Intolerance
Summary
A colossal cathedral of celluloid, Intolerance flings four epochs into a centrifuge of time—Babylon’s moonlit ziggurats crushed by Persian spears; Christ’s Jerusalem smouldering under Pilate’s cynical wash; 16th-century Paris where Huguenots bleed beneath Catholic bells; and a 1914 American metropolis whose industrial gears chew a workers’ romance into scapegoated tragedy. D.W. Griffith braids these strands with a maternal ribbon: Lillian Gish’s eternal crone rocks the cradle of history while intolerance—political, religious, economic—repeats its carnivorous dance. Cross-cut at break-neck velocity, the film becomes a kinetic fresco, each storyline rhyming in visual couplets: a Babylonian chariot wheel matches a modern mill gear; a massacre hymn becomes a strike-breaker’s jeer. The result is cinema’s first symphonic montage, a fever dream of human folly where epochs collapse into a single howl against cruelty.
Synopsis
Four historical tales depict the ongoing human struggle against prejudice and inhumanity.
Director
Bessie Love, Walter Long, Mae Marsh, Pearl Elmore, Miriam Cooper, Lloyd Ingraham, John P. McCarthy, Margery Wilson, Robert Harron, Marguerite Marsh, Billy Quirk, Erich von Ritzau, A.W. McClure, Lillian Langdon, Lucille Browne, Eleanor Washington, Lillian Gish, Monte Blue, Olga Grey, Howard Gaye, Ruth Handforth, William H. Brown, Vera Lewis, Ralph Lewis, Tom Wilson, Edward Dillon, Sam De Grasse, Mary Alden, Julia Mackley, F.A. Turner
Frank E. Woods, D.W. Griffith, Walt Whitman, Tod Browning, Hettie Grey Baker, Mary H. O'Connor, Anita Loos
