Movie Review: Intolerance (1916)

Note: This is #1 of my 52 Classic Movies in 52 Weeks challenge for 2009.

Wow, what a movie to start this thing off on. Released in 1916, Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Through the Ages is film pioneer D.W. Griffith’s sprawling silent movie epic about how much intolerance really totally sucks. The film actually combines 4 different stories and links them together through transitions. This includes a “modern” story set in 1914 about a bunch of puritains trying to ruin everyone’s fun through their intoleance for anything but their brand of morality, a story set during the French Renaissance where religious intolerance between Protestants and Catholics leads to a massacre, the story of Christ’s crucifixion during the Judean era, and the fall of ancient Babylon brought on by conflicts between worshipers of different religious sects.

Instead of presenting each story sequentially, Griffith weaves the stories together and draws on common themes to show how humanity’s best must suffer and withstand humanity’s worst. In the beginning of the movie, the transitions are more measured and far apart as the filmmaker sets the stage (literally) for each of the four stories. He even does this weird thing where some woman is rocking a cradle symbolic of human civilization or something, which to me seemed like so much art house wankery. He even includes snippets of poetry by Walt Whitman, and as everyone knows, I HATE WALT WHITMAN. As things reach their climaxes the cuts become more frequent and you can see how the events of each of the stories run parallel to each other and otherwise relate.

Sounds grand, but I don’t see how Intolerance could be a movie anyone would recommend except as an academic exercise in film history. It’s mildly interesting the way looking at a Bronze Age tool or an ancient sandal in a museum is mildly interesting. You think “Huh, that was probably pretty cool at the time, sure is old now” and you shuffle on to the next exhibit. Only I couldn’t do that, because Intolerance was almost three freaking hours long.

And indeed, I can see how this movie was a groundbreaking achievement that served as a template for decades to come. I get that. While I was amused at how the actors and director were often shackled to the traditions of stage plays (e.g., wildly exaggerated facial expressions, florid and almost spastic body movement, extreme lighting, etc.), if you kept in mind that this thing was made in 1916 you start to notice things that were probably novel and even ingenious, like close-up shots of pocket watches or crane shots of city streets. Even the transitions between the four parallel stories would have been something utterly impossible to do on a stage. And apparently Griffith even bankrupted his own studio by financing huge wardrobes and set scenes replete with authentic looking buildings and exotic animals like camels, elephants, and ducks. I can imagine viewers really being amazed by that stuff at the time.

But I wasn’t. The fact is that I personally found it practically unwatchable, thanks in no small part to how the quality of the surviving footage gave me a huge headache. Entire areas of scenes are blown out to the point of being burning white blobs, the quality of the rest of the picture is grainy to the point of distraction, a lot of the text in the intertitles is completely illegible, and honestly I found that the stories were goofy at best and incoherent at worst. I appreciate Intolerance as ground breaking film making, but it was a complete pain to watch in 2009.

Others doing the 52-in-52 thing this week:

• Jeremy reviews Eagle Eye
• Paul reviewed City Lights
• Neil reviewed Revolutionary Road