Father’s Day… Judith of Bethulia (1914), BFI with Wendy Hiscocks

The Variety reviewer was awestruck: "It is not easy to confess one's self unequal to a given task, but to pen an adequate description of the Biograph's production of 'Judith of Bethulia' is, to say the least, a full grown man's job." …  cripes: am I “man enough” to blog this one?

Today was DW day at the BFI at the start of their month-long season celebrating “Cinema’s Great Pioneer” which will include screenings of all his major works including a tie-in with UCL’s three-day conference on Birth of a Nation: the Father of Cinema celebrated, just two Sundays before Father’s Day… Really BFI, you could have waited!

David Llewelyn Wark Griffith, probably not a descendant of  Rhys ap Gruffydd...

As befits a man little known for brevity, the day started with Kevin Brownlow and David Gill’s three part documentary covering the life and career of the man our Charlie called “the teacher of us all”. DW Griffith: Father of Film, narrated by Lindsay Anderson, included precious interviews with Lillian Gish and Blanche Sweet, who were to feature later, along with cinematographers Karl Brown and Stanley Cortez.

The series documents Griffith’s relatively humble background on a farm – not quite the southern aristocrat he later made himself out to be: “descended from the Kings of Wales…” me too mate! He was a self-made man, self-taught with his school-teacher sister’s help and this makes his achievements all the more remarkable:  as with Chaplin he clearly had exceptional native intelligence and supernatural energy.

Lillian reaches out in The Battle at Elderbush Gulch

There are in-depth appraisals of his blockbusters and the almost unbroken run of success up to Orphans of the Storm (Lillian had me on the verge of tears yet again…) and then his attempts to replicate that success over the next decade. A decline marked by the emergence of new wave of silent-sophisticates such as Lubitsch, Vidor and Von Stroheim.

DW examining the rushes from Abraham Lincoln

But you know, decline is always far worse when viewed retrospectively – from the vantage point of ultimate failure and there are some films such as America and Lincoln that are worthy of deeper investigation.

With scarcely time to grab a sandwich, it was on to the actual films with three fascinating samples of early DW…

The Adventures of Dollie (1908)

A still from Dollie... no where near as clear as the print we saw!

This was Griffith’s first film as a director and was an amazing print: 107 years old and looking as fresh as yesterday! Gypsy tries to steal from a young mother and after being forced away by her husband takes revenge by abducting their daughter. The mean travellers hide her in a barrel which falls off the back of their cart and sails home along the river… NO children were harmed in the making of this film (probably).

The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913)

The calm before the storm... but they did say "no dogs!"

The print quality here was not so good but it showed how far DW had come in the five years since his debut. There’s a battle in a besieged log cabin that prefigures the same in Birth of a Nation. This time the aggressors are Native Americans upset over the killing of the chief’s son. Now, personally I think they gave up on negotiations far too soon but then again, the young man was killed in an argument over whether or not he could eat two dogs belonging to the settlers.

The owner of the dogs was Mae Marsh who eventually emerges as the hero by rescuing Lillian Gish’s baby amidst the smoke and cross-cutting fury of the battle itself. Robert Harron, another Griffith regular, plays Lillian’s heroic husband wearing the kind of moustache often seen on Brookside in the late 1980’s.

Judith of Bethulia (1913)

Blanche Sweet

Marsh, Gish and Harron all re-appear in the main course, Griffith’s first four-reel film made when the director was upping his game in response to long-from competition from Europe and the Italians in particular; Quo Vadis, The Last Days of Pompeii et al.

Biblical stories gave directors more freedom of “expression” and there’s certainly a good deal of passion in this tale from exotic dancers to Judith herself (Blanche Sweet) who spends most of the time breathing in and stretching her arms up wide as she contemplates the manly charm of Assyrian Prince Holofernes (a barely-recognisable Henry B. Walthall) and what she must do to him…

The "Little Colonel" has a wee dram...

There’s also a wonderfully camp turn from J. Jiquel Lanoe as the Prince’s Eunuch Attendant and a dance troop led by Gertrude Bambrick who provides considerable distraction to the viewer if not their jaded leader.

Mae Marsh plays a young woman called Naomi who is in love with a warrior called Nathan (Robert Harron - still with that same ‘tache!) and looks years older than in the previous film. There’s an interesting comment from Lillian Gish in the documentaries about being cast as the “young girl” in Broken Blossoms; she reckoned she was too old and that they should have given the job to an actual girl “they always look five year’s older on screen” (except perhaps Mary P!). Mae Marsh was 19 at the time of filming both.

Mae Marsh thinks about irrigation techniques...

 Naomi and Nathan’s lives are turned upside down when the Assyrians attack and lay siege to their city of Bethulia. Naomi is carted off to the enemy camp whilst Nathan takes to arms as the city tries to fight off the invaders. The city walls remain intact but there is precious little water and food and the enemy will surely only have to wait.

Griffith marshals his extras well not just for the battle – which certainly shows the Italian influence – but also within the city where a long line of helpless citizens lines up into the distance. At the head of this queue of the vulnerable is a young mother (Lilian again!) who epitomises the civilian heart of Bethulia.

Lil and Blanche

The citizens look to Judith for leadership and healing but she despairs until she works out a way of saving her people… along with her maid she makes her way to the Assyrian camp and immediately begins to entrance their prince. What she didn’t reckon though was on attraction being a two-way street and as she begins to doubt her own mission in the face of burgeoning love, will she have the heart to carry out her plan?

The film is a very refined Griffith product and shows the benefit of his weeks of rehearsal time with an established company of technicians and performers. The battle scenes are again closer to what we will see in the ensuing years with Birth and Intolerance… they’re not quite Cabirian but you can feel the flames and the fury.

Judith smothers herself in dirt before undertaking her dangerous mission...

Blanche Sweet gives and impressive performance amidst all her wind-milling arms and heavenly-imploring - in the documentaries there’s a precious shot of DW showing her how to cosy up to the Prince… she does it far better! She’s actually impressively naturalistic and nuanced whilst also looking more than capable of doing the deed she must… I doubt Lillian could even wield that sword whilst Mary P just couldn’t!

Mae Marsh is also impressive here looking a little like Zoe Deschanel (is that just me?) in one of her more serious roles whilst Henry B. Walthall shows how to act through a beard: be the beard – he is the beard! There is also a fleeting appearance from Dorothy Gish as a crippled beggar, her mother Mary and some bloke called Lionel Barrymore: the Hollywood “club” was turning into a juggernaut.

Blanche leads the extras (including Lionel Barrymore?)

And there was more… as A Romance of Happy Valley was up next along with The Cricket on the Hearth but I needed to re-establish some form of contact with my family and to eat… 

The DWG show runs till the end of June and further details are available on the BFI site. There are still tickets available but they're selling fast!

You just can’t beat seeing the man’s work on screen and projected with live accompaniment. Wendy Hiscocks’s was today’s pianist and she contributed greatly to the tone and focus – capturing the mood from Dollie’s dangerous barreling to matters of life, death and love in the longer films. Every silent film musician brings their own flavour to the films and Wendy mixed post Victorian lyricism, wild-western dramatics and middle-eastern epic with consummate ease!

The difficult one… The Birth of a Nation (1915)

Pre-internet there was no option but to gain information the hard way and as a child I used to work my way through the twelve volumes of Purnell's New English Encyclopaedia my parents had bought. In the section on film there was a list of the twenty best films of all time (probably taken from the AFI list?) and I was fascinated by the fact that the majority were not only in black and white but also silent.

This was one of my earliest encounters with the idea of silent film and, of course, near the top of the list was The Birth of a Nation. It is a film I've always wanted to see yet one I've become very wary of because of its complex relationship to the truth and the attitudes not only of the film makers but the millions of Americans who made it the most successful silent movie of all time.

David Thomson calls the film “appalling” and that we should not watch it “unprepared” or in ignorance: it's a reminder and call to educate... (not to mention, agitate and organise).  So much has been written about this film, I'm sure no one is waiting for my take, but here it is anyway...


The Birth of a Nation is and always has been racist: this is not just good guys against bad guys it is good guys against bad black guys. Griffith’s awareness of this was clear from the inter-titles before part two: “ this is an historical presentation...and is not meant to reflect on any race or people of today.” He tried to couch the representation of racially-based motivations as something of the past.

But this was not a distinction accepted by all at the time. Speaking to the New York Post in March 1915, Jane Addams (founder of Hull House and future Nobel Prize winner) said: “The producer seems to have followed the principle of gathering the most vicious and grotesque individuals he could find among colored people, and showing them as representatives of the truth about the entire race... It is both unjust and untrue."

DW's introduction the the 1930 re-release

Yet, even in the introductory interview Griffith recorded with Walter Huston for the 1930 re-release, he was still supporting the views in his film, saying that the Clan was needed "at the time" and that he still believed his film represented “the truth”. Oddly he then quotes Pontius Pilate in saying “the truth, what is the truth?” Well, exactly...

These outrageous sentiments show that Birth of a Nation was not just an error of judgement but a reflection of long held views - Griffith was a Southern Man. The same director went on to film an inter-racial relationship in Broken Blossoms and put together Intolerance as a plea for human understanding and in penitence following the reaction of some to Birth… yet here he is 15 years later, defending the validity of his story in a cosy chat with Walter. Huston goes on to say that the film is perhaps the greatest ever made and there are still many who might agree with that...technically if not morally.

"Gus, a Renegade Negro" played by Walter Lang

Birth of a Nation reflected a lot of common feeling and exposed the truth of racial thinking in a society which was still trying to complete the process of equality a century after the Civil War let alone after a half century.

Griffith starts his film with the thought that “the bringing of the African to America planted the first seed of disunion.” Is he trying to place blame on the slave traders or the slaves: one of a number of occasions when the message seems conflicted - hedging his bets? He doesn’t devote too much time to the causes of the War other than the implication that the North was trying to dominate the liberated South in the proposed Union.

The Camerons entertain the Stonemans

He’s passionately anti-war though having grown up with tales from his father who fought for the Confederacy. Griffiths had acted in plays about the Civil War and it featured in eleven of the short films he made before the big feature. Common themes show the splitting of family and friends and the awful damage done to both sides by the conflict.

Thus we see the Northern Stoneman family driven against the Southern Camerons in spite of their links of brotherly and romantic love. Once the conflict has begun Griffith skips two years to the closing days and the Battle of Petersburg.

The battle is magnificently recreated starting with a close up of a family cowering on a hill and then panning across a valley in which the trenches will be dug and the armies converge.

In moments like this you can see the compound technical breakthroughs achieved by this film – how many were the director’s own innovations is open to debate but no one had ever before used so many cross-cuts, super-impositions, dolly and tracking shots, close-ups and other devices in such number. The film feels almost modern in some sections but this was Griffith consolidating the language of film we all take for granted.

Had the story ended with the carefully-reconstructed assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the film might have been more unequivocally “great", but then he goes and blows it all…

The second half of the film shows the Reconstruction as the post war Union was destabilised by the economic impact of Southern defeat and by the land-grabbing carpet-baggers who came down from the North to take advantage of the chaos.

Griffith suggests that the gifting of equality to former slaves and the black populace in general was a mistake as they were taken advantage of and corrupted by the Northern opportunists. It is excruciating to modern eyes but haven’t Hollywood films always enjoyed a tenuous relationship with historical fact, following the simplest of populist paths.

Mary Alden as Lydia Brown

Yet, in this case, Griffith can’t look beyond the ingrained beliefs of his upbringing. There are two mixed race characters who take advantage of the naïve Stoneman (Ralph Lewis), first his excitable "mulatto" maid Lydia (Mary Alden) bends his ear – “the great leader's weakness  that is to blight a nation...” and then he enables the rise to power of Sylas Lynch (George Siegmann). Lynch seems to be an amalgam of various perceived wrong ‘uns who lust after the white women and who’s agenda is simply to take what the white folk have got: everything.

The fact that both characters are played by actors in black face makes things so much worse. But this is what Griffiths, sincerely, believed had happened.

George Siegmann, Ralph Lewis, Lillian Gish and Henry B. Walthall

The saviours of this situation were the be-sheeted Ku Klux Klan who, quite simply, kept on fighting even after the war had finished. In Griffith’s eyes and those of the hundreds of thousands of people who flocked to join the KKK in the years after the film was released (helping to reverse its long-term decline), this action had been unavoidable given the whites’ “disenfranchisement”.

At the end we see a group of black men put off the idea of voting by a troop of Clan riders standing proud on horseback…. In Griffith’s view two wrongs clearly made a right … If you’re feeling particularly generous, he was over-reaching… but he was not alone in thinking that desperate times called for martial law.

The film’s climax is exceptionally well choreographed and set the template for so many that followed, with triple strands of peril and rescue as Lynch pursues Elsie, the Camerons are chased into a shack and the Clan ride into town to out-muscle the black militia.

Miriam, Lillian and some men in sheets...

All ends with a victorious Clan march through with lovers united and peace descending.  Griffith shows a vision of Hell replaced by caucasian Heaven as the two sets of North and South lovers gaze outwards from a windswept hilltop.

Of the largely excellent cast, Henry B. Walthall as the “Little Colonel” Ben Cameron stands out for his energy and resolve – a believable hero on the battlefield and off. Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh are also exceptional but Miriam Cooper stands out as the eldest Cameron daughter who mourns her two dead brothers almost at the expense of life beyond with her love from the North.

Miriam Cooper

At least some boundaries were crossed in the end and it’s important to remember that this film appeared in the year of the 50th anniversary of the war’s ending – a time of country-wide reflection and re-affirmation that, somehow, it was all worth it.

Like many a film-maker, Griffith processed this sentiment through the establishment of semi-fictionalised agents of evil which he hoped to anchor in the past. Like it or not, millions were willing to immerse themselves in this fiction – he touched a nerve alright, but he may have also played a part in the ultimate rejection of these sensibilities by the majority…

At the time there was criticism from the newly-created National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) for its "vicious" portrayal of blacks and support of the Klan. Riots also broke out in Boston, Philadelphia and other major cities and it was denied release in a number of states including Chicago, Ohio, Denver, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Minneapolis.

Mae Marsh, Lillian Gish and Henry B. Walthall

Griffith miss-judged the focus of his film and the burgeoning civil rights movement may have gained as much from this film as the Clan. Whatever the statistics, there was a long road ahead but change was going to come.

I watched the splendid Kino BluRay edition which features both the 2011 restoration as well as the 1997 one and seven of Griffith’s Civil War shorts. This is now out in the UK Masters of Cinema set, an excellent restoration of a very important if not strictly enjoyable - difficult - film.

The final title card reads: "Liberty and union,  one and inseparable,  now and forever!"

All images copyright of Mr DW Griffith as per usual - they're here to help sell your movie.