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Intolerance
1916 -
USA -
175 min. -
Feature, B&W, Silent
AMG Rating:
Director:
D.W. Griffith
Cast:
Lillian Gish,
Mae Marsh,
Robert Harron,
Miriam Cooper,
Walter Long.
More Information:
All Movie Guide
Características del DVD
- Lang.: English
Alquílela
por (rent it for): $3.77
(dos días - two days)
Si vive en
Weston (if you live in Weston)
Sinopsis
(All Movie Guide)
Sometime during the shooting of the landmark
Birth of a Nation,
filmmaker D.W.
Griffith probably wondered how he could top himself. In 1916, he showed
how, with the awesome
Intolerance.
The film began humbly enough as a medium-budget feature entitled
The Mother and
the Law, wherein the lives of a poor but happily married couple are
disrupted by the misguided interference of a "social reform" group. A series
of unfortunate circumstances culminates in the husband's being sentenced to
the gallows, a fate averted by a nick-of-time rescue engineered by his wife.
In the wake of the protests attending the racist content of
Birth of a Nation,
Griffith wanted to demonstrate the dangers of intolerance.
Mother and the
Law filled the bill to some extent, but it just wasn't "big" enough to
suit his purposes. Thus, using
Mother and the
Law as merely the base of the film
Griffith
added three more plotlines and expanded his cinematic thesis into epic
proportions. The four separate stories of
Intolerance
are symbolically linked by
Lillian Gish
as the Woman Who Rocks the Cradle ("uniter of the here and hereafter"). The
"Modern Story" is essentially
Mother and the
Law; the "French Story" details the persecution of the Huguenots by
Catherine de Medici (Josephine
Crowell); the "Biblical Story" relates the last days of Jesus Christ (Howard
Gaye); and the "Babylonian Story" concerns the defeat of King Belshazzar (Alfred
Paget) by the hordes of Cyrus the Persian (George
Siegmann)
Rather than being related chronologically, the
four stories are told in parallel fashion, slowly at first, and then with
increasing rapidity. The action in the film's final two reels leaps back and
forth in time between Babylon, Calvary, 15th-century France and contemporary
California. Described by one historian as "The only film fugue,"
Intolerance
baffled many filmgoers of 1916 — and, indeed, it is still an
exhausting, overwhelming experience, even for audiences accustomed to the
split-second cutting and multilayered montage sequences popularized by
Sergei
Eisenstein,
Orson Welles,
Jean-Luc Godard,
Joel Schumacher
and MTV. On a pure entertainment level, the Babylonian sequences are the most
effective, played out against one of the largest, most elaborate exterior sets
ever built for a single film. The most memorable character in this sequence is
"The Mountain Girl," played by star-on-the-rise
Constance
Talmadge; when the Babylonian scenes were re-released as a separate
feature in 1919,
Talmadge's tragic death scene was altered to accommodate a
happily-ever-after denouement. Other superb performances are delivered by
Mae Marsh
and Robert
Harron in the Modern Story, and by
Eugene Pallette
and Margery
Wilson in the French Story. Remarkably sophisticated in some scenes,
appallingly naïve in others,
Intolerance
is a mixed bag dramatically, but one cannot deny that it is also a work of
cinematic genius. The film did poorly upon its first release, not so much
because its continuity was difficult to follow as because it preached a gospel
of tolerance and pacifism to a nation preparing to enter World War I.
Currently available prints of
Intolerance
run anywhere from 178 to 208 minutes; while it may be rough sledding at times,
it remains essential viewing for any serious student of film technique.
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