by Greg Johnson
A powerful, nationwide newspaper campaign initiated the process of bringing the movement to heel. A 21-article investigative “exposé” launched by the Jewish Pulitzer family through their New York World (edited by influential Jew Herbert Bayard Swope) and St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspapers won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 1922; in 1999 a group of academics voted the series one of the top 100 journalism stories of the 20th century. In short order, by 1925-26, the Second Klan was broken, impressive proof of the enormous power of the anti-white element in the United States even at that early date.
Continuing Jewish and Left-wing obsession with the film is due to the keen realization that cinema, and subsequently radio and television, is far more powerful at instilling beliefs and altering behavior than print or plays ever could be. Incensed that a viscerally powerful pro-white message had been disseminated to a mass audience, and shocked and angered by its social effect, they determined that such a thing would never happen again.
That, not “racism,” is what the continuing furor over The Birth of a Nation is really about.
INTOLERANCE
I knew I had to watch Intolerance (1916), a classic movie in its own right, in conjunction with The Birth of a Nation because it is so often described as Griffith’s defensive reaction to the fierce criticism directed at his Civil War epic. Indeed, its title strongly suggests an attempt to curry favor with socially powerful accusers. So my expectations for it were not high. The running time of the version I watched (four major versions are extant) was 3 hours and 18 minutes.
Intolerance was particularly influential in the Soviet Union, where dictator Vladimir Lenin ordered it imported in 1919. It was studied closely by film students and directors, including Jewish Communist moviemaker Serge Eisenstein.
Famous for its massive sets—the outdoor set for the Babylon segment was the largest ever built up to that time—and thousands of extras (16,000 in one scene), Intolerance is a long, complex film dramatizing examples of intolerance from ancient times to the present.
Four distinct stories from different epochs are interwoven—ancient Babylon, the crucifixion of Christ, the 16th century St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre of Protestant Huguenots by French Catholics, and a contemporary American tale of a young couple victimized by poverty, self-righteous social reformers, and an inflexible legal system.
There are over 50 transitions between segments as Griffith cuts back and forth among the stories. The symbolic bridging device is a recurring cameo shot of Lillian Gish representing Eternal Motherhood rocking a cradle, accompanied by an intertitle paraphrasing lines from Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”:
“Endlessly rocks the cradle, uniter of here and hereafter. Chanter of sorrows and joys.”
Unlike Birth, which was Hollywood’s biggest moneymaker before 1939’s Gone with the Wind, Intolerance was a box office failure. Audiences found the multiple plots confusing. Nevertheless, the movie greatly influenced later filmmakers and is today considered a masterpiece of the silent cinema.
Though the structure of the film is a bit unwieldy, each of the four unrelated (save thematically) stories are chronologically linear, so the overall effect is nevertheless clear. Structural disproportion is more noticeable. The Babylonian and modern segments are the longest by far, while the St. Bartholomew’s Day and New Testament stories are comparatively underdeveloped. Unsurprisingly, the segment about Jesus is the shortest, as well as the most muted and circumspect of the four.
Silent movie actress Mae Marsh, who had major roles in Birth and Intolerance, emoted with her entire body in both movies. She repeatedly hopped up and down or stamped her feet in ways intended to be girlish and endearing, but that were merely irksome. Constance Talmadge emulated Marsh, albeit with her own unique variations.
Intolerance does not look like the mea culpa it is typically described as being, despite an introductory intertitle proclaiming that each of the four stories demonstrates “how hatred and intolerance [note the lingo—how long have those clichés been around?], through all the ages, have battled against love and charity.”
The long Babylonian segment isn’t so much about intolerance as treachery and betrayal. Set in 539 BC, it portrays the conquest of Prince Belshazzar’s Babylon by Cyrus the Great of Persia. The city’s fall is brought about by a fifth column (“the great conspiracy”) within the city led by a priest of the Babylonian god Bel-Marduk.289
Belshazzar, though described as an “apostle of tolerance and religious freedom,” comes across as a typical Oriental potentate. Lavish scenes of luxury and sexual decadence abound. Griffith is not condemnatory. On the contrary, he seems to relish them. (Judith of Bethulia contained an orgy scene.) The dissolute Babylonians are the heroes, the martial Cyrus the bad guy.
As the Persians force their way into Belshazzar’s inner sanctum, the Prince permits his favorite harem slave to slay several of his other women on the theory that they have a duty to die with their master. Before the Persians seize him, Belshazzar commits ritual suicide with a knife.
The contemporary sequence in Intolerance takes particular aim at puritanical female WASP reformers. (“When women cease to attract men, they often turn to Reform as a second choice.”) Like the contemporary Left, the “uplifters” insist that “We must have laws to make people good.” Griffith equates such people with Pharisees. On balance, the director appears not to be a fan of war, prisons, or child and family services. Contrariwise, he is anti-Prohibition and (if I may say so) “pro”-prostitution.
Given the concerted attacks upon Griffith as a “racist,” the most interesting segment of Intolerance from an ideological (though not artistic or narrative) perspective is the Christian one, even though it is the shortest, least obtrusive, and most guarded of the four. It briefly portrays the Passion, and Jesus is called “the Man of Men, the greatest enemy of intolerance.”
In addition, it is the Pharisees who embody intolerance in the story. One is played by Austrian-born Jew Erich von Stroheim, who was an assistant director on Intolerance and later became a famous filmmaker in his own right.
The Pharisees wear tefillin (phylacteries, small black leather boxes containing scrolls of parchment inscribed with verses from the Torah) on their foreheads, strongly hinting at Griffith’s familiarity with Orthodox Jews from his many years in New York City and Hollywood. Swaying, one Jew (Griffith calls the Pharisees “hypocrites”) mouths, “Oh Lord, thank thee that I am better than other men.”
Intolerance closes with an idealistic vision similar to Birth’s. In the clouds above a modern battlefield, white robed pacifist angels appear. Battling soldiers drop their rifles and turn their gaze heavenward. An open vehicle with passengers waving from its sides sails through the clouds. Brilliant light from above descends toward the exterior of a prison. The prison walls dissolve into open countryside with a flowery field in the foreground and mountains in the background. Prisoners are freed.
Battlefield soldiers lift their arms to the sky as clouds with angels descend toward them. Two children sit on an unused cannon that’s sprouting flowers, and people dance in a grassy field. A little boy and girl play in the foreground. The boy puts flowers in the girl’s hair, she blows him a kiss, and they hug. A brilliant white cross appears in the sky.
The intertitles read:
“When cannon and prison bars wrought in the fires of intolerance [disappear]—
“And perfect love shall bring peace forevermore.
“Instead of prison walls—Bloom flowery fields.”
Outlawry of war, universal democracy, brotherhood, peace on earth, united nations, world federalism, egalitarianism, and feminism. Such is the utopianism featured in the epilogues of Birth and Intolerance, lachrymose sentimentality that is invariably joined in real life with the utmost cruelty.
War is contemptible. Nevertheless, grownups who indulge in maudlin fantasies should be severely chastised. Children should be spanked.
BROKEN BLOSSOMS
B
roken Blossoms or The Yellow Man and the Girl (1919) is considered the third most important D. W. Griffith film after The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916). It is fundamental to any analysis of his work from a racial perspective because of its flagrant promotion of race mixing.
As previously noted, Intolerance really does not come off as a mea culpa for the “racism” of Birth of a Nation. Broken Blossoms, on the other hand, is (to all appearances) Griffith’s belated response to the loud, obnoxious, obdurate critics of the classic American film. In it we see a marked intensification of the harmful racial themes of the early films as Griffith pushes his material to the limits of social acceptability—near-open advocacy of hybridization via defection of the white female. Today this theme is so pervasive that it constitutes one of Hollywood’s, pornography’s, and Madison Avenue’s most obsessive tropes.
(It should be pointed out that the previous year critics had singled out for praise in Griffith’s war movie The Greatest Thing in Life [1918] a scene in which Irish American actor Robert Harron, who played a bigoted white officer, “overcame his prejudice” in a burst of racial repentance and kissed a dying male Negro soldier on the battlefield.)
D. W. Griffith was the master of melodrama. It is not widely understood today, I think, that this was the genre in which he specialized. Before watching his films I certainly was not aware of it. To fully grasp this indispensable aspect of his art, including Broken Blossoms, it is helpful to view his most pristine (in the genre sense) feature-length melodrama of all, Way Down East (1920), based on an 1898 play by Lottie Blair Parker that was one of the most popular successes of the American stage, touring the country for two decades and thousands of performances.
Like Broken Blossoms, the movie starred Lillian Gish and Richard Barthelmess. Second only to The Birth of a Nation in box office receipts among Griffith’s films, Way Down East was the fourth highest-grossing silent movie in cinema history. The Birth of a Nation was number one. (I’m excluding 2011’s The Artist, which now ranks number one in dollar terms, because it is non-comparable in too many ways.)
Due to the unfashionableness of melodrama today, many readers probably would not relate sympathetically to Way Down East. Nevertheless, it greatly illuminates Griffith’s work as a whole and melodrama as a once universally accepted theatrical and movie genre.
The Birth of a Nation and Broken Blossoms are both melodramas in the Way Down East mode—with the twist that they ideologically subvert the form, Birth from the Right, and Blossoms from the culturally dominant anti-white Left.
Blossoms is based on Thomas Burke’s short story “The Chink and the Child” from his collection Limehouse Nights (1916). The book depicted interracial relationships between Chinese men and white women.
Much of Broken Blossoms was shot on two small interior sets—a departure for Griffith, who preferred exterior sets and location shooting. Though made in less than three weeks on a modest budget, the film took several months to edit. “I can’t look at the damn thing,” the director said, “it depresses me so.”
The movie, which was a critical (not surprising, given its implicitly anti-white and anti-family themes) and financial success, is a tragic tale of love and suffering in the seedy Limehouse district of London. (London’s Chinatown centered on Limehouse in London’s East End.)
Lillian Gish, aged 25, plays an illegitimate 15-year-old girl, Lucy Burrows, who lives with her abusive father, good-for-nothing prizefighter Battling Burrows, played by young, powerfully-built Donald Crisp (later a well-known character actor in the talkies), of whom she is rightly terrified.
The Chinese hero, referred to only as The Yellow Man (Richard Barthelmess), is an otherworldly paragon (save for his addiction to opium, the kind of flaw that did not particularly trouble Griffith), while Battling Burrows is a vicious, depraved emblem of Anglo-Saxon brutality beyond hope of redemption. The identification of the male protagonist only as “Yellow Man” accentuates the film’s insistent interracial agitprop.
Caught between Good and Evil is the little, victimized heroine, the epitome of the wronged, powerless female.
The story opens in China, where the idealistic young Buddhist acolyte dreams of emigrating to the West to convert violent whites to the peaceful ways of the East. This is not as bad as it sounds. The Yellow Man does move to London, but quickly fails in his mission. Alone in a strange land, he is compelled to earn a living, and opens a small curio shop.
One day two Christian missionaries pause to speak to him. One says, “My brother leaves for China tomorrow to convert the heathen.” The look on Barthelemess’ face is priceless—no racism, contempt, or condescension at all as he responds ironically, “I—I wish him luck.” He knows the man will be no more successful than he was.
The gentle shopkeeper-hero, now a failure—a broken blossom—frequents an opium den to anesthetize his sorrow and loneliness: “Chinese, Malays, Lascars [Asian Indians], where the Orient squats at the portals of the West.” Griffith conspicuously shows young English women in this dissolute environment, pressing themselves upon indifferent Asian opium addicts, impliedly trading sexual favors for dope or money. I noticed no English men in the scenes.
Despite an intertitle condemning the dive as a “scarlet house of sin,” Griffith’s visual imagery conveys a contradictory message of sensuality rather than censure. One senses a certain hypocrisy in such scenes, an attitude more commonly associated with Jewish director Cecil B. DeMille because of his similar moralizing yet salacious displays of onscreen decadence.
Perhaps relevant here, Griffith became an alcoholic, and his unsuccessful last film, The Struggle (1931), a talkie, explored the ravages of alcoholism (and characteristically attacked Prohibition). Though not highly regarded, the cheaply-made independent film funded with proceeds from an unexpected tax refund is seen by some as a precursor to The Lost Weekend (1945).
Hapless Lucy Burrows—the other broken blossom of the tale—longs to escape her wretched existence, but cannot, trapped as she is in a poverty-stricken, adolescent hell.
Through his selection of subject matter, Griffith savages the white family, just as Jewish director Richard Brooks later savaged Christianity in Elmer Gantry (1960). This is why a contemporary writer praises Blossom’s depiction of “domestic violence with such unvarnished, unforgiving ferocity.”
“Whatever you do, dearie,” a married woman counsels the girl, “don’t get married.” (Men are so terrible.) Unlike white girls today, Lucy is also, an intertitle informs viewers, “warned as strongly by the ladies of the street against their profession.”
Meanwhile, the Yellow Man surreptitiously observes her in the street, secretly adoring her: “The Yellow Man watched Lucy often. The beauty which all Limehouse missed smote him to the heart.”
The perpetually terrified child is sometimes beaten to within an inch of her life by her bestial, hard-drinking father. After one particularly brutal encounter, Lucy, physically and emotionally battered, collapses unconscious in the Yellow Man’s shop after wandering the streets aimlessly. He carries her to his apartment above the store and dresses her in Chinese robes: “Blue and yellow silk caressing white skin—her beauty so long hidden shines out like a poem.”
In an unintentionally humorous (by today’s standards) query, Lucy asks while gently stroking the Yellow Man’s cheek, “What makes you so good to me, Chinky?”
Although Griffith approached interracial physical intimacy as closely as he could, cinema convention in 1919 forbade its explicit depiction. An intertitle therefore emphasizes (dishonestly, given the film’s underlying aim) that the Yellow Man’s love remains ethereal, “a pure and holy thing—even his worst foe says this.”
As the Chinese hero tenderly nurses Lucy back to health, a chaste romance blossoms between the two, awakening powerful feelings of love both thought had forever been denied them. The Asian lovingly thinks of his “alabaster” Lucy as “White Blossom.”
The girl’s father, training for an upcoming bout, le
arns of his daughter’s presence in the Chinaman’s shop from an acquaintance, assumes the worst, and becomes enraged. He vows to set matters straight after the fight that evening.
Griffith accentuates the Englishman’s iniquity by stressing his racism. The fact that he opposes race-mixing for his daughter is used against him: “Battling discovers parental rights—A Chink after his kid! He’ll learn him!” The evildoer accuses his grievously wronged daughter: “You! With a dirty Chink!”
To further drive home the point, viewers are informed: “Above all, Battling hates those not born in the same country as himself.”
In a drunken rage, Lucy’s father visits the Chinaman’s shop (the proprietor is out), trashing it before dragging his daughter back to their grimy rooms to punish her. Fearing for her life, Lucy locks herself in a closet to avoid his assault. This is the famous closet scene, where Gish writhes in terror as Crisp batters down the door to get at her.
Returning to his shop, which is now in a shambles and the girl missing, the Yellow Man seizes a revolver and rushes to Lucy’s aid as Burrows is breaking into the cupboard. But he arrives too late. The girl is already dead from the brutal beating her father has administered. (Unhappy endings are common in Griffith melodramas.)
In most un-Buddha-like fashion, the angelic Chinaman murders the bestial dad.
The Yellow Man gathers Lucy’s lifeless body into his arms and carries her through the fog-shrouded streets of Chinatown back to his apartment. Devastated by Lucy’s death, knowing he will be arrested and jailed, and probably executed, he performs a religious ceremony before committing ritual suicide by plunging a knife into his chest.