D. W. Griffith | Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages / 1916

how to destroy love

by Douglas Messerli

 

D. W. Griffith, Hettie Gray Baker, Tod Browning, Anita Loos, Mary H. O'Connor. Frank E. Woods (screenplay), D. W. Griffith (director) Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages / 1916

 

D. W. Griffith’s 1916 masterwork Intolerance is one of the most legendary and well-known of US silent classics. Chosen for inclusion in The National Film Registry, this film is surely required viewing for anyone interested in US cinema. But my guess is that most of filmgoers born after 1960 have never seen the film. Even I had only seen it twice before I viewed it in order to write this essay, and those viewings were stretched out over a period of 20-25 years, making the work seem entirely new each of the three times I’ve watched it.

 

     So perhaps a quick summary of its difficult to untangle narrative, which even a seemingly indomitable essayist as Donald Eagan characterizes in his introductory sentence as being one of the strangest of film epics ever made, might be useful.

      Reacting in part to the criticism surrounding his otherwise astoundingly successful film the year before, The Birth of a Nation, for which he was attacked for being racist in its support of the Rebel cause in the Civil War and caused him to be perceived even as un-American, Griffith decided to turn his attention to a grand work expressing his outrage against intolerance throughout the ages. Apparently, he could not recognize that his own vision about the situation of US blacks might be recognized as simply another form of intolerance. Nonetheless, one has to grant that it is one of the most remarkable and simply amazing apologias against religious, political, social, and personal intolerance ever made.

     What the director imagined was something that had never been done before and has not so successfully been achieved again—except perhaps in the very different form of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev (1966). Working with four different scripts, four sets of casts, technicians, sets, costumes, and shooting locations, and filming in the period of less than a year, Griffith made basically 4 movies which he then cut and interspliced with each other, working sometimes thematically, but mostly in terms of the film’s rhythms, to create a diorama of injustice and intolerance reoccurring throughout the history of mankind, from the ancient Babylonia of 539 B.C., to the Biblical Judea c. AD 27, the French Renaissance of 1572, and then-contemporary US, c. 1914, the dozens of intercuts linked only by Lillian Gish rocking a child endlessly in an action dedicated to Walt Whitman’s famous lines.

 

     The first of these—actually filmed last because of the construction needed for its lavish, mammoth sets—represents the battles between the Babylonian Prince Belshazzar and Cyrus the Great of Persia. In the episodes upon which Griffith focuses, Belshazzar (Alfred Paaget) successfully resists the first of Cyrus’ (George Siegmann) attacks on the Babylonian city surrounded by a wall so high and thick that it could support a full chariot racing across its battlements and whose massive iron doors took two sets of 4-5 men to pull the mechanical devices it took to open them.

     After defeating the Persians, the legendary Feast of Belshazzar is celebrated in an orgiastic-like celebration for several days—with no handwriting on the wall nor visit of Daniel in this instance—which permits Cyrus, now in league with the rival priest of the Babylonian gods, those aligned with Bel-Marduk, to regroup and attack again, defeating Belshazzar and his people, most of whom worship the sun-God Ishtar. Presumably the intolerance in this section consists in the High Priest of Bel-Marduk’s (Tully Marshall) traitorous defection from the more open-minded practices of Belshazzar and most of his citizens. In this case, the villain’s actions seem motivated primarily for his own attempts at power.

      The epic stories also contain minor figures, in this case The Mountain Girl (Constance Talmadge), a wild child who might be described as the ancient equivalent to Calamity Jane, who becomes loyal to the Prince when he grants her, almost miraculously, the permission to marry who she wishes to or the possibility to not marry at all; and the man who loves her, The Rhapsode (Elmer Clifton), a warrior-singer who is aligned with Bel-Marduk, with whom The Mountain Girl flirts only so that she might obtain further information about his liege’s plans of rebellion.

      In at least two of these works, queer figures are portrayed. In this first instance the queer figure is The Mountain Girl who is obviously a tomboy who fights as a soldier, not unlike Joan of Arc, against Cyrus’ attacks, and dies in her attempt to inform Belshazzar that Bel-Marduk and Cyrus and joined forces to attack once again, the Prince at first refusing to believe her before he faces the truth as his Kingdom is defeated and he and his lover, The Princess Beloved (Seena Owen), are by oath forced to take up swords to their own bodies.

      In the orgiastic scenes with their hundreds of vestal virgin dancers (eight of whom were Ruth St. Dennis and her dancers) provides clear evidence in this 1916 film (unlike the simple hints of Louis Feuillade’s A Roman Orgy of 1911) of lesbian love.

       Finally, one has to mention yet again the amazing set constructed for the Babylonian scenes, created without special effects, that were never again so vast and cinematically convincing. Not even DeMille’s Ben Hur could match it. The set was so large that Griffith, on the advice of Allan Dawn, brought in a railroad flat car loaded with an elevator to film the last celebratory scenes. Ancient warfare, moreover, has never since been quite so convincing. For sheer splendor this part of the film towers over all the others.

      The second of these interlinked stories through time is the shortest, a sort of winnowing down of the Biblical tales of Christ’s actions and his last days before the crucifixion. Griffith obviously could presume his audience’s knowledge of Christ’s outspoken statements against intolerance and the symbology of his own crucifixion as representation of intolerance itself.

      Accordingly, we have no complex series of events involved with these moments of the film. Only the secondary figures aligned with the events of Christ’s life, the Pharisees’ self-congratulatory prayer in the streets wherein they demand everyone around them stop all activities; the Wedding at Cana wherein, when the hosts run of wine, Christ turns water into wine; and the woman taken in adultery about be stoned about whom Christ responds "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone” become the major figures. There are also brief glimpses of Christ carrying the cross and his final crucifixion. The “Nazarene” is performed Howard Gaye, Mary, Christ’s mother briefly appears performed by Lillian Langdon, and the Bride at Cana is acted by Bessie Love.

    If there is a queer figure here it is obviously Christ himself, whom the Pharisees and religious elders accuse of imbibing in alcohol—a major subtheme of this film—of consorting with adulterers, and of refusing to pray in the proper manner. Certainly, he is the true outsider of this segment in a series of featured outsiders such as The Mountain Girl, and in the next segment, Prosper Latour (Eugene Pallette), a Catholic who has fallen in love with a Huguenot beauty, Brown Eyes (Margery Wilson).

    It seems strange for Griffith to have chosen the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of Protestant Huguenots as one of his seminal events in the history of “intolerance,” not because it doesn’t fit—indeed because it is perhaps the clearest example of that word within the film. But it is a one of many such internal battles fought throughout Europe during the Protestant Reformation, and perhaps one the lesser remembered. Yet, given his previous alignment with the Southern cause in the Civil War it is perhaps comprehensible that the director would choose a local minority determined to live themselves in much more spartan conditions than the majority of the populace, intimating as it does also in his presentation of it the Egyptian’s murder of the Hebrew first born.

     In this instance, however, it was wholesale slaughter. King Charles IX of France (Frank Bennett) is portrayed as an effeminate man-child who’d rather play with toys and puppies than deal with political matters. Bennett’s portrayal of him is obviously of a queer man, who holds his puppies in his codpiece and kisses his friends with more passion that friendliness. He, however, is man of peace who despite his mother’s disdain of the Huguenot’s of being “unlike” them, he has convinced the court to remain neutral.

      Things seem to run peacefully however, despite his involvement in politics, evidenced in the example of a Catholic man, Prosper Latour’s falling in love with a young Huguenot girl, Brown Eyes. He courts her, and the two plan marriage.

       But meanwhile, mercenary soldiers and other French nobles insist that the Huguenots have become dangerous, themselves inciting riots, convincing Catherine who pressures the recalcitrant King to finally take revenge of the religious minority. Unwillingly signing the declaration of the massacre, Charles insists that if they need be killed they must all be killed so that no one be left to accuse him of the horrible events.

      By night their houses are marked with chalk and by morning the massacre begins, with Prosper discovering the attacks only after they have gotten underway. Brown Eyes’ father (Spottiswoode Aitken) attempts to hold back the soldiers as long as he can, but Prosper, who has a free pass, is nonetheless held back by the vengeful mercenaries, and by the time he reaches his lover’s house, she and her family have been killed. He lifts her into his arms and attempts to carry her off, only to himself be slaughtered.

      In all the stories told thus far, the believers and national figures who were the subject of intolerance were destroyed, their martyrdom being their only link. In the final “modern” story, the focus is on those of everyday and ordinary life, who do not at all represent religious, political, and ever larger social concerns. Given Griffith’s own alignment with the agrarian values of the South, it is perhaps inevitable that his focus falls now upon the Northern industrial society and the mill workers who are most tormented from his strange perspective by not simply the industrialists such as his token representative, Mill owner Arthur Jenkins (Sam De Grasse), but the moral and righteous “uplifters,” basically presented as females without the ability to land a husband, who while pretending to fight for the better care of children and the moral uplift of industrial workers, actually take away their pleasures in dancing and drink, and often abscond even with their children, seeing the hard-working wives as unfit. One might argue that Griffith’s misogynistic representation of these figures bears some resemblance to the Southern view of abolitionists of the previous century.

 

     In the director’s example, the owner of the Mill only reduces the pay of his employees in order to fulfill the financial needs of such organizations, one of them now run by Jenkins’ sister, Mary J. Jenkins (Vera Lewis).

      Not only do those lower wages send the workers on strike, which Griffith depicts in remarkably realistic images, but forces them to move into cities, where their living conditions become even worse and where such transported individuals such as the Boy (Robert Harron, a former Mill employee) join gangs such as that run by the Musketeer of the Slums (Walter Long) and encourages former Mill women such as The Friendless One (Miriam Cooper) to become prostitutes. Other former Mill workers, such as The Dear One (Mae Marsh) and her father (Fred Turner) find squalid conditions in the city which lead to the father’s early death and the girl’s desperation.

  

     When the Boy meets The Dear One, the two fall in love, but when he promises to marry her and abandon the criminal life he has lived as a gang member, the Musketeer plants a gun on him and incriminates the Boy in a crime which sends him to prison. The Dear One, meanwhile, bears their baby, but a visit from the Uplifters while she has run downstairs to get some cough medicine, lead them to declare her unfit, eventually taking away her child.

       The Musketeer offers to find her child and return him, but only as a ruse to get her into his bed. The Boy, freed from prison, returns to his beloved Dear One to find her without their son and a changed woman.

       When the Boy is away, the Musketeer returns to attempt to rape the Dear One, but his own girl The Friendless One, perceiving what he is up to, takes up a gun and shoots her boyfriend from a window, throwing it the apartment floor in her escape. When the Boy returns to find the body on the floor, the police arrive to arrest him, and soon after he is charged as guilty of the murder, sentenced to death.

 

      A Kindly Officer (Tom Wilson), perceiving what has probably happened attempts to convince the Governor (Ralph Lewis) to commute the Boy’s hanging, without success. The Dear One also visits the Governor in an attempt to convince him of her husband’s innocence, but again without success. Finally, The Friendless One admits to the two her guilt, and together they rush via a road speedster to outrace the Governor’s train. They get the pardon, but barely reach the hangmen in time to stop it. At the very last moment, the papers arrive, and the Boy is freed, their child presumably returned to them.

      In short, only in this last instance does intolerance fail to destroy those effected. Interestingly, whereas in the other tales the queer figures futilely attempted to fight against the various intolerances, this time there is no queer figure to be found. Yet the innocents survive. I don’t know if Griffith and his large roster of writers intended that to be a statement, but it is there to be witnessed nonetheless. Griffith, even through his subtitle, infers that if you destroy love of any kind, you destroy life, you destroy the very life force of an entire people.

      The images that Griffith uses to tell this more complex “modern” story are often brilliant and reveal the direction in which his later films will lead him, although by the late 1920s his work was often described as having not kept abreast of the changes in the medium which he had so brilliantly helped to define.

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2022).