Intolerance

D.W. Griffith followed up his controversial Birth of a Nation with a an epic tale inspired by Italian cinema such as Cabiria. Intolerance starts stating Griffith's view of the world. Intolerance happens all the time. It resulted in tragedy throughout history, destroyed love and civilizations and he wants to show it is the same now as it ever was. There are four tales in the film. A tale taking place in ancient Babylon, the story of the Passion of Christ, the telling of the slaughter of the Huguenots and a modern day tale of meddling women activists.

Of the four, the passion gets the least screen time in this long movie. Perhaps because it was and is the best known but that made it for me all the more uninteresting and unnecessary. The Huguenots story was also truncated for reasons that make most of that narrative incomprehensible. But the Babylon sequence is rich and full of life and amazing set design and has a decently engaging story of a woman in love with the king of Babylon. Likewise the story of the modern woman and her struggle to raise her child while her husband is in jail and then her baby is taken away is compelling.

As the film enforces its notion of time and returns repeatedly too a fixed image of a woman rocking a cradle we cut back and forth between these stories. Late in the film as the drama intensifies the cuts come faster and faster and it is effective. You feel the pressure of what is happening. As the tragedies start to mount you feel an ever increasing sense of sorrow. Babylon falls, Christ is crucified, the Huguenots are slaughtered.

This builds to a chase sequence of a car trying to catch a train. Can the woman get a gubernatorial pardon before her husband is hanged? I won't say but depending on your notion of movies you might be disappointed or happy. But the Babylon sequence and the modern tale carry the film. It could have been tighter if they had cut the other two sequences but maybe not. It like its predecessor has its fair share of 19th century Southern elitist biases but doesn't come off as overtly troublesome as Birth of a Nation and seems to be and attempt to silence his critics and shows he clearly missed the point of the criticism.