North American New Right 2

by Greg Johnson

  “His innovative achievements in liberating the cinema from the restrictive traditions of the stage,” Ephraim Katz wrote, “are all the more remarkable” given his theatrical roots.

  Quantity alone did not make Griffith’s early film career so extraordinary. From the very start, he showed a remarkable instinctive understanding of the creative potential of the medium, using inherently cinematic techniques—changing camera angles, intercutting, crosscutting, parallel action, camera movement, dramatic lighting, the close-up, the full shot, rhythmic editing, etc. He wasn’t the first to employ these techniques, but he was the first to use them consciously and creatively, taking the linguistic components of film and molding them into a syntax, thus giving cinema an articulate language all its own.283

  Griffith was extremely fortunate to have ground-breaking German-American cinematographer Johann Gottlieb Wilhelm “Billy” Bitzer as his close collaborator. The duo became the best-known director-cameraman pair in the history of American film. As close as brothers, they had a chemistry unmatched in the industry. Griffith’s intricate stories were brought to life by Bitzer’s photography, culminating in The Birth of a Nation (funded in part by Bitzer’s life savings) and Intolerance. Griffith and Bitzer worked together so closely on so many productions that it is difficult to determine which one contributed what to their many joint ventures.

  Bitzer’s innovations include the fade out, the iris shot, soft focus photography, filming entirely under artificial lighting, lighting close-ups and long shots to create mood, and the perfection of matte photography. Bitzer died in Hollywood in 1944 in relative obscurity.

  As early as 1909 Griffith gathered a group of young actors and rehearsed them constantly to extract performances more suitable to the magnifying eye of the camera than the exaggerated delivery then used on the stage. He quickly developed a stock company of players that included such future stars as Mary Pickford, sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Blanche Sweet, Mabel Normand, Mae Marsh, Henry B. Walthall, Lionel Barrymore, Donald Crisp, Mack Sennett, Owen Moore, Wallace Reid, and Harry Carey.

  In 1910 Griffith began taking his company to California during the winter to take advantage of the sunny climate and great variety of background scenery. His In Old California (1910, 17 mins.) was the first motion picture ever shot in the then-tiny village of Hollywood. Until 2004, the first film believed to have been made there was Jewish director Cecil B. DeMille’s race-mixing (white/Indian) drama The Squaw Man (1914).

  Ambitious to produce bigger films than Biograph was willing to undertake, Griffith left the company in the summer of 1913, taking most of his regular actors and the best of the technical crews—most importantly, cameraman Billy Bitzer—with him.

  As an actor and filmmaker in New York City and Hollywood, Griffith necessarily interacted often with Jews. Though raised a Methodist, Griffith, a Freemason, was not particularly religious. At times his films glorified a secular kind of “Christianity,” but weren’t in any sense doctrinally or theologically orthodox.

  In 1919 Griffith, Mary Pickford, Charlie Chaplin, and Pickford’s husband Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. founded United Artists Corp. (UA) to free themselves from the tightening grip over the industry being exerted by Hungarian-born Jew Adolph Zukor, founder and head of Famous Players-Lasky (later Paramount Pictures).

  Although UA was perceived as non-Jewish, Chaplin was a Jew (or part Jew)284 and Pickford was married to Douglas Fairbanks, a half-Jew. The head of the firm was Hiram Abrams, a former president of Paramount Pictures.

  Because so many of Griffith’s films for United Artists lost money, he came into conflict with his partners. After surrendering creative control to work briefly for Adolph Zukor, Griffith switched to making films at his own studio in Mamaroneck, New York for several years.

  He returned to UA in 1927 without regaining creative control. UA’s chief executive by that time was Russian-born Jew Joseph Schenck, later the founder and head of 20th Century-Fox. In order to win financial backing for his movies, Griffith had to sign a contract forfeiting to Schenck the voting rights in his remaining shares of UA stock, as well as final script approval. His films for Schenck were unsuccessful. The industry had changed, and the highly-regimented, factory-like studio system robbed Griffith of his independence and creativity.

  THE DEPICTION OF RACE IN GRIFFITH’S EARLY WORK

  As noted, Griffith directed hundreds of shorts for Biograph prior to making The Birth of a Nation, many of which contained identifiable racial themes. White ethnics, Indians, Chinese, Mexican Americans, blacks, Jews and other groups were featured in these films. (Note: the early shorts I’ve personally watched are marked with an asterisk [*] in the following discussion; I have watched all of the longer films mentioned in any detail later.)

  INDIANS

  American Indians constitute the non-white group represented most frequently (roughly 30 films) in Griffith’s Biograph productions. His treatment of Amerindians was consistently positive. Anti-white film critic Richard Schickel wrote that Griffith’s films were “notable for their extremely sympathetic treatment of the Indian as a natural nobleman.”

  Most Griffith melodramas present Indians as victims of explicitly white—not “American,” not “Army,” not “settler” or any similar euphemism—cruelty and immorality.

  In the Biograph films Indians, the victims of white assaults, murders, and expropriation, elicit sympathy, while pioneers, soldiers, and miners are portrayed as rapacious malefactors.

  The Call of the Wild (1908) features an attractive Jim Thorpe-like protagonist, an Indian football hero and honor graduate of Carlisle Indian College who falls in love with his white mentor’s daughter. She rejects his advances. After backsliding and intending to kidnap the young woman, the Indian acquits himself honorably.

  The Redman’s View* (1909, 15 mins.) scornfully portrays “The Conquerors” (white men) cruelly driving Indians off their land in a manner reminiscent of the “Trail of Tears”: “Is there no land where we may rest our heads?” Whites even force the heroine, a beautiful young squaw (Lottie Pickford), to remain and toil (and perhaps more) for them.

  Ramona: A Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indian* (1910, 16 mins.) was based on an 1884 novel by Helen Hunt Jackson about a half-white, half-Indian orphan (Mary Pickford) who suffers racial discrimination in Southern California after the Mexican-American War. Griffith, who starred as the Indian Alessandro in a traveling stage production of Ramona in California in 1905, was intimately familiar with the book and its theater adaptations.

  There are pronounced themes of interracial romance and sex (during marriage) between the half-breed Ramona (with whom white female readers and filmgoers were intended to identify—Ramona still thinks she’s white when she falls in love across the color line) and an Indian (played by white actor Henry B. Walthall) and a Mexican man.

  An immediate bestseller, Jackson’s novel was immensely popular. Sixty years after publication, 600,000 copies had been sold. To date there have been over 300 reissues, and the book has never been out of print. It has been filmed four times (first by Griffith), broadcast over the radio, and in 2000 aired as a Mexican telenovela on TV. The Ramona Pageant, an outdoor play performed annually since 1923 in Hemet, California, is the longest-running, largest outdoor play in the United States, and the official state play of California.

  Ramona was a fictional follow-up to Jackson’s non-fiction A Century of Dishonor (1881), a study of white mistreatment of the Indians. The novelist hoped to manipulate readers’ emotions and arouse sympathy and concern for the red man as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done for Negroes.

  “I am going to write a novel,” she declared, “in which will be set forth some Indian experiences in a way to move people’s hearts. People will read a novel when they will not read serious books.” And: “If I could write a story that would do for the Indian one-hundredth part what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the Negro, I would be thankful the rest of my life.”

  Ra
mona cast white Americans as villains and Indians in the ever-popular, stereotypical role of noble red men. As the movie’s subtitle indicates—A Story of the White Man’s Injustice to the Indian—Griffith’s movie is explicitly, not implicitly, racial, accounting for such intertitles as “The whites devastate Alessandro’s village” and “The whites’ persecution: ‘These lands belong to us.’” Such was the story whose movie rights Griffith purchased. The novel written by a white woman as an Uncle Tom’s Cabin for Indians achieved its intended purpose.

  A review of Ramona for Moving Picture World in 1910 described a capacity audience of appreciative white businessmen at the film’s premiere. Mary Pickford’s brother Jack played a boy in the movie, and another of Griffith’s stock players, future comedy producer Mack Sennett, portrayed a white exploiter.

  The Squaw’s Love* (1911, 12 mins.) is an example of a purely Indian tale with no whites involved. Some of Griffith’s surviving Biograph shorts, including this one, lack the original intertitles. This tale, apparently about lovers from warring tribes, is, like most silent films, almost unintelligible without them. But there is certainly nothing racist about it.

  A white prospector wins the love of Indian royalty in The Chief’s Daughter (1911), but “cruelly casts her aside” when his white sweetheart arrives from the East.

  The good-Indians bad-whites theme resurfaces in Heredity: The Call of the Blood Answered (1912, 17 mins.). Harry Carey plays a “white renegade” father who buys a squaw. The woman gives birth to their child, who is raised by Indians. As he reaches maturity, “the racial difference between father and son is felt.” After the renegade father sells bad whiskey and inferior guns to the tribe, the son repudiates him, the white villain dies, and the young man and his mother are “reclaimed by their own.”

  At least Heredity correctly recognizes which group the son properly belongs to—though only, one suspects, because it is the more “righteous” one.

  At the beginning of The Massacre* (1914, 30 mins.) white soldiers ruthlessly slaughter the inhabitants of an Indian village; in retaliation, Indians massacre a wagon train of white settlers. The cavalry arrives too late—only the heroine and her baby survive, buried (literally) beneath a pile of corpses. It is hard to draw a clear-cut racial lesson from this movie; perhaps it seeks to demonstrate the futility of war.

  The lone pro-white exception among Griffith’s many Indian films appears to be The Battle at Elderbush Gulch* (1913, 30 mins.) featuring Mae Marsh, Lillian Gish, Henry B. Walthall, Lionel Barrymore, Harry Carey, Elmo Lincoln (subsequently the silent screen’s Tarzan), and Blanche Sweet. It provides 30 minutes’ blessed relief from the noble red man narrative. After getting drunk and feasting on dogs, the Indians rouse themselves from their alcoholic stupor to viciously attack white settlers, driven by “the ever ready spark to hatred of revenge.”

  But even here a lowly, ill-treated Mexican, not a white man, risks all to ride courageously through enemy lines to summon the troops.

  BLACKS

  Ironically, in light of his reputation, blacks do not figure prominently in Griffith’s oeuvre.

  The Zulu’s Heart (1908) is the earliest movie set in South Africa. A family of white settlers is attacked by a tribe of Zulus (played by white actors in blackface). The father is killed, but the little girl wins the affection of an upright Negro warrior who recently lost his own daughter. Ultimately, he intervenes to save the white mother’s life as well.

  In Swords and Hearts (1911, 17 mins.), dashing Confederate Hugh Frazier, reduced to poverty, is saved by his loyal black retainer, Old Ben, who rescues the family strongbox from a fire and from Frazier’s enemies.

  In 1911’s Rose of Kentucky, Klan nightriders are the villains.

  Easily Griffith’s most extensive cinematic treatment of blacks before The Birth of a Nation was 1911’s His Trust: The Faithful Devotion and Self-Sacrifice of An Old Negro Servant* (14 mins.) and its sequel, His Trust Fulfilled* (17 mins.). Together the films present a tale of devotion and self-sacrifice by an old Negro servant who, faithful to his Confederate master’s charge, cares for the soldier’s widow and daughter during and after the Civil War.

  Old George is the only black character featured prominently in a Griffith film prior to The Birth of a Nation, which likewise depicts noble blacks who remain loyal to white families. Some scenes, admittedly, look funny today, with actors in blackface dancing jigs of joy as they celebrate their white masters’ leave-taking. On the other hand, scenes of drunken, looting, burning, vandalizing bluecoats are never seen in other Hollywood films.

  Not only are there no bad blacks in these two movies, but the Southerners (never mind the reprobate, pillaging Yankees!) are revealed as completely callous and self-absorbed. All the old, broken black gentleman gets for his lifetime of selfless loyalty is a hearty handshake from a white attorney at the end! The young girl he sacrificed everything for ignores him entirely.

  How many theatergoers felt any sympathy for the whites in His Trust and His Trust Fulfilled? It is virtually impossible to do. By not making whites the stereotypical bullies of the Indian pictures, Griffith damns them all the more completely.

  JEWS

  The script for Old Isaac, the Pawnbroker (1908, 10 mins.), directed by Wallace McCutcheon, is attributed to Griffith, who’s also listed as a supporting actor; the second half of the plotline is virtually identical to the second half of Romance of a Jewess. The studio’s 1908 capsule summary read: “The portrayal of [Jewish] charity is the theme of the Biograph’s story, which dissipates the calumnies launched at the Hebrew race.”

  Forever “persecuted,” yet forever the beneficiary of endless, tear-jerking propaganda!

  Romance of a Jewess* (1908, 16 mins.) is much more crudely made and acted than Griffith’s first film the same year, The Adventures of Dollie. A pawnbroker disowns his daughter because he objects to her choice of a spouse. Insufficient intertitles make the story difficult to follow. Both direction and script are attributed to Griffith by historians (the film itself has no screen credits), though I have doubts about this—the film has a non-Griffith feel to it. It contains brief exterior shots of a teeming Jewish neighborhood in New York City, reportedly the Lower East Side.

  A Child of the Ghetto (1910, 15 mins.) is an interracial romance between a New York Jewess and a rural white farmer. The Jewess, a seamstress, flees to the country after she is wronged by the son of the Jewish factory owner she works for. Exterior ghetto scenes were shot on Rivington Street on New York’s Lower East Side. In the opinion of a modern Jewish reviewer, “The city is seen as a place of hardship, exploitation, and false accusation, while the country offers health, trust, beauty, and love.” Again, the film promotes interracial mixing of Jews and whites, albeit opposite from the real-life pattern of Jewish men with white women.

  Griffith’s final film for Biograph was Judith of Bethulia* (1914), a Ben-Hur-like Gentile conceptualization of Old Testament Jews. One hour long, it was America’s first feature-length movie. Filmed in 1913, Judith was a large-scale production for its day. The story, from the Book of Judith, an Old Testament apocryphal text not included in the Protestant Bible, was partly adapted from a poem by Thomas Bailey Aldrich.

  During the siege of the Jewish city of Bethulia by the Assyrians, a Jewess devises a plan to save her beleaguered tribe. She disguises herself as a harem girl and slips into the Gentile camp, where she seduces Holofernes, King Nebuchadnezzar’s general, and beheads him while he is passed out drunk. The assassin returns to her city a heroine, an assessment the audience is invited to share.

  MISCELLANEOUS GROUPS

  Griffith’s first film as a director was The Adventures of Dollie* (1908, 12 mins.). A little white girl is kidnapped by a Gypsy and his wife after the mother, portrayed by Griffith’s first wife, actress Linda Arvidson, refuses to purchase the man’s wares. The Gypsy seals the child in a wooden barrel, but after floating downriver she is rescued. Since the villains are Roma, it must constitute “hate.”

 
In The Greaser’s Gauntlet (1908), José, “a handsome young Mexican,” is the noble hero.

  Charlie Lee is the protagonist of That Chink at Golden Gulch: A Chinaman’s Sacrifice Through Gratitude (1910). His description as “a saffron-skinned Pagan, his soul is white and real red blood pulsates his heart,” suggests that race is only skin deep. But if that is the case, non-whites can also be evil: Pong Lee in The Fatal Hour: A Stirring Incident of the Chinese White-Slave Trade (1908) is a “Mephistophelian saffron-skinned varlet” who trades in white women but receives his just desserts in the end.

  After completing Judith of Bethulia, Griffith left Biograph for Reliance-Majestic Studios in Hollywood, California. The Birth of a Nation and Broken Blossoms were partly or wholly filmed there, and the gargantuan sets for Intolerance were erected across the street. Griffith directed four undistinguished films while preparing to shoot his masterpiece.

  THE BIRTH OF A NATION

  The landmark of American cinema is an epic three-hour long intersecting story of two white families, one Northern, one Southern, across three periods of time: the antebellum years, the Civil War, and the Reconstruction Era. It was based on an intensely exciting best-selling novel, ex-Baptist preacher Thomas F. Dixon’s The Clansman (1905).

  Ephraim Katz called Birth

  a superlative epic of the Civil War which many historians consider the single most important film in the development of cinema as an art. It was certainly the most influential, a stunning summary of all that had been known about filmmaking at the time, and, much more, an elaborately constructed, complex production that remains effective to this day. Unanimously hailed as a great work of art, it was also an outstanding financial success.285