From Hollywood Citizen News, May 7, 1947, 11, 12.
David Wark Griffith, who made what is probably the most ambitious mistake in motion picture history, also gave to the world the most memorable of all films, The Birth of a Nation, which many authorities claim is the greatest money-making photoplay ever produced. Gross of The Birth, estimated as high as $48 million since it was first screened more than thirty years ago, no doubt is the largest return per dollar invested in cinema annals, since its production cost was only $90,000.
The “mistake,” however, was not The Birth of a Nation, but the fourteen-reel spectacle Intolerance that followed. The “mistake” was that Griffith made Intolerance in 1915 instead of three decades later. He was ahead of his time.
Griffith told me about Intolerance the other afternoon in his Beverly Hills home. Among the 320 pictures he has made since 1909, it is the one that seems to have the strongest hold upon his memories, perhaps because it was an ugly duckling, financially, for him. He almost lost his shirt over it, but more astute businessmen who inherited it coined handsome profits. When it was reissued ten years after it was produced, it won acclaim from the public that had at first been denied, except by a few discerning critics.
Those among us of an older generation who felt the impact of the early Griffith movies when they were first shown and who have nurtured a sentimental remembrance of them, may not have realized then the implications of Intolerance. We were overwhelmed by its dramatic sweep and the vastness of its staging.
Yet there was something beyond pictorial grandeur that made Intolerance significant and too advanced for its day. The movies’ novelty still held a public not ready for the story of Intolerance. Ten years later was a more propitious time, and today’s audiences might have made it a success from the outset.
Documentary films, so much in vogue today, were paced by Hearts of the World, a Griffith film of the World War I period that had many authentic scenes made on French battlefields. The picture dramatically pointed up the battle against Kaiserism, as modern films have depicted the war against totalitarianism. Griffith’s films did much to spearhead global supremacy for American movies. They were seen by millions who had never heard a word of English spoken.
D. W., an inveterate screen fan, sees an average of four pictures a week. He doesn’t dwell in the past and his thinking isn’t dated. He does believe, however, that talkies are in their infancy; that they have not yet bridged the gap between silent film skills and talkie technology.
“Talkies have not yet achieved the rhythm, the movement and flow of the silent drama,” he observed. “The perfect blending of the silents’ effortless storytelling and the effectiveness of sound and dialogue is yet to be attained.
“The industry has a moral obligation to turn out a few films that are wholly artistic, without thought of the box-office. This is not too heavy a burden for some of our prospering film companies to assume, and I feel that in the long run it will prove profitable for them.
“Talkie dialogue has encroached too much upon acting and cinematography. Beautiful lines are well spoken by players, but expressions of faces and bodies too often are not reflective of the words uttered. In the silents, thoughts were photographed. Now, there is a tendency to photograph dialogue and movement too much,” Griffith stated.
“The cinema is the ideal medium, compared to the stage. Movies have a world-wide scope for settings, but they need poetry and beauty after the idea of Keats. Beautiful scenery, slow tempo, careful creation of musical settings are some requisites.”
“Except by dialogue, you cannot put a battle between two nations on the stage. You can portray the world on film, so why waste so much of pictures’ potentialities by confining them to studios? Even in the battle between human ethics, the stage is limited, but the cinema can run the whole gamut without hindrance.
“Yet breadth to use large casts of actors is no special boon for films. You can have millions of people, but they are of no avail without a story and the people who can tell the story,” D. W. asserted.
He feels that the present apathy of audiences needs to be “cured” by a return of pictures that stir people.