Intolerance dvd movie.|
Intolerance buy bestselling dvd movies, videos find reviews, ratings, prices |
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List Price: $29.99 Features • Black & White • Color • DVD-Video • NTSC In Theaters : 05 September, 1916 DVD Release : 19 January, 1999 |
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Intolerance description After Birth of a Nation, what do you do for an encore, especially after said film has branded you a racist? D.W. Griffith, the silent era's "king of the world," mounted this melodramatic spectacle of "Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages," four stories that illustrate "how hatred and intolerance have battled against love and charity." Critic Heywood Broun, upon the film's release, probably said it best: "Quite the most marvelous thing which has been put on the screen, but as a theory of life it is trite." But what's on the screen is dazzling! Griffith interweaves the four parallel stories set, respectively, in the modern era (fuddy-duddy reformers and a workers' strike), Jerusalem (Christ's crucifixion), 1572 Paris (a "hotbed" of persecution against the Huguenots), and ancient Babylon. No collection of silent films is complete without this landmark, awe-inspiring epic, which really does boast a cast of thousands (the most memorable of which is Constance Talmadge as the spunky Mountain Girl). The fall of Babylon ranks with one of the great action set pieces, complete with racing chariots, a nifty decapitation (at the hands of Elmo Lincoln, the man who would be Tarzan), and falls from what appear to be incredible heights. The edge-of-your-seat climax to the modern story, a race against time to save an innocent young man from the electric chair, is another bravura sequence. --Donald Liebenson |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | I bite my thumb |
| That's to stop my jaw dropping like a brick. The line comes from the Babylon story. The Mountain Maid (Daisy Mae?) also says she'll slap her girdle. Not a saying I'm familiar with. I have to be frank about this creation. The division into 4 parts is a help. I've only watched two, so far, Babylon and the Huguenots, and am giving the rest a rest for the time being. Also, I seem to have picked up the worse of the two versions: my disc lacks the coloured tintings. The visual vision is gob-smacking, as everyone agrees, but the rest is unbelievably naive. Considering the kind of literature that was being written during this decade, DWG seems hardly out of infant school. So you have to honour his achievements, without admiring them for their narrative sophistication. Everything in the Babylon story hovers uneasily between the comically bad and the overpowering. Allowances must be made, I suppose, but there's a limit to tolerance: not everything is acceptable.
After sitting through the next two stories: the Judean and the Modern, I revise my opinion upwards. The Judean is mercifully short, and makes its few points fairly effectively. There are one or two nice shots. Some inspired by the pious paintings of Victorian artists. The Modern story is quite coherent, and quite well-paced. The plot is fairly well conceived, and there's quite an element of suspense. Will the wrongfully convicted man get suspended, or will he be saved? These stories could have made 4 reasonable shorter separate films. They don't really mesh together too well. I can't quite face sitting through the whole lot from beginning to end. You have to acknowledge, however, that DWG certainly set the pattern for a lot of later film-making: I kept getting reminded of other movies that were made much later. |
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