america Directed by D.W. Griffith
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With a three-hour running time and a two-dollar ticket, The Birth of a Nation made a staggering amount of money for its time—$18 million—and created an audience for longer and more ambitious motion pictures. Griffith followed it with a mammoth historical epic, Intolerance (1916), and such successful dramas as Hearts of the World (1918), Broken Blossoms (1919), and Way Down East (1920). But in the 20s he gradually dropped from the artistic vanguard as younger filmmakers built on his earlier innovations. “D.W. Griffith Act Two,” a Sunday-night series running through March 6 at University of Chicago Doc Films, revisits his rarely seen features from this decade; this weekend Doc will screen America (1924), a beautifully mounted drama of the Revolutionary War that was Griffith’s last silent epic and a conscious attempt to recapture the historical grandeur of The Birth of a Nation. As in the earlier movie, awesome battle scenes are woven into the story of a family caught up in the currents of history. What’s missing is the strong personal feeling that Griffith—whose father fought for the Confederacy—brought to his story of Reconstruction.
One of the plays he wrote, around the time of his first movie job, was an ambitious four-act drama called War that was set during the American Revolution and in many ways prefigured the movie he would make in the 1920s. Jack White, an indentured servant, pines for Jennie, the lovely daughter of a respected Virginia family. Eventually Jack sets off on a spying mission for General George Washington, and when he arrives in disguise at the Hessian camp at Trenton, he learns that Jennie has been captured and will be ravished by the villainous Captain Robert Cunningham, a sadistic officer of the British crown. Griffith biographer Richard Schickel has pronounced War to be wanting in both dramatic tension and historical insight. But the elaborate play, which included stagings of events from the Revolutionary War, did reveal a storyteller eager to get his arms around the nation’s history. Once Griffith established himself as a writer and director for the Biograph movie company, the tools to tell such a story lay within his grasp.
