Orphans of the Storm
by D.W. Griffith
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Dorothy Gish, Frank Losee, Joseph Schildkraut, Katherine Emmet, Lillian GishDirector: D.W. Griffith
Brand: Kino International
Cinematographer: G.W. Bitzer
Cinematographer: Hendrik Sartov
Cinematographer: Paul H. Allen
Producer: D.W. Griffith
Writer: D.W. Griffith
Writer: Adolphe d'Ennery
Writer: Eugène Cormon
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0; English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0
Format: Black & White, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Silent
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 150 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2002-12-10
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Model: 2692
Studio: Kino Video
Movie Reviews of Orphans of the Storm
Movie Review: Early Hollywood Version of the French Revolution
Summary: 5 Stars
This film is a mixture of "A Tale of Two Cities" and some other tales and stories that in America have always been accepted as the 'true' story of the Revolution in France. It follows on the known elements of the fable of the event rather than the facts
Most important to Griffith's vision is the convoluted tale of two sweet looking, perpetually innocent young sisters that travel to Paris from the country at the with the worst possible luck. Henriette (Lillian Guish) and the blind Louise (Dorothy Gish) are not technically sisters, Henriette's mother married a commoner against her aristocratic family's wishes and they killed him and gave her child away by placing it at the doors of Notre Dame in Paris on a snowy day. A peasant who was on his way to deposit his own girl at the steps was so moved by Louise's crying that he kept both. Louise had alongside a beautiful diamond-ringed locket, a small bag with enough gold coins to change the family's course from poverty to middle class. Then both parents die suddenly of the plague and both girls decide to move to Paris.
On the road they are already victimized by a leering aristocrat who plots to have Henriette kidnapped. Henriette herself provided all the needed information in her conversation, while trying to keep him from wolfing her hands, neck or face with unsolicited kisssing and caressing. Of course Henriette is kidnapped right on arrival, Louise falls into the hands of a horrid beggar who uses her singing to extract more alms from passerbys. Eventually they will meet again, but this is the basic plot.
Griffith must have have had a very narrow and fantastical vision of pre-Revolutionary France, which comes through in the movie. This is the first movie I have ever seen where Danton, one of the radical and blood-thirsty leaders of the Jacobin faction of the Revolution is compared to Abraham Lincoln, surely this was a tremendous exaggeration to say the least. Danton's face, which has been preserved in numerous contemporary portraits and engravings is clearly that of a natural butcher, and the brutality of his personality is evident in every trait, leaving little doubt as to his capabilities in manipulating the mob through the Revolution, well documented from secondary sources, from its beginnings in the cafe-clubs to the early stages of the Terror, where he himself perished in the scaffold.
Precisely because this Revolution was a noble cause, more than justified by the hardships of an undisputed majority of the French, we sympathize with it, however, it is also an undeniable fact that it quickly morphed into a nightmare, which demonstrated the unfortunate appearance of both mass executions and executions without trial from the beginning. These features only got worse with time, and the French Revolution has continued to challenge film directors up to our own time with the many problems in presenting a balanced picture of the events. The aristocrats as portrayed by Griffith, with the sole exception of the Chevalier de Vaudrey who falls in love with Henriette, are all poisonous vermin, and we can not wait till they get guillotined. They are either too busy trying to fit in a carriage while carrying a huge wiged coiffeure or running over street children on their way into town.
Almost completely absent from the screen is the strong presence of the financially powerful middle classes that had long ago supplanted the aristocracy as the richest people in the country and which were both the catalyst and 'raison d'etre' of the Revolution itself. Only Danton and Robespierre appear to be neither pauper or aristocrat, which leaves them in a twilight zone of identity up to the point when they become players in the revolt. Griffith exaggerates further when he wants to show an exception: In another scene, so that we understand clearly that the Chevalier de Vaudrey is better than all the others, he finds a crowd of hungry people looking at bread in a window and goes in and buys everyone a loaf, but this is not enough; he proceeds to embrace and kiss a hideous looking woman, which is hard to believe, and then also gives her a bag of coins as a bonus.
Meanwhile it has been proven by both contemporary and older research that it was the financial help that France provided America through the ten long years from Independence Declaration in 1776 to the formation of a new Nation in 1787 that cracked the finances of the Old Regime, not the extravagance of the court or the follies of Marie Antoinette, although neither were insignificant in flaring the fires. No monument records this fact, no street or square bears his name, but it is nevertheless the truth as there was no parlament then, no assembly that 'voted' on this issue. It was the King and his cabinet who decided, at great cost, and as it turned out, disastrous consequences, to pursue this policy, not totally idealistic as it did carry the intention of checking England's power, but that nevertheless made possible the birth of America. Griffith chooses to forget that it was the absolute monarch, Luis XVI who consistently provided us with the funds to do our Independence, nothing indicating this important policy, which went on for years, is shown. We only see him briefly in the movie, rather inate in the middle of his court, where he announces for example the marriage of the Chevalier.
In general the condensation process that Griffith uses to use the story of the sisters, can not give an accurate development of the Revolution. It merely excites our curiosity as to how they are going to cope with it. Although Jefferson and Franklin feature a brief, insignificant appearance without any connection to the action for further development, nothing is shown about he efforts of Grovernor Morris, our first ambassador in France, to bring here the King and the Royal family as he saw the country disintegrate into anarchy, and he correctly realized that we owed our Independcence to this man, and not solely to the antics of Lafayette, a man that in France proved to be less than the ideal founding father. This plan was unfortunately never realized, but it would have accelerated America's role in international politics by placing America into the very center of European power politics within less than a generation after the Declaration of Independence, quite a feat. On another, more important socio-cultural perspective, such a strong influence from France may well have toned down the puritanical aspects of the developing culture, and stimulated education and the political thoughts of enlightenment that could have prevented the Civil War. Jefferson's correspondence at the time reveals an interesting penchant for denial in accepting the information provided by our American embassy, describing details of the massacres and brutality which was becoming commonplace. This is interesting from the perspective that an equally profound level of denial surely was a decisive factor a couple of generations later in the explosion of the Civil War over the issue of slavery, a subject that captured Griffith's imagination in another of his great films: "Birth of a Nation".
The cinematography is as usual with Griffith, wonderful to watch. The streets of Paris are an excellent effort to re-create the period, and the mob scenes particularly good at depicting the mix of carnage and carnival that characterized the early stages of the Revolution. The scenes in Versailles and the palaces of the aristocrats are adequately lavish, but it is very much better in the architecture and decor than the costumes, which are sometimes very different from the originals, particularly in the choice of patterns. The scene where Danton rushes to save Henriette from the blade of the guillotine is full of inaccuracies, as for example the location of the guillottine, which was the Place de la Concorde and not 'somewhere outside the city gates" . It does provide the drama and excitement of a modern car chase in an action movie, and it is also another version of Griffith's desparate plot to save a prisioner from execution in his earlier film, "Intolerance".
Summary of Orphans of the Storm
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