The Stern Lessons of Honor.

Rating: 5/10 (17 September 2010)

Leaving the message aside for the moment, I don't think that anyone could deny that for 1915 this was a monumental achievement. Griffith was a genuine innovator, and one of the first. As a film maker he deserves at least the disinterest that Leni Riefenstahl gets.
He's often said to have "invented the grammar of film," whatever that means. (For twenty years I've had trouble thinking of anything, except language, as a language.) He didn't invent cross-cutting, a device that shows us a critical scene, cuts to the onrushing rescuers, then back and forth to juice up the tension. But he did invent what came to be called "invisible editing." Ante-Griffith, if there was a scene in which someone wiped his forehead of sweat, it was done in a single shot. Post-Griffith, we might see the figure in a far shot begin to lift his handkerchief, then a cut to a medium close up in which the figure completes the action, beginning precisely where it was cut off in the previous shot.
That doesn't sound like much but it did alter the way movies were made, and Griffith does it here. He also tells a LONG and complicated story forthrightly and with a minimum use of title cards, a big relief because, man, are the titles stilted, sentimental, florid, embarrassing. But making such a lengthy and still coherent movie was an achievement in itself. It was a big, expensive movie with lots of characters and hundreds of extras, about an epic event in history, and Griffith pulls it off. Credit where credit is due.
It's impossible to comment on the performances because they are all over wrought, as was the convention at the time. I suppose the casting is adequate, if not very subtle. Lillian Gish is fetchingly virginal with her tiny lips, but I preferred Miriam Cooper as one of the Southern Cameron daughters. She has a prominent nose, black hair, and dark soulful eyes, and she looks as if she's been around a little.
The DVD I have is splotched and marred and the only virtue of the sound track is that you get to hear The New World Symphony from beginning to end and, here and there, excerpts from other light classics.
At this point it becomes impossible to avoid talking about the plot. Here's the story. Happy Southern Cameron family, riding horses and such, chuckling along with the happy darkies picking the cotton. Sour-looking Senator Stoneman in Pennsylvania, abolitionist, who is nevertheless close friends with the Cameron family. Stoneman boy loves Cameron girl.
Then comes the war. (Kids: That's the American Civil War, 1861 to 1865. The North won.) A title card informs us that Lincoln has just asserted the rights of the federal government over those of the sovereign states, the first time since Cornwallis surrendered at Yorktown. (Kids: That's a reference to the Revolutionary War. PS: We won.) If your ears haven't pricked up before, now's the time for them to do it. Griffith either forgot about, or didn't know, about the Articles of Confederation being replaced by the Constitution.
In any case this is not the place to refight the Civil War or to argue over the Reconstruction Era that followed the Federal victory. Part I takes the viewer up through the Civil War and is generally accurate. Part II goes completely ape. "I will build a Black Empire and you will be my white queen." "The streets are filled with crazed Negroes." A little white Southern girl jumps to her death to avoid being raped by some villainous black guy. The Ku Klux Klan comes riding to the rescue of another -- well, two others, actually. An African-American judge and jury convict a white gentleman of something he wasn't supposed to do -- aiding and abetting the Klan. In 1931, the white folks made up for it. An all-white judge and jury convicted nine young black men of something they didn't do at all -- raping two white women -- in Scottsboro, Alabama. Griffith had another thing right. Reconstruction under President Johnson and others is generally considered a calamity visited upon the South. In the absence of a formal system of justice, we often wind up with an informal one. From 1889 through 1918 mobs lynched 129 persons in the Midwest, 9 in New England, and 2,915 in the South and Border South. The nation reached a total of 3,587 by 1930.
D. W. Griffith is said to have been surprised at the outrage caused by his film, and I believe it. Like President Woodrow Wilson, who said of the movie, "it's all true," Griffith was a Southerner at a time when the South was so isolated that it was almost a country unto itself. Whatever the opposite of "cosmopolitanism" is, Griffith was it. I believe it, too, when he claimed he meant no harm. He was like the Buddha leaving his father's garden at sixteen and discovering for the first time that there was more than one point of view.