Flashback, September 1916: Griffith’s ‘Intolerance’ Tests Audiences

Fresh from the stunning commercial and critical triumph of his controversial film, The Birth of a Nation, director D.W. Griffith released an even more ambitious epic, Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages. Yet the new movie, though less ideologically problematic than its predecessor and hailed by film professionals for adding to the tools of cinema, was not as successful on the bottom line.

It is important to state here that, contrary to decades of conventional wisdom, Intolerance was not a flop. True, it cost $2 million in 1916 currency—not only 20 times the amount spent on Birth of a Nation, but reputedly the most expensive film to that time.

But in its initial run, it actually made a modest profit, a fact demonstrated in Richard Schickel’s definitive biography of Griffith. It wasn’t until the film was exhibited on the road, away from larger cities with state-of-the-art theaters, that the costs became prohibitive. It didn’t help that Griffith insisted that these theaters in the hinterlands be modeled with a special decoration and that a live orchestra play the score of the movie.

One has to ask why Griffith embarked on such a massive undertaking. The immediate impetus was an Italian film called Cabiria, so visually stunning that Griffith couldn’t get it out of his mind. The second factor was Birth of a Nation. As I discussed in a prior post, several elements of that blockbuster--its benign view of the Ku Klux Klan, its horror of miscegenation, and its depiction of an attempted rape of a white woman by a black man—were racially incendiary. Griffith may not have wanted to apologize or atone for the film, but he did want to show he was a social observer of good intentions.

The success of Birth of a Nation gave him a freer hand than he had previously. While he was with Biograph studios, he was continually second-guessed. In the wake of his blockbuster, he no longer had this oversight at Triangle Film Corp. When he ran into financing problems on Intolerance, he dipped into his own reserves from Birth of a Nation—and when even that wasn’t enough, he convinced actresses Mae Marsh and Lillian Gish to invest in the film.

He would need every dollar that they and he could scratch together. In contemplating the success of Birth of a Nation, he looked at the property he had in hand—a melodrama called The Mother and the Law—and realized how modest it seemed by comparison. For someone like Griffith, who felt that film did not yet approach the theater as an art—but that it should—The Mother and the Law must have seemed positively anti-climactic following Birth of a Nation.

So, instead of simply telling one story of injustice and persecution, he would tell four: not just about an Irish-Catholic youth framed for murder amid labor strife in California, but about a French Huguenot couple at the time of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre; the clash of Jesus with the Pharisees, followed by his betrayal and crucifixion; and the fall of ancient Babylon to King Cyrus the Persian.

These narratives are centuries, even millennia, apart, with no characters in common—yet Griffith hoped that audiences would see their similarities, through visual leitmotifs (e.g., the image of Gish with a baby, with an “intertitle” from Walt Whitman, “Out of the cradle, endlessly rocking”).

The most prominent of the quartet of stories, the Babylon sequence, posed the greatest challenges and required the most extraordinary ingenuity. In much the same way that Alfred Hitchcock began North by Northwest with a single image in mind (a man hanging from Abraham Lincoln’s nose from Mount Rushmore), Griffith was seized, after returning from a tour of San Quentin, by an astonishing sight: the “Tower of Jewels” overlooking the Pan-Pacific Exposition ground in San Francisco. Its Oriental-style grandeur was just the look he was striving for with his Babylon sequence, so he hired three craftsmen who worked on the tower.

Just how improvisational Griffith’s style and genius were can be seen by what followed next:

*Lacking a formal art director on the film set, Griffith had another film professional figure out how to build the Babylonian tower from pictures he provided: either boss carpenter Frank Wortman or, as one surviving crew member remembered it, the English theatrical designer Walter L. Hall.

*Griffith didn’t merely want a static tower for the Babylon story, but one that could be shot through camera movements. A balloon was tried, but proved unsuccessful. The eventual solution: an elevator built inside the tower, coupled with trucks with cast-iron wheels that allowed the tower to move forward. The stunning set offered a blueprint of how filmmakers could surmount daunting technical challenges, particularly for epics set in ancient times.

*In an article on the film in the September 12, 2016 issue of National Review, film critic Armond White pointed to “innovative cinematic techniques” that Griffith devised with his photographers Billy Bitzer and Karl Brown: “tinting scenes in varied colors for moods…and giving images extra height and panoramic breadth to accentuate dramatic moments.”

*No script existed to inform the film’s artists, craftsmen, or actors what the whole thing was about. (It didn’t help that the same title was used for all four sequences: The Mother and the Law. It was like the boxer George Foreman giving all his kids the first name George.) So Griffith simply kept shooting. His first rough cut was eight hours long, more than double what exhibitors warned that audiences could endure. He had to find a way to trim it. Even scenarist Anita Loos (who later wrote the novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) thought the whole thing “awful” and “completely bewildering,” she told film historian Kevin Brownlow five decades later. The four stories fused as one in the editing room, when Griffith employed cross-cutting not just between contemporaneous actions, as in Birth of a Nation, but in the new film’s astonishing conclusion, when all four stories rushed to their collective climax.

 

After Intolerance, Griffith continued to make films for another 15 years, but never with as much ambition or creative freedom. Studio accountants hounded him every time a project seemed about to run behind schedule or exceed costs.

Such a colossal production required a number of assistant directors, and Griffith employed a bench that would go on to make some of the most celebrated movies of the late silent and early talkie era, including W.S. Van Dyke (the “Thin Man” franchise), Joseph Henabery (Cobra), and Sidney Franklin (The Barretts of Wimpole Street, The Good Earth).

Griffith was a huge contradiction in terms. It was not simply because, as Orson Welles noted in this YouTube clip introducing Intolerance on public television in the 1970s, Griffith created just about every cinema technique used for the following decades, in service to a vision of life that was old-fashioned even in 1916. 

No, it was because the director appealed both to the most reactionary elements of American society (Birth of a Nation became a virtual recruiting tool for the Ku Klux Klan) and to its most progressive (Intolerance championed unionism and pacifism while capital punishment at a time when these were not generally acceptable positions).

This is not to say that Intolerance always displayed enlightened attitudes. The most technologically daring filmmaker of his age could never surmount a paternalistic, Victorian attitude toward women, for instance. (One of the film’s “intertitles" can’t help but make modern audiences guffaw: “When women cease to attract men, they often turn to reform as a second option.")

Intolerance not only influenced straight dramas, but also comedies: It was parodied in Buster Keaton’s first feature-length film, Three Ages (1923), which in turn inspired Mel Brooks’ bawdy History of the World, Part 1.

Griffith wanted Intolerance to be his monument. Instead, it became his movie memorial.

This Day in Film History (Griffith’s “Birth of a Nation” Released Amid Controversy)

February 8, 1915—Posterity knows D. W. Griffith’s epic of the Civil War and Reconstruction as The Birth of a Nation, but its original title when it opened at Los Angeles’ Clune’s Auditorium gives a far better idea of its incendiary nature: The Clansman.

When I saw the film for the first time in a New York City revival house in the 1980s, many members of the audience giggled helplessly at moments undoubtedly intended to be serious by director-producer Griffith. You couldn’t blame them—the stereotypes about carefree slaves, freedmen turning state legislatures into chaotic dens of corruption, and dastardly carpetbaggers were ridiculously out of place in a nation utterly transformed by the 1960s civil rights revolution.

But this silent masterpiece was more than a cinematic catalogue of the alleged abuses of Reconstruction. In its benign view of the Ku Klux Klan, its horror of miscegenation, and its depiction of an attempted rape of a white woman by a black man, it is one of the most blatantly racist films in all of cinema.

Its enormous success (from 1915 to 1946, approximately two hundred million people viewed the film in the United States and overseas) helped spark the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, as well as riots by outraged African-Americans at its Chicago and Atlanta premieres.

Yet, though the film served as a dismayingly effective promotional vehicle for the KKK, it also raised the profile of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), then only six years old. NAACP leaders initially urged Griffith to edit objectionable scenes. When his response proved inadequate, they mounted protests against the film. (The L.A. premiere only came off at all because Griffith got a sympathetic judge to overturn a ban urged by the NAACP.)

As I briefly mentioned last month in my post on Gone With the Wind, a film that covered much the same ground as Griffith’s, producer David O. Selznick went to great lengths to avoid the controversy that plagued Birth of a Nation As much as anything, the later Oscar-winning blockbuster represented the attempt by novelist Margaret Mitchell, despite her racial prejudices, to see African-Americans as human beings—an ability utterly beyond the skill set of Thomas Dixon, author of the original source material on which the film was based, or, to a lesser extent, Griffith.

Griffith’s sensibility might have been immersed in hammy Victorian melodrama, but by delivering it in a package containing the most revolutionary elements of a nascent visual art form, he made audiences think they were seeing something fundamentally new: their history rendered in unprecedented verisimilitude. Such is the magic—and illusion—of cinema.

Griffith’s three-hour movie—the longest feature film up to that time—sought to recreate with painstaking accuracy such events as Lincoln’s call for volunteers, Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, and Lincoln’s assassination in scenes labeled “Historical Facsimiles.” To film the battle of Petersburg with greatest accuracy, he even called on surviving Civil War veterans to lay out his set and to plan troop movements.

Such realism was so unexpected that President Woodrow Wilson reportedly called the film “history written by lightning.”

Lessening the impact of these scenes is the fact that the major historical figures in them seldom interact with the Stonemans and Camerons, the two principal fictional families in the film, who are really only representative figures of the North and South, not fully rounded characters with whom all audiences can identify.

Birth of a Nation is the first prominent example of Hollywood's tendency to endow the antebellum South with the same tragic grandeur of another fallen civilization: Homer’s Troy. Undoubtedly, much of this retrospective support arises from Americans’ affection for the underdog—in this case, a people who lost almost everything in the war. Yet it is hard to escape the impression that some of this fascination also results from what historians have called “the Southern myth” or “the myth of the Lost Cause.”

The Lost Cause took wing in the popular romances of novelists Thomas Nelson Page and Thomas Dixon, a former North Carolina Baptist minister. Their work, in the words of David Asbury Pryor, a biographer of Margaret Mitchell, “chronicled the lives of aristocrats associated with vast estates, slavery, and the knightly order of noblesse oblige.”

This vision of wisteria-and-magnolia gentility comforted generations of Southerners with the thought that their civilization was worth all the blood and all the dashed hopes. In picturing Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis as unblemished heroes, it became a kind of civic religion.

Yet, just as most religions have demonologies, so the “Lost Cause” myth stigmatized Yankees who had crushed the South beneath the heel of its industrial might, blacks who were freed at the end of the conflict, and Southern soldiers such as General James Longstreet who were accused of failing the cause at critical moments.

For his tribute to the Lost Cause, Griffith turned inevitably to two novels by Dixon: The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden, 1865-1900 (1902), and The Clansman, An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). As a result, the movie, as noted by James Baldwin in his book-length film essay, The Devil Finds Work, “is really an elaborate justification for mass murder.”

Baldwin moves smoothly from the searing criticism of the above remark to the elegant satire of the following consideration of the film’s miscegenation theme:

“Neither of the two mulattoes had any sexual interest in the other; given what we see of their charms, this is quite understandable. Both are driven a hideous by a hideous lust for whites, she for the master, he for the maid; they are, at least, thank heaven, heterosexual, due, probably, to their lack of imagination.”

Griffith’s propagandistic historical fantasia nearly quadrupled its original $40,000 budget, but it more than made up for it with its box office: nearly $18 million made by the start of the talkies. Shrewdly, The Birth of a Nation was not launched so much as a movie as an event. For tickets of $2 apiece—jaw-dropping at the time—viewers could see a film that incorporated all of the following, and far more:

* subtitles that counterpoint imagery;:
* employment of fade-outs and cameo-profiles
* extensive cross-cutting
* use of parallel action and editing in a sequence.

The film's $18 million take by the start of the talkies made it the most profitable film for nearly two decades. But the price in Americans' historical understanding was outrageous.