Yikes!

Rating: 6/10 (17 November 2005)

A must see for any student of film studies, but not easy to sit through. It's long, it's antique, and by today's standards it's reprehensible in its portrayal of the KKK and blacks. But it's also the movie that virtually invented the entire vocabulary of film language. Not before Griffith's film were all the separate elements of film-making brought together to create such a cohesive whole. And the last quarter or so of the film is admittedly exciting, and Griffith shows he knows how to use editing in ways that no one before him did. So the movie is interesting from a film history standpoint, but otherwise you've been warned.
Grade: A (for its importance to film history) but C (for its watchability)