Intolerance (movie)

Intolerance is a silent film directed by D.W. Griffith in 1916. The film, considered one of the great masterpieces of the Silent Era, was made in response to critics, who claimed that Griffith's 1915 epic, The Birth of a Nation was racist.

The most spectacular film of all time, Intolerance was a colossal undertaking filled with monumental sets, lavish period costumes, and requiring more than 3,000 thousand extras. The film consisted of four distinct but parallel stories that demonstrated mankind's intolerance during four different ages in world history. The timeline covered approximately 2,500 years, beginning with:

1. The "Babylonian" period (539 B.C) depicted the fall of Babylon as a result of a new but powerful religion filled with intolerance;
2. the "Judean" era (circa A.D. 27), recounts how intolerance led to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ;
3. The French Renaissance (1572), tells of the failure of the Edict of Toleration that led to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre;
4. Modern America (1914), demonstrated how various forms of intolerance helped ruin the lives of Americans.

Actual costs to produce Intolerance are unknown, but best estimates range close to $2 million (around $3 billion in today's dollars), an astronomical sum in 1916 that could never be risked by any studio in today’s dollar equivalent.

• Directed and written by D.W. Griffith
• Assistant directors: Allan Dwan, Erich von Stroheim, Christy Cabanne, Tod Browning, Jack Conway, Victor Fleming, W.S. Van Dyke, Elmer Clifton, Monte Blue, Mike Siebert, George Siegmann
• Cinematography: by G.W. Bitzer and Karl Brown
• Editing: James and Rose Smith
• Original running time: Approximately 8 hours
• Average running time of currently available copies: just under 3 hours

The cast was enormous and included:

• Lillian Gish
• Mae Marsh
• Sam De Grasse
• Constance Talmadge
• Natalie Talmadge
• Douglas Fairbanks, Sr
• Owen Moore
• Wilfred Lucas

The film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

A detailed account of the film’s making is told in the William M. Drew 1986 book titled .

External link

• Summary and discussion of the movie at Filmsite.org, a website about classical American movies