Maxfield Stanley Movies

This light comedy was based on the George Ade play, and Ade in turn seems to have been inspired by It Pays to Advertise, because it's basically the same plot. Ed Swinger (Jack Pickford) has a college degree but no apparent skills. He wants to marry Caroline Pickering (Molly Malone), the daughter of Septimus Pickering, the pickle king (George Hernandez). But Pickering doesn't think Swinger is son-in-law material. To get him out of the way, he gives Swinger twenty thousand dollars and says that if he can double it in 30 days, he can have Caroline. Of course, Pickering is confident that he will get most of his money back and get rid of Swinger. In fact, he manages the former by secretly selling the young man fifteen thousand dollars' worth of bogus oil stock. With five thousand dollars left, Swinger enlists the help of a college chum who wants to break into advertising. They create a campaign around "Bingo Pickles," most of which are just Pickering's pickles with new labels. Everywhere the pickle king goes, he finds himself inundated with "Bingo Pickles" ads. Finally he decides it's best if he buys out the concern and is forced to cough up a hundred thousand dollars -- plus advertising costs. When he finds out that the whole thing was a trick of Swinger's, Pickering is a good enough sport to let him wed Caroline. If Pickford (younger brother of screen star Mary Pickford) doesn't make much of an impression here, perhaps there's a reason -- in September, 1920 his wife, actress Olive Thomas, died under mysterious circumstances, and Pickford mourned deeply for many months. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide

Sometime during the shooting of the landmark The Birth of a Nation, filmmaker D.W. Griffith probably wondered how he could top himself. In 1916, he showed how, with the awesome Intolerance. The film began humbly enough as a medium-budget feature entitled The Mother and the Law, wherein the lives of a poor but happily married couple are disrupted by the misguided interference of a "social reform" group. A series of unfortunate circumstances culminates in the husband's being sentenced to the gallows, a fate averted by a nick-of-time rescue engineered by his wife. In the wake of the protests attending the racist content of The Birth of a Nation, Griffith wanted to demonstrate the dangers of intolerance. The Mother and the Law filled the bill to some extent, but it just wasn't "big" enough to suit his purposes. Thus, using The Mother and the Law as merely the base of the film, Griffith added three more plotlines and expanded his cinematic thesis to epic proportions. The four separate stories of Intolerance are symbolically linked by Lillian Gish as the Woman Who Rocks the Cradle ("uniter of the here and hereafter"). The "Modern Story" is essentially The Mother and the Law; the "French Story" details the persecution of the Huguenots by Catherine de Medici (Josephine Crowell); the "Biblical Story" relates the last days of Jesus Christ (Howard Gaye); and the "Babylonian Story" concerns the defeat of King Belshazzar (Alfred Paget) by the hordes of Cyrus the Persian (George Siegmann).

Rather than being related chronologically, the four stories are told in parallel fashion, slowly at first, and then with increasing rapidity. The action in the film's final two reels leaps back and forth in time between Babylon, Calvary, 15th century France, and contemporary California. Described by one historian as "the only film fugue," Intolerance baffled many filmgoers of 1916 -- and, indeed, it is still an exhausting, overwhelming experience, even for audiences accustomed to the split-second cutting and multilayered montage sequences popularized by Sergei Eisenstein, Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, Joel Schumacher, and MTV. On a pure entertainment level, the Babylonian sequences are the most effective, played out against one of the largest, most elaborate exterior sets ever built for a single film. The most memorable character in this sequence is "The Mountain Girl," played by star on the rise Constance Talmadge; when the Babylonian scenes were re-released as a separate feature in 1919, Talmadge's tragic death scene was altered to accommodate a happily-ever-after denouement. Other superb performances are delivered by Mae Marsh and Robert Harron in the Modern Story, and by Eugene Pallette and Margery Wilson in the French Story. Remarkably sophisticated in some scenes, appallingly naïve in others, Intolerance is a mixed bag dramatically, but one cannot deny that it is also a work of cinematic genius. The film did poorly upon its first release, not so much because its continuity was difficult to follow as because it preached a gospel of tolerance and pacifism to a nation preparing to enter World War I. Currently available prints of Intolerance run anywhere from 178 to 208 minutes; while it may be rough sledding at times, it remains essential viewing for any serious student of film technique. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide