INTOLERANCE (1916) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: D.W. Griffith
Mae Marsh, Constance Talmadge, Robert Harron,
Lillian Gish, Miriam Cooper, Bessie Love,
Margery Wilson, Eugene Pallette, Alfred Paget,
Josephine Crowell, Elmer Clifton, Seena Owen
Griffith's monumental silent epic chronicles human bigotry through four different historical eras - ancient Babylon, Palestine at the time of Christ, 16th-century France and contemporary America. Incredibly, all four stories are told simultaneously, intercut to show the dramatic and moral parallels between them. One of the great pioneer works in the history of movies, it looks archaic now, partly because of the director's unrestrained romanticism, but more because of Griffith's primal influence on every other filmmaker who followed. No other filmmaker ever made a movie like this.
