D. W. Griffith's "Intolerance" is a Bona-Fide Masterpiece, and the Director's Magnum Opus

“Mr. Tolstoy carelessly neglects to include a boat race,” Mark Twain famously remarked of Count Leo Tolstoy’s mammoth novel, War and Peace, which more or less has everything else in it. A similar statement could be made of D. W. Griffith’s landmark Intolerance, a film that broke all the rules, created many new ones, and almost destroyed its director’s career, not to mention his production company. With an outlandish budget (for the time) and near-infinite creative freedom, Griffith constructed what is the medium’s most ambitious film ever made, if not one of the greatest of all time.

            In the wake of the enormous success of his first epic, The Birth of a Nation, Griffith embarked on a project so incomprehensibly large that contemporary audiences could not handle it. Intolerance was film’s first major commercial failure, and it would leave its massive Babylon set in Los Angeles as its gravestone (to be referenced nearly a century later in Rockstar’s L.A. Noire). In the years since the debut of the film, critics and film scholars have come to recognize it as the unmitigated classic that it is, and its legacy has been revived through an expert re-mastering by Kino International.

            What makes Intolerance so amazing is that Griffith presents four parallel stories—all of which take place throughout disparate periods in world history—in order to illustrate the destructive effects of intolerance on humanity. Griffith presents the betrayal and downfall of Babylon at the hands of Cyrus; the rise and crucifixion of Christ, motivated by the hypocrisy of the Pharisees; Catherine de Medici’s influence on the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572; and finally, a fictional modern story about a man’s moral decline due to the corruption that surrounds him. Each of the stories is equally compelling on its own. But rather than present them chronologically, Griffith proceeds through each of them deliberately, focusing on the thematic parallels between them. Griffith crosscuts wisely, avoiding the tedium that you frequently encounter in films that use this sort of device (which Griffith pioneered in the first place). As a result, the film—which can run for as long as 208 minutes, like in the print I watched—is excellently paced, and the running time speeds by unnoticed.

            To a modern viewer seeing this movie for the first time (i.e. me), I was blown away by how engaged with the story I was. Although I loved The Birth of a Nation, I found aspects of it to be quaint and a bit dull, like when Griffith lingers too long in the parlor rooms of either the Stoneman or Cameron families. This never happened to me as I watched Intolerance. Griffith maintains momentum throughout the entire movie, and when the film changes gears from incredibly large battle scenes to intimate family moments, the shift feels appropriate and not at all jarring. Like Tolstoy, Griffith is capable from hopping between macro and micro views of the world. I would argue that the contemporary story, even without the humongous scale of the other parts of the film, is the most compelling of them all. My opinion is a testament to the excitement that Griffith builds by thematically associating all the story threads with one another; when everything goes to shit in the other threads, you desperately want the final part to end well.

            This brings me to the overall tone of the movie. Given that Griffith’s emphasis is on the destruction wrought by intolerance, most of what occurs plot-wise is a big bummer. Griffith intentionally presents the worst that humanity is capable of committing in this film. As a result, you get to see French Catholics flinging babies to the ground, stabbing innocents in the chest, and plenty of death in general. There is a prevailing sense of doom that hangs over the movie (Griffith even refers to Babylon as being “doomed,” so you automatically know that story will not end nicely). This is not to say that the film lacks dramatic tension; on the contrary, I still felt hope for the characters, even as it became apparent that they were all headed towards utter disaster. The only part of the film that does not mesh with the rest is the ending, which is saccharine and a complete tonal 180°. It was similar to the goofy conclusion of The Birth of a Nation, so it is possible that Griffith just was not very good at ending his movies.

            Intolerance is a masterpiece in every sense of the word and anyone who loves film must see it. Do not let its extreme length intimidate you: some movies are best taken in over a longer period of time. The fact that it is silent is also irrelevant, because Griffith was trying to go for universal artistic expression, and he succeeds. It is extravagant, over-the-top, and brilliant in every aspect of its production. See it, and join in on the conversation.