After the extraordinary success of The Birth of a Nation in 1915, David Wark Griffith was beset by visions of grandeur that proved to be delusions of grandeur as well. Originally, the "father of the movies" was to follow his Civil War saga with a smallish film called The Mother and the Law, an emotionally gripping modern tolerance in his time. But the small film of The Mother and the Law expanded into the epic Intolerance, which, at a staggering cost of $2 million, was the most expensive film made until that time.
The story of The Mother and the Law is quite a simple one: The Dear one (Mae Marsh) and the Boy (Bobby Harron) are separated by a cruel frame-up; The Dear One's baby is taken from her by meddlesome temperance women while The Boy is in jail. When he gets out, he is wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to hang.
Griffith saw the opportunity to add three other narratives - the fall of Babylon under Belshazzar, the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre of the Huguenots in sixteenth-century France, and the story of Christ – to highlight intolerance and man's inhumanity to man throughout the ages. All four stories were linked by the image of a woman (Lillian Gish) rocking her baby - "out of the cradle, endlessly rocking" - with three women (the Fates?) watching on.
The costs of Intolerance, subtitled Love's Struggle Through the Ages, grew as Griffith's tale became more and more complex. The resulting film, much of it hand-tinted, was more than three and a half hours long (three was a prologue and two acts). When the film failed, almost immediately, Griffith made drastic cuts, and then distributors sued. Griffith tried to splice it back together - unsuccessfully. He had created something so massive - so unwieldy - that it confused even him. A dismal failure at the box office, Intolerance wrecked Griffith's career in California. Not long afterwards, he returned to the East Coast where he built his own studio on Mamaroneck, Long Island.
Restored Version
Modern audiences had only seen the abridged version, which runs a little under two hours, but the Museum of Modern Art unveiled its restored, longer version at the New York Film Festival last October. The restoration includes the original score by Joseph Carl Briel, played by the Brooklyn Philharmonic, employing a chorus of twelve voices, and conducted by Gillian B. Anderson, a music specialist at the Library of Congress. (The print travels to both California and Europe next year.) Unfortunately, Briel's score is merely a serviceable pastiche, or Verdi, Wagner, and popular melodies and program music of the time. One is glad to have heard the score, but is not exactly thrilled by it.
The physical restoration poses a problem as well. The single frames, or still, standing in for the actual footage that has been lost (about eleven minutes tend to destroy Griffith's film-making rhythms, particularly during the crosscutting of the four stories near the very end. It is a necessary evil of sorts - disruptive but instructive at the same time.
Whatever one's cavils, watching Intolerance again is one of those experiences that cannot be matched on the modern screen. It is not surprising that Griffith, who died a penniless alcoholic, made Intolerance, for the overreaching gesture of the film
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