William E. Lawrence Movies

John Coburn (Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree), who hails from a rural area, is elected senator and he comes to the big city with his wife (Josephine Crowell) and son Steve (Elmer Clifton). Steve, seduced by the city's attractions, forgets all about his country sweetheart Marjorie (Mildred Harris, who had just graduated from child to ingenue roles) and falls in with a group of lawless pleasure seekers. He kills a man because of a woman, and Senator Coburn tries to protect him for the sake of Mrs. Coburn. However, he winds up on trial, and just as it seems he is about to be convicted, his mother stands up and pleads for her son. As a result he is found "not guilty." The verdict is accompanied by a title (written by the story's author, Rupert Hughes) which explains that although this move was illegal and wrong, the "old folks at home" nevertheless deserve some consideration. Senator Coburn was a nice digression for Tree, who was better known for his Shakespearean and costume roles. ~ 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

Unlike most "preparedness" films of the WWI era, Flying Torpedo sidesteps preaching in favor of non-stop action. With California in imminent danger of enemy invasion, the American government commissions a noted inventor to develop a flying torpedo. Unfortunately, the inventor's plans and prototype are stolen by international racketeers. Racing against time, master detective Winthrop Clavering (John Emerson) retrieves the prototype and begins arming the California seacoast against hostile attack. Co-director Christy Cabanne expertly emulated his mentor D.W. Griffith in the spectacular invasion-and-repulsion climax. Actor-director-writer John Emerson had previously essayed his heroic "Winthrop Clavering" character in the stage play The Conspiracy. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Home Sweet Home has been referred to by its leading lady Lillian Gish as "the first all-star film." Indeed, virtually every member of director D.W.Griffith's celebrated stock company appears in this three-part, five-reel biographical drama. Based on the life of John Howard Payne, composer of the "world-famous" title song, the film stars Henry B. Walthall as Payne, herein depicted as a brilliant but unstable artist who never found the happiness embodied in his songs. As incidents in Payne's life are enacted on the screen -- his early failures, his success as a playwright in England and as a composer in France, and his lonely, embittered final years in Africa -- these scenes are counterpointed with three "sub-stories," in which the song Home Sweet Home is shown to have a profound effect on several different people. In Episode One, a western miner (Robert Harron) nearly leaves his waitress sweetheart Mae Marsh), but they are reunited to the strains of the Payne song. In Episode Two, the song causes a faithless wife (Blanche Sweet) to renounce her lover (Owen Moore) and return to her husband (Courtenay Foote). And in the final episode, two quarrelling brothers (Donald Crisp and James Kirkwood) kill each other, leaving their grieving mother to find solace in the familiar strains of Home Sweet Home. Though Lillian Gish also spoke respectfully of her artistic collaborations with D.W. Griffith, even she found the film's final scene -- in which, dressed as Heavenly angel, she rescues John Howard Payne from the bowels of Hell -- a bit difficult to watch with a straight face. This silly denouement aside, Home Sweet Home, a joint effort of the Reliance and Mutual film companies, was quite wonderful entertainment, and one of the most successful of Griffith's pre-Birth of a Nation endeavors. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide