Griffith’s four-strand spectacle is still an astonishing piece of construction: a Babylon built at full size, a modern story acted with real feeling by Mae Marsh, and cross-cutting that sets the pace a century on. Two of the four strands barely exist, and the sermon never stops.
D.W. Griffith made Intolerance in 1916, the year after The Birth of a Nation, and it runs 197 minutes. It tells four stories at once. A mill town in the present, where Arthur Jenkins (Sam De Grasse) cuts his workers’ wages to fund his sister’s charity. Judea in the time of Christ. Paris in August 1572, on the eve of the massacre of the Huguenots. Babylon, under siege by the Persians. Between them, Lillian Gish rocks a cradle. It is still worth an evening, and the modern story and the Babylonian one would justify it on their own. The other two are placards.
The modern story is the best thing in it, and Mae Marsh is the reason. As the Dear One she is a mill girl who practises walking like the fashionable women she sees in the street, then gives it up when her father (Frederick A. Turner) catches her at it. Marsh acts small in a film where everyone else acts large, and the difference shows. Robert Harron’s Boy is a decent lad who takes the only work the city offers him, and Vera Lewis’s Mary T. Jenkins leads a committee of reformers who go about improving the poor by taking their children. Griffith plainly loathes these women, and his contempt makes the scenes sharper than his pity does elsewhere.
Babylon is the part everyone remembers, and rightly. Griffith is credited as his own production designer, and he built the court at full scale, with elephants standing on the columns and steps wide enough for a parade. Billy Bitzer photographs it from far above and moves down and in towards the dancers, and we sat up in our seats, because a hundred years later it is still not obvious how he did it. The siege that follows has towers rolled against the walls and defenders pouring fire from the top, and it is real people on real walls, not a painting. Clare West’s costumes put the Persians in scale armour and the Babylonian court in feathers and gold thread, so at a glance you know which side of the wall you are on.
The Judean story is a handful of tableaux: the wedding at Cana, with Bessie Love as the bride, the woman taken in adultery, Erich von Ritzau’s Pharisee praying in the street so he can be seen doing it. It is punctuation, not a story. The French strand is thinner still. Margery Wilson’s Brown Eyes and Eugene Pallette’s Prosper Latour get a courtship and a massacre, and between them sit long scenes of court intrigue that we were honestly bored by, and then irritated by, because we could feel the film losing the time it needed elsewhere.
Then there are the titles. Frank E. Woods and Anita Loos are the credited writers, and the intertitles do not trust us for a moment. The word intolerance turns up every few minutes, sometimes with a footnote. A film that spends this much money showing us a wall should not need to tell us what the wall means.
What holds it together is the cutting. Griffith edited it with James Smith and Rose Smith, and as the film goes on the shots shorten and the four stories start to alternate faster, until the last half hour has all four running against a clock at once. We will not say how any of them resolves. What we can say is that the rhythm still works on the pulse. We were aware of our own breathing in the final reels, in a film made before our grandparents were born.
It was made by a man answering critics of the most poisonous film in American cinema, and its argument for tolerance is entirely sincere and entirely unexamined. We do not think that spoils it. It makes it stranger, and worth arguing with.
Give it an evening rather than a slot. At home you can stop it, and we would not blame anyone who did in Paris and started again in Babylon. It is a PG, and there is nothing in it a child cannot watch, only a great deal a child will not sit through.
