So this is D.W. Griffith’s follow-up to his infamously ultra-racist Birth of a Nation. But it’s not clear — as in, different sources say directly opposite things — whether this is kind of a mea culpa for his racist movie, or a fuck-you to the “intolerant” reaction to it, a “SO MUCH FOR THE TOLERANT LEFT” kind of thing.

But the good news is, the connection between the two movies is really more of a background detail than anything that comes out in the watching. Because what Griffith is doing here is illustrating the theme of “intolerance” with four examples throughout history, so it’s basically interweaving four different, mostly-unrelated movies together, specifically:

  1. This GIANT FUCKING EPIC costume drama about the fall of Babylon. (The “intolerance” hook is that priests of one god betrayed the city to Persia because they were intolerant of another god being worshipped.) This part of it is actually super-impressive just in its scope, because like they have these epic sets that apparently are actually real-ish — like, they built hundred-foot-tall walls ‘n’ shit — and giant setpieces with literally thousands of extras. Like serious A+ for technical/throwing-money-around achievement, especially considering how early this is.

Dramatically, it’s less successful: There are characters we’re supposed to care about, but there’s not a lot of reason to, and the titles keep telling us what’s going to happen before we see it, so there’s no suspense. All spectacle, nothing else.

  1. This retelling of the Jesus story. Which tbh is barely even in the movie at all — it’s like three scenes total — and jumps from the wedding where he wined it up to forgiving an adulteress and telling people not to throw stones to getting crucified. The intolerance in question is, uh, intolerance toward Jesus, I guess?

  2. A thing in France where Huguenots get massacred (the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, apparently). The intolerance is pretty obvious here, but this also has little reason to exist in the movie. Like, there’s a Huguenot couple that’s going to get married, but then the night before they do, the massacre order goes out, and he manages to get little “safe passage” armbands, and runs to get her to safety, but she gets killed before he gets there and then he dies too. There’s a sketch of a worthwhile story there, but it happens too quickly to really work.

  3. A story set in the “modern” (aka literally a hundred years ago, when this movie was made) world, which involves a temperance league that shuts down drinking and dancing and what-not (intolerance!), but then to get their funding, one of their members (a rich spinster) cuts wages at the factory she owns, which causes a strike, and there’s a bloody shootout, and people die/lose their job, and then the main dude takes up a life of crime because what’s left, and the woman marries him but then he goes to jail and her baby is taken away by the temperance league for its own good (intolerance!) and then he gets out of jail and…

Okay, you know what I’m not even going to try to explain this, because it’s just a chain of melodramatic events that are all absurd, but the UPSHOT is that it ends with a race to get to the jail with a pardon before he’s hanged, and this is probably one of the most legitimately dramatically satisfying sequences in the movie, because it’s tense and tautly edited.

Apparently, before Birth of a Nation blew up big, the movie Griffith was making was just the modern part of this, and all the rest of it got added because suddenly he had a lot more money available. Honestly, he probably should have stuck with just making the modern movie, because it’s the only one of the four that’s really developed and has characters that you might possibly care about. (In fact, after this movie was a commercial failure, Griffith released separated-out versions of the Babylon story and the modern story, which apparently did kinda okay-ish.)

I was super-prepared to hate this, because c’mon, D.W. Griffith. But I’m actually kind of impressed with it. I wouldn’t say it’s good in any real modern sense, but the sheer spectacle of the Babylon part and the tension of the end of the modern part are awfully impressive for a movie from this early in movie history. And despite Griffith’s (apparently well-deserved) reputation, this is no more offensive than any random piece of movie-making from its time, and actually less offensive than many.