The Bitch Of A Nation.

Rating: 4/10 (27 July 2010)

Back when there was no internet or breast augs or Conan O'Brien, people got their entertainment by watching the first moving pictures. D.W. Griffiths's THE BIRTH OF A NATION is one such "movie." Nearly a century after its release (1915) it stands today on the horns of a grand dichotomy: that of being a pioneering film - and a racist piece of poop.
Griffiths lifted the story from a play and a novel, both written by white supremacist and reverend (no contradiction there!) Thomas F. Dixon Jr. - The Clansman and The Leopard's Spots.
THE BIRTH OF A NATION comes in two segments, the first dealing with the friendship between a family from the North and a family from the South, and how the Civil War forces them to take opposing sides; the tragedy reaches its zenith when the two families' sons meet bayonet to bayonet on the battlefield.
The second half of BIRTH deals with Reconstruction - and the magnificence of the Ku Klux Klan in keeping African Americans at bay as they were on the verge of taking over White Civilization. No kidding!
With BIRTH's historical place in filmdom is pretty much unassailable, it is hard to rail against this progenitor of today's trillion dollar industry. It is a massive achievement - there are epic battle scenes, split screens, process shots, special effects (tinting the filmstock) and cutaways (a brave new technique) - D.W. Griffiths showing the industry the heights that film "making" could scale. On the other hand, whenever a movie promotes hypocrisy, ignorance or wrongheadedness, the movie rates low, because it misuses a great artistic tool to further idiocy.
And BIRTH's second half is freakishly hypocritical, provincially ignorant and overwhelmingly wrongheaded.
Movie is "bad" because ignorance and hypocritical Christianity are held up as sanctimoniously right. The last frames show the Ku Klux Klan not allowing blacks to vote at gunpoint, and then an overlay of Jesus with a fake beard overseeing a town of frolicking people - frolicking WHITE people - a text overlay blurting, "Dare we dream of a day when the Prince of Brotherly Love shall rule." Uh, over just us Whiteys, of course.
After the Civil War, a subplot grows to fruition - Silas Lynch, a mulatto (a white guy face-painted in Light Darkie - it just keeps getting worse, don't it?), starts a black congress, which immediately starts acting like Whitey thinks a black congress would act - boozing and arguing, with their shoeless feet up on the tables, making laws that Whitey should salute them and that they pass the right to intermarry... It's all patently ridiculous - yet here it is, in a motion picture of the time.
When I heard THE BIRTH OF A NATION was racist, I thought, "How bad can it possibly be?" This black congress is reprehensible, but I've seen worse. Remember those Shirley Temple movies?! Well, think of the most racist thing you can think of - say, Rush Limbaugh - and then multiply by the Ku Klux Klan. Add Glenn Beck. Stir.
Then it gets REALLY racist - as blacks overrun the town, vandalizing and chasing white women in uncontrolled bestial lust (which the sophisticated Christian whites would *never* do!), and one of the young milky-faced stars from the first half of the film (the one they call "Little Colonel" - pertaining to his white manhood, mayhaps?) gets the idea to form the Ku Klux Klan... with white man-hoods... Black soldier Gus (Walter Long - another white guy in blackface) pursues one of the virginal white chicks until she jumps off a cliff rather than be molested by him. Gus is executed by the Klan, beginning a race war.
And then - the Hero Shots. As the whole town is ransacked by blacks (and white guys in blackface), Little Colonel rounds up Klan members and rides thousands strong like the Cavalry coming to the rescue. The Ku Klux Klan is unequivocally the hero - there is no gray area, it IS all black... and uh, white.
These guys are so serious, even their horses are covered in white sheets! There are literally thousands of white-sheeted Klanfolk, all gutlessly bedecked in their hoods, which in those times were white helmets with long spikes on top - in another of those great scenes that Griffiths sets up, but for the promotion of ignorance! I've never seen so much amassed redneck in one place. Except maybe a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert.
Lillian Gish is probably the only actress worth mentioning here. She plays a girl who at first hated Little Colonel for his involvement with the Klan. But she is not displaying ethics; it is only a character trait so she can arc to loving him when he saves her in his sheet. Also proving the utility of being a Klan member - chicks dig it.
After the rousing parade of Klansmen through cheering city streets, we dissolve to the next election, where we see blacks coming out of their homes and being greeted by armed Klansmen on horseback with guns drawn to stop them from voting. In that great American tradition of: One White Man - One vote.
THE BIRTH OF A NATION is the closest thing to an Emmett Brown time machine; a window not just on how people used to live, but the intellectualism of the time, and also the stunted attitudes of "All men created equal - except black people."
If this is THE BIRTH OF A NATION, I want an abortion.