George Siegmann Movies

On the heels of his masterpiece, Intolerance, which dramatized the futility of war born out of prejudice, director D.W. Griffith shifted gears for this film. Intolerance had proven a financial disaster for Griffith, so he signed with producer Adolph Zukor to release his next film. He came upon the subject matter on a trip to England to promote Intolerance. The British government, desperately looking to America for help in fighting the Germans in the first World War, persuaded Griffith to make a propaganda picture. Set in France, it's the portrait of a village overrun by the Germans during the hostilities. Griffith begins the story in 1912 with a slow developing romance between The Boy, Douglas Gordon Hamilton (Robert Harron) and The Girl, Marie Stephenson (Lillian Gish). A street singer known as The Disturber (Dorothy Gish) tries to come between them, but she settles for her own romance with Monsieur Cuckoo (Robert Anderson). In the summer of 1914, The Boy and M. Cuckoo answer the call to arms, forcing the postponement of The Boy and Girl's wedding. The film's second half cuts back and forth between the battlefield and the home front (which in this case are separated by only a few miles). By the time the film was completed, the United States had already entered the war, and over the years its extreme portrayal of German soldiers has been trimmed, the first time at the request of the wife of President Woodrow Wilson. In fact, Griffith included shots of American troops helping out in the story's final battle and then marching off to return home. The version viewed for this review, running 115 minutes, included a brief prologue with footage of Griffith touring the battlefields in France, where some documentary footage was shot, though most of the film was made in Southern California, and the director meeting with British prime minister David Lloyd George. Also notable is the appearance in small parts of future filmmaker Erich Von Stroheim as a German soldier, future character actor Ben Alexander as The Boy's youngest brother, and future entertainer Noël Coward as a young villager pushing a wheelbarrow. ~ Tom Wiener, All Movie Guide

My Unmarried Wife was the rather blatant title imposed upon this adaptation of Doris Schroeder's novel Molly and I. Breaking off relations with his wealthy father, the young hero tries to make it on his own as a novelist. While rescuing a child from a factory explosion, the hero is himself blinded and placed in the care of Molly, the straight-laced assistant to a celebrated eye specialist. Molly does her best to care for the young man, but she cannot raise the money necessary to send him to Europe for a delicate eye operation. In despair, the hero prepares to shoot himself, but Molly comes up with a solution: She will marry the sightless hero, get into his father's good grace, and secure the necessary funds. Then, if her new husband so chooses, he may divorce her upon his return from Europe. The operation is a success, and the young man comes home prepared to go through with the divorce. Instead, he is distracted by a headstrong Italian girl, who in his absence has taken over his financial matters. Almost immediately, the hero falls in love with this fascinating stranger -- little realizing that the girl is actually Molly, who hopes to win the boy's heart by pretending to be someone more exciting than herself. ~ Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

Those who made this anti-divorce film weren't sure if they wanted to preach or entertain. It featured a storyline, an allegorical introduction and appearances from Nevada government officials and the heads of the Illinois vice and divorce commission, and was a very tiring two hours long. The basic plot involves two men, William Gordon (Norbert Myles) and Henry Blake (J. Webster Dill). Both get married and have children. Gordon dumps his wife, Lorna (Gene Genung), for an actress, Marie Gibson (Alice Wilson), while Blake mistreats his wife and eventually deserts her. Both wives go to Reno to obtain divorces. Blake's daughter grows up without ever knowing her father, so when she meets up with him later he doesn't recognize her at first. When he realizes who she is, he tries to marry her off to a vulture (Robert Lawlor), but he is stopped by Mrs. Blake and Gordon's grown son (James Harrison). This picture is a curio that is very much of its era. ~ 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

This innovative psychological drama represents one of D.W. Griffith's early full-length feature films and contains innovations that influenced international filmmakers, particularly German ones, for decades to come. It tells the tale of a young man with a fondness for reading Edgar Allen Poe, who is forced to choose between having his uncle's wealth and marrying the girl he loves. He makes a choice and she jilts him, causing him to vent his rage and pain psychotically by strangling his uncle and sealing his corpse behind a brick fireplace wall. As in Poe's Telltale Heart, the young man's cruelty does not go unpunished, and as he sits alone in his cabin, he begins hearing the maddening beat of his dead uncle's heart. Every sound, to the poor youth, becomes another damning thump, and in desperation he runs from his cabin to hang himself. Just before he dies, the law catches up and saves him. Meanwhile, his cruel girl friend is overcome by guilt and so hurls herself from a cliff, but fortunately, this is not the end of the story. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide