American Movie Epics from the 1910s

The Birth of a Nation, Intolerance, and Joan the Woman

Aug 25, 2008

Prior to World War I, Italian cinema led the world in the making of movie epics. However, the war resulted in America becoming the new center.

While America’s movie makers were still producing one and two reel, low budget films, directors in pre-World War I Italy, and to some extent France, were turning out lengthy movies featuring elaborate costumes and scenery, and casts of hundreds if not thousands.

Then the war came and the European movie industry went into a period of decline. Stepping in to fill the void were American directors like David Wark Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. Influenced by European feature films and epics, they created movies with their own distinct touches.

Griffith prior to Nation had made nearly 490 one and two reel films and a handful of feature length movies, beginning with Judith of Bethulia in 1914. Many of these movies featured innovations that Griffith had either created or refined: cross-cutting between simultaneous events; long range, medium, and close-up photography; tracking and high angle shots; fadeouts; and creative use of tinting.

Griffith combined all these techniques in creating The Birth of a Nation, a three hour saga of the Civil War and Reconstruction centered around two families, one Northern, the other Southern. The result was a film that became for several years the highest grossing of all time at $18,000,000.

Even today the artistic and technical merits of this movie are impressive. The battle scenes are large scale and realistic. The scenes showing Lee’s surrender to Grant and Lincoln’s assassination are so correct in every detail that these re-creations could pass for actual recordings of the events. Even the overall acting is somewhat restrained considering the period in which the film was made.

Unfortunately, Nation is tainted by racism that exists throughout the film but is most blatant in the second half. Griffith’s use of actors in blackface is offensive enough, but the extreme stereotyping of black characters is worse. Even in a time when racism was very much a part of American society, the public outcry against the movie was great.

Stung by the criticism and controversy over Birth of a Nation, Griffith responded the following year with Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Throughout the Ages in an attempt to persuade his audiences that he, too, opposed hatred and bigotry. Although the 190 minute film was not a box office success at the time, it is now considered a fine example of motion picture workmanship.

The movie has four interwoven stories, each dealing with hatred and intolerance: a modern story of a man wrongly accused of murder; a tale of the Babylonian conquest by Cyrus in 538 B.C.E.; the crucifixion of Christ; and, the massacre of Huguenots in 16th century France. Each story depicts some form of government or puritanical group inflicting wrong on the less fortunate.

The modern and Babylonian stories compose most of the movie and are by far the best. The two have the fullest developed characters and story lines, with the Babylon story also benefiting from some of the most elaborate sets, inspired by the Italian epic, Cabiria, that have ever been created.

Unlike Griffith, DeMille made feature movies from the start of his career. In fact, his first directorial effort, The Squaw Man (1914), was the first feature length film made in Hollywood, and he soon followed it with a series of full length westerns, dramas, and comedies.

Then in 1917 he made a 140 minute movie, Joan the Woman, that was a biopic of the French heroine, Jeanne d’Arc. Despite not doing well at the box office, the movie developed a pattern for DeMille that became the trademark for many of his later epics -- a religious story or theme combined with sex, wild orgies, huge crowd scenes, and distorted history.

There are many memorable scenes such as the siege of Orleans and Joan’s execution at the stake. DeMille also used double exposure to create visions and showed a masterful eye for lighting and tinting. Two of the biggest weaknesses were using an actress at least two decades too old to play Joan and introducing a romance between the future saint and an English soldier.

The copyright of the article American Movie Epics from the 1910s in Classic Films is owned by John K. Davis. Permission to republish American Movie Epics from the 1910s in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.