Intolerance
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Movie Reviews of Intolerance
Movie Review: D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, Kino's Great DVD
Summary: 5 Stars
Don't waste your money on the cheapies, get the Kino DVD and the reviews on this site should be for that version, not others. It is unfair to Kino and customers alike. Kino has done a wonderful job restoring and putting Intolerance together. This film is overreaching and not as good as The Birth of a Nation but it tries to avoid avoid the offensive stereotypes and messages that The Birth of a Nation contained. The film tells the story of a modern couple who are impoverished and unable to take care of their child, the Babylonian defeat to the Persians and a death to a culture and the St. Bartholomew Massacres in France where Catholics killed Huguenots in a religious riot. The stories can be overwhelming and most interesting is the modern story but it is a good movie and artfully done. The second great American epic when only Italy seemed to be making them at the time. Griffith lost his shirt on this film, it did salve his reputation a bit as a Racist. This is one of the gotta see films in history and Kino took care of it very well.Movie Review: Milestone silent epic!
Summary: 5 Stars
Griffith constitutes to the American Cinema the most remarkable director ever born and in my personal list he is among the five Greats . After him we can name Welles, Ford, Wilder, Capra and a long etc. But this giant understood the enormous relevance about the overtaking and the expressive power of this relatively new device. With the only exception of Giovanni Pastrone in Italy (Cabiria nights), till that moment any other filmmaker had such level of commitment, ambition and distinction at the moment of handling a camera to ignite the screen in such way.
Griffith was a herald of the Cinema. His transcendence has elevated the ambits of the artistic barriers to become a continuous matter of analysis and discussion around the master classes and far beyond. He inspired to a remarkable crowd of future directors - Stroheim was perhaps, the most immediate director.
250 chariots, 15.000 people support an intense script perfectly articulated where the injustice prevails far beyond a specific age.
Movie Review: Intolerance
Summary: 5 Stars
Stung by accusations of racism after the debut of his "Birth of a Nation," Griffith decided to assuage his detractors and at the same time top his previous masterpiece with this lavish meditation on cruelty and persecution. With colossal stages, a vast universe of extras, and some of the most jaw-dropping images ever recorded on film (check out the fall of Babylon sequence!), "Intolerance" is a masterpiece of epic melodrama and set-piece grandeur. Among the cast, Harron (as the contemporary hero), Lillian Gish (as the symbolic Woman Who Rocks the Cradle), Mae Marsh (as the "Dear One" in the modern tale), and Constance Talmadge (as the Girl From the Mountains) are especially striking. And the brilliantly innovative parallel climax of all four stories is a feat of ahead-of-its-time editing technique that may still take your breath away.Movie Review: INTOLERANCE
Summary: 5 Stars
UN VERDADERO CLASICO DEL CINE UNA JOYA, OJALA LOS RALIZADORES DE ESTA EPOCA VIERAN ESTA PELICULA, QUE HECHA EN 1916 SUPERA A MUCHAS DE HOY CON TODA LA TECNOLOGIA QUE TIENEN PARA USAR, ESTO SI ERA CREACION....GRACIASMovie Review: The Sun-Play of the Ages
Summary: 4 Stars
For his follow-up to (and, some suggest, apology for) Birth of a Nation, D. W. Griffith was not content to merely make another epic but rolled four epics into one to create his 'Sun-Play of the Ages.' At the time, many of its innovations were rejected by public and critics alike (many complained that the tracking shots brought on dizziness) and its reputation has suffered more from the subsequent mindless repetition of the 'accepted opinion' by people who have not actually seen it than its own failings. Taken on its own merits, these are far outweighed by its achievements.
The project grew out of the section that would become The Mother and the Law, later released as a separate feature, in which an industrialist cuts the wages of his employees by 10% to finance a moral crusade ("They squeeze the money out of us and use it to advertise themselves by reforming us" cries a surprisingly sympathetically depicted union man). In the resulting strike the troops are called in, with the ensuing deaths throwing the families of two of his workers into desperation and crime. Alongside this are three other tales of intolerance through the ages; the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre of the Huguenots in 16th Century France; the death of Christ; and, with little relevance but mighty spectacle, the fall of Babylon. Linking them all is Lillian Gish, rocking a child through the cradle of the ages.
Griffith's brand of sentimentality is sometimes hard to take, especially with character names like Brown Eyes and The Little Dear One. The final scene of soldiers throwing down their weapons and prison bars replaced by fields of flowers seem particularly over-optimistic when viewed in its context of a world at war by the time the film was released in 1916, and some sequences have dated in the worst way: he Sacred Dance in memory of the resurrection of Tammuz in the Temple of Love is a surreal cross between the Charleston and Monty Python, while its orgy scenes seem an obvious inspiration for De Mille's later excesses. But amid the miscalculations there are a few astonishingly natural moments and performances.
The cross-cutting between the stories is the film's boldest stroke, although not always successful due to their varying quality and relevance. The French and Judean episodes come off worst, the latter being a series of dreary tableaux where the only interest is trying to spot future directors Erich Von Stroheim and Todd Browning. Despite the fame and cinematic sweep of the Babylonian story, it's the modern story, with its genuine sense of outrage that is the best and most powerful of the quartet. After a rather over-sentimental start, as an example of the filmmaker's art it's a work of genius with few equals in early silent cinema.
Intolerance is still a great cinematic experience that has much to recommend it, although you do have to be careful which version you pick up with so many public domain versions available - many cut or even transferred at the wrong speed. Kino's is probably the best of the bunch, a near-complete version in a good transfer with a decent selection of extras: introduction by Orson Welles, extracts from Cabiria (1914) and The Last Days of Pompeii (1914), `happy ending' from The Fall of Babylon and extracts from two pamphlets by D.W. Griffith.