Intolerance

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Downtown 1st Floor 1-week checkout	DVD Silent-Film Intolerance	1-week checkout	Due 05-02-2024

Videodisc release of the 1916 motion picture.
Lillian Gish, Robert Harron, Mae Marsh, Constance Talmadge, Bessie Love, Seena Owen, Alfred Paget, Mirian Cooper, Erich Von Stroheim.
Lillian Gish, Robert Harron, Mae Marsh, Constance Talmadge, Bessie Love, Seena Owen, Alfred Paget, Mirian Cooper, Erich Von Stroheim.
Switches back and forth between four separate stories from Babylonian times to the twentieth century to show humanity's inhumanity and intolerance through the ages. The Babylonian story deals with the fall of Babylon in 538 B.C. The Judean story treats the life of Christ. The French story centers on the Massacre of St. Bartholomew's Day in 1572. The modern story is set in an American mill town and the slum area of an American city.
DVD.

COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Tolerance Required submitted by nbauer on September 26, 2009, 7:23pm Be prepared: This fairly essential viewing for the movie lover requires 3 hours and change.

The sheer spectacle of the Babylon sequence is impressive, and Cecil B. DeMille seems to have never stopped trying to top it. Beyond that, it's a long, preachy haul. The contemporary story featuring The Dear One is probably the most interesting, with periodic stretches of good acting and a whole lot of melodrama. The Huguenot episode is patchy and distracting, and the New Testament sequence might as well be a series of tableaux that you'd see at a well-financed church.

Constance Talmadge stands out as maybe one of the first plucky modern heroines. Also of note are the close-ups of ugly expressions, which seem incredibly daring.

The biggest problem with the movie, but certainly an influential one, is the preaching, which comes in like a hammer blow. Griffith doesn't trust the audience to get the point, so title cards come in to hit us on the head and make sure we get the message. Think of Spielberg's music cues. "You're feeling this, right? I'll just make sure..."

Perhaps the most entertaining aspect of the Kino DVD is the intro from a very cranky Orson Welles, taped for a TV presentation in the 70s. Welles briefly extols Griffith's brilliance; it's too bad commentary tracks hadn't yet been invented.