Loading
American SpectacleFilm 1 of 21
Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages
- Year
- Country
- Runtime
- Sound
- Director
Your rating
D.W. Griffith, Wark, 1916. Four plots cut together: a modern strike and a hanging, Christ’s Passion, the St. Bartholomew massacre, and Belshazzar’s Babylon. Lillian Gish rocks the cradle between them. Motion Picture News (1 April 1916) reported three thousand extras on alternate days and Babylon walls about ninety feet, opposite the Fine Arts lot on Sunset. Variety noted B’nai B’rith got him to reshoot the Crucifixion so Jews were not shown killing Christ. Studio books put the cost at $385,906.77, not the two million of the ads.
In two programmes
Babylon, built about ninety feet high across from the studio on Sunset, with three thousand extras on alternate days. Four stories cut together and a cradle rocking between them. The books say $385,906.77, not the two million the ads promised. It lost money at the scale it was made.
The Woman Who Rocks the Cradle, a linking figure between four stories and two thousand years. Not a part, a posture. Gish holds it still enough that the film can cut away from her a hundred times and come back. Watch how little she moves. That is the job.
Cast & crew
Also streaming
Loading films
