Film Information

D. W. Griffith had a vision of the movies as the greatest spiritual force the world had ever known. Just one year after the huge success of Birth of a Nation, he was emboldened to prove his faith in the new medium with the superproduction Intolerance.

Four separate stories are interwoven: the fall of Babylon, the death of Christ, the massacre of the Huguenots, and a contemporary (early 20th Century) drama -- all crosscut and building with enormous energy to a thrilling chase and finale. Through the juxtaposition of these well-known sagas, Griffith joyously makes clear his markedly deterministic view of history, namely that the suffering of innocents makes possible the salvation of the current generation, symbolized by the boy in the modern love story.

Griffith's concept and execution of Intolerance are awesome, but audiences of 1916 were generally bewildered by his lofty intentions. He aimed too high and spent the rest of his career paying off the large debts that his vision had incurred.

With Miriam Cooper, Mae Marsh, Margery Wilson, Constance Talmadge, Robert Harron, Elmer Clifton, Tully Marshall

"Intolerance is the greatest motion picture of the silent era, if not the greatest motion picture in the history of the cinema." - Anthony Slide, Fifty Great American Silent Films

• Filmed introduction of Orson Welles
  
  
• Excerpts from Cabiria(1914) and The Last Days of Pompeii(1914), two films that inspired Griffith to make Intolerance
  
  
• Text excerpts from "Away With Meddlers: A Declaration of Independence" and "The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America," two pamphlets published by D. W. Griffith at the time of Intolerance's release
  
  
• Excerpt from The Fall of Babylon (1916) which offers an alternate (happy) ending to the Babylonian sequence.
  
  
• About the score