Intolerance (1916)

Intolerance is an American period drama film first released in 1916, directed by D.W. Griffith.  The film stars Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, Sam De Grasse, Walter Long and Vera Lewis.  It has also been released under the title: Intolerance: A Sun-Play of the Ages.  Our overall rating for this film is: excellent.


Four interwoven stories spanning mankind’s turbulent history show how hatred and intolerance have battled against love and charity across the ages.  When social reformers bring about a strike in our modern era, a young woman is driven to the city, where a series of tragic circumstances rob her of her husband and her newborn child.   In Jerusalem circa 30 AD, a preacher loved by all becomes the target of hatred for the religious authorities who contrive to bring about his destruction.  In Paris of 1572, the Catholic Queen Mother Catherine Medici plans to quell opposition from the protestants by arranging a massacre of the town’s Huguenot population.  In ancient Babylon of 539 BC, an ambitious High Priest betrays his King to a rival power, and brings about the fall of a great civilisation.  "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking"...

In response to fierce accusations of racism in his film The Birth of a Nation (1915), director D.W. Griffith was inspired to make this epic morality work which argued that intolerance was a tragically fundamental part of the human condition.  It is significant that the film was made during the First World War (just prior to America’s involvement), a time when the entire continent of Europe looked as of it might be laid waste by the fires of intolerance.  Almost a hundred years on, the film remains chillingly relevant, perhaps even more so, as conflict between nations, between religions, between generations grow ever more apparent.  Has there ever been a more intolerant, loveless age than the one we are now living in?

With its two million dollar budget (an absolute fortune in 1916), Intolerance was the most ambitious film made at the time.  Even now, the scale and extraordinary detail of the sets (notably the stunning Babylon sequences which employed around 16,000 extras) is breathtaking, a colossal feat of artistic design and technological wherewithal.

Rather than tell the four stories of the piece as separate sections, D.W. Griffith chose to intertwine them, cutting from one to another to emphasise a particular moral theme.  As the four stories each reaches its spectacular climax, the cutting becomes increasingly frenetic, heightening the tension and creating the illusion of a single narrative collapsing into an orgy of panic and chaos as dark, primal forces are unleashed on the world.

Griffith’s unrivalled ambition for scale is surpassed only by his flair for innovation and this film shows the director introducing and refine camera techniques (such as swooping crane shots) that were to transform the art of cinema in the years that followed.  Intolerance was not just a cinematic masterpiece, it was also an inspiration to a whole generation of filmmaker (including Erich von Stroheim who worked as an assistant director on this film), and it still stands as one of the great triumphs of the silent era.

The film’s ambitious scale proved to be its undoing, however.  Intolerance was a massive flop, and almost ruined its director – partly on account of its long run time (around three hours), but more probably because its pacifist subtext was judged to be unacceptable with America’s entry into World War I.   In 1989, the film was honoured with preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".  Regarded by many as Griffith’s greatest film, Intolerance is undeniably one of the most important films in cinema history and, by virtue of its subject matter, one that will remain relevant for many, many generations to come.

© James Travers 2007

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