid out her own plans, after the beheading, for the destruction of the Assyrian army. In the film, her act of beheading simply creates an immediate vacuum which simultaneously sucks all the enemy forces out of the Israeli world.

       Judith returns to her dourer duds, the city proclaiming her as its hero.

       Judith of Bethulia, accordingly, proves to be one of the most fascinating of serious LGBTQ films, and only one of two US-made films—along with Paul Wegener and Stellan Rye’s Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague) (1913), Sidney Drew’s A Florida Enchantment (1914), Urban Gad’s Zapatas Bande (Zapata’s Gang) (1914), Mario Roncoroni’s Filibus (Filibus: The Mysterious Air Pirate) (1915), Mauritz Stiller’s Vingarne (The Wings) (1916), Ernst Lubitsch’s Ich möchte kein Mann sein (I  Don’t Want to Be a Man) (1918), Richard Oswald’s Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) (1919), and Paul Legband and Julius Rhode’s Aus eines Mannes Mädchenjahren  (A Man’s Girlfriend) (1919)—of second decade of the 20th century.

 

*In his fascinating discussion of Mae West’s portrayal of herself as a model of a drag queen, Gay theorist Parker Tyler summarizes West’s persona: “Perhaps one ought simply to say that Miss West’s style as a woman fully qualified her—as it always did—to be a Mother Superior of Faggots.”

 

**Even though Judith and Salome are stark opposites, a comparison between the two in relation to their beheading of men to whom they are most attracted should be explored more thoroughly. As Judith’s beheading signifies the salvation of the Israeli world, Salome’s act represents the fall of Herod’s society and the early beginnings of the Christian world.

 

Los Angeles, June 17, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).