Intolerance
Release date 5th August 1916
Country : USA
Running time : 178 mins
Genre : Epic
Starring Robert Harron, Mae Marsh, Constance Talmadge,  Lillian Gish
 Screenplay by D.W. Griffith
Directed by D.W. Griffith



  Four stories of love through the ages are intercut and build to a pulsating finale.

This film was a huge influence on every epic movie ever made. It takes intercutting further than any film has before or since both in the scale of the stories told and the fact the cutting between eras of history becomes more frenzied as the film goes on. Born out of a plan to make a far less ambitious film The Mother and the Law, Griffith was confronted by the challenge of making an epic even bigger than The Birth of a Nation (1915). The solution was to make a film telling four stories, incorporating the modern tale of The Mother and the Law, a tale of injustice in which Robert Harron is almost hanged for a crime he didn't commit but also segments set in Ancient Babylon with incredible sets, one depicting the Crucifixion and one depicting the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre.

 

A mad, brilliant silly extravaganza. Perhaps the greatest movie ever made.  New Yorker, 1980