A Corner in Wheat

A Corner in Wheat (1909) - This is one of Griffith’s most famous early films, and if it is not a profound masterpiece, it is very, very close. Here, still using very few individual shots (25, in this case), and with still no camera movement, Griffith manages to tell a vast fable of the inequality of man. The plot is very simple - a venture capitalist buys up the entire market on wheat and becomes outrageously wealthy, while the common people, including the farmers who produce the crop, go hungry. In an ironic deux ex machina, the "Wheat King" stumbles into his own mill, where he is buried alive by the downpouring grain which is the source of his corrupt wealth. This does not resolve the situation, as the farmers go on hungrily, as helpless as before.
The amazing thing about A Corner in Wheat is the vast panorama of the extremes of social classes, and the pungent use of cross-cut editing to highlight not only the differences, but to establish a mental relationship of cause and effect. For such simple elements, this is a very powerful and potent film. What makes the movie so strong is the intensity and the realism of the individual shots. The inherent power that emanates from Griffith’s polished imagery is the very stuff of the drama itself. It is the daring and audacity in the few, but powerful jump cuts from which the narrative derives its power, however. This might be the best narrative film ever made thus far - it is certainly the best I have ever seen up until this period.

I think that this is one film that would benefit extremely from a shot-by-shot analysis, which can be done in a brief space, as there are so few shots. But the description of their content is needed to pour all of the intensity of this vision into focus, and the simplicity of the cuts can be illustrated to describe the film’s ultimate power.

SHOT 1 - Immediately after the title card, we cut to a shot that is already replete with poetic realism. It is a medium-shot composition of three people: in the center a farmer, on our left, his wife, and background right, his old father. The farmer bends over slowly, placing his hands three times in the sack of seeds before him, and letting the precious gifts of life slide through his fingers, back into the sack. There is a dignified sense of noble and fatalistic poverty of this family. The farmer (James Kirkwood) has a tragic, though somehow distinctly American "everyman" characer about him, and something about the pathos of his stance, the far-off look in his eyes, suggests a Lincolnesque dignity, while simultaneously presaging the iconic vision of Henry Fonda’s "Tom Joad." The wife (Linda Avidson) stares at him with a sense of fatalism. Finally, he picks up the heavy bag and begins his march forward into the field, followed by his old father (W. Chrystie Miller), who lifts his own sack for the millionth time and painfully hobbles along after him. There is something extraordinarily iconic about this family portrait, something that suggests eternal endurance in the face of endless work and difficulty.

SHOT 2 - We cut to a long, deep shot of the edge of the field where the farmer and his father are walking slowly, sewing the seeds. Griffith lets the scene proceed until the two men finally reach us, pass beyond the frame, then re-enter, following their long steps back down the next row. Following them are two horses pulling a plow and a young man (farmhand or son?) tugging onto the reins behind them. The horses turn as well, and follow the men before them. Griffith is brave to let this scene go on so long, for the point that it demonstrates is how long this backbreaking work will take the men, as we can see that the field is deep, but we have no idea how wide it is - the field is cut off by the screen on the left side, and conceivable this labor might go on forever. It is Griffith’s patience, here, that focuses our sense of time and the difficulty of agriculture.

SHOT 3 - A title card announces: "THE WHEAT KING: ENGINEERING THE GREAT CORNER. We cut immediately to a completely different world. An immaculately dressed, powerful looking man sits augustly in his elegant office, puffing on a cigar thoughtfully. Four well-heeled young men stand close by, waiting on his service. This is the "Wheat King," actor Frank Powell (later a director himself) in an energetic, muscular performance that will give the film its central evil dynamism, and its life. The Wheat King rises, snaps his arm with his new idea, then quickly issues instructions to each of his assistants, after which he follows them out. One of the great keys to the success of A Corner in Wheat is due to this performance, and Griffith’s vision of the villain as not a surly villainous caricature, but such an impressive portrayal of a true-to-life, ambitious, strong-willed capitalist. This is definitely a man who would be respectfully approved of on Wall Street.

SHOT 4 - A title card displays the ironic declaration: IN THE WHEAT PIT: THE FINAL THRESHING," and we abruptly cut to the frantic mad jostling of speculators fighting to outbid one another. This is a depiction of the human being as animal, fighting claw to claw, as one might say, each for himself. Griffith allows this jostling, multi-leveled composition clamor for (or against) itself for some time, before the solidly powerful entry of the Wheat King enters and immediately outbids all others, appropriating what we presume to be the entire wheat crop all to himself, presumably while his assistants are doing the same thing at other speculator’s dens. Like a lion, he majestically asserts his dominance, then exits, leaving the the remainder of the pit in a shocked shambles. One man passes, presumably ruined, passes out on the floor, and others try to help him up.

SHOT 5 - A title card asserts: "HIS ANSWER TO THE RUINED MAN’S PLEA - ‘GET IT WHERE I GOT IT.’ We cut back to the Wheat King’s office, where he enters beaming, along with his assistants, who each shake his hand in congratulations. The Ruined Man enters and begs with the Wheat King for assistance. The Wheat King simply smiles back at him for a moment, then grabs him angrily by the collar, telling him to get out. He leaves, and the businessman go back to their congratulatory celebration. The Wheat King is clearly disgusted by the pleading man, and the subtext seems to suggest that he assumes that all is fair in business - he has simply won by dint of his power of imagination. If everyone were as wisely aggressive as him, they could do the same. The sense of the "unlevel playing field" where the wealthiest have all the advantages simply does not occur to him - presumably, as Griffith suggests, as it does not to any typical capitalist.

SHOT 6 - A title card announces: "THE GOLD OF THE WHEAT." We cut to a fabulously arrayed table in a posh parlor, where elegantly arrayed men and women cavort carelessly and happily, while being served wine by three stately waiters. The Wheat King charges in happily, while everyone stands excitedly and cheers him, offering him a toast. He takes a glass of presumably very expensive claret and drinks back to their salute. Obviously, the Wheat King is not a selfish man - he has no qualms about lavishing ostentatiously on his young, beautiful and wealthy friends.

SHOT 7 - The title card contrasts with the previous one: "THE CHAFF OF THE WHEAT." Here is a poor bakery with loaves of bread stacked on a counter. A woman (the baker?) hovers in the background, a boy sweeps up, while the man behind the counter gestures to a prospective customer a sign which reads, "Owing to the advance in the price of flour the usual 5¢ loaf is now 10¢. The man pays the extra nickel and departs with his loaf. A young woman enters and is told the same. Finally, The Farmer’s Wife, with a little girl in tow (Gladys Egan from The Adventures of Dollie!) enters, and when told of the price increase, does not have the money to pay the inflated price, so she leaves the store, in a state of shock with her hungry little daughter.

SHOT 8 - The farmers’ family hungry despair is contrasted by the Wheat King’s opulence, in a cut back to his splendid banquet table, filled with food, wine, and beautiful, happy young men and women. The successful Wheat King smiles and toasts his wife, sitting across from him.

SHOT 9 - The contrast is deepened by a cut back to the bakery, where a still shot shows a line of people staring hungrily at the bread table. These jump cuts not only connect in the viewer’s mind the difference between the rich and the poor, but actually prompt an identification of cause and effect between one and the other. Griffith shows he understands thoroughly the psychological implications of film language.

SHOT 10 - After the banquet, the Wheat King stands triumphantly smoking a cigar by the table, surrounded by three fawning females. He invites everyone in the room to leave, presumably to come look at something.

SHOT 11 - The farmer’s wife sits forlornly, her little daughter at her side, staring into space hopelessly. They are anchored to the right side of the screen, in front of a haystack that dominates the composition, and, to the left, an old wagon. The farmer and his father enter from the left, and she rises to greet them, expectantly. The farmer stops before her, then shows her his empty pockets. She tearfully shakes her head at him, and he shakes his head back sadly in response. He has been unable to procure any more money for bread. They both stare at the ground, helpless and lost, as the grandfather ambles impotently out of the frame.

SHOT 12 - A title card reveals "THE HIGH PRICE CUTS DOWN THE BREAD FUND." A cut back to the line of SHOT 9, where the people file by, getting their loaves of bread at the inflated price. Soon, the last loaf is sold. The baker explains the situation to a poor and desperate-looking man, who finally accepts the painful truth, then saunters sadly off, the rest of the line moving resignedly after him, no bread to be had.

SHOT 13 - A title card announces "A VISIT TO THE ELEVATORS." The Wheat King sits in his office, which is quickly invaded by his wife, followed by the beautiful young ladies and the men who had been at the banquet. He rises to greet them, and they all happly exit into the next room.

SHOT 14 - We cut to an interior shot of the mill, where a worker stands on an upper level (in front of what is obviously a painted backdrop of the rest of the mill). He is looking down into what appears to be a pit down below. Another worker ascends the stairs behind him, and taps him on the shoulder. He moves to the side, while the Wheat King enters in fine clothes and hat, bringing his admiring entourage up behind him. Two women joyfully appear, looking about. A worker steps forward and puts out his hands to warn them of the precipice in front of them.

SHOT 15 - Cut to a large wooden bin in which the wheat is pouring after threshing from an automated elevator. The quickness of the cut tells us very economically that this is fall the worker is warning the ladies of. The wheat falls with a fury, filling the shaft.

SHOT 16 - The women are urged back again by the worker. Everyone strains to see the sight down below, but the workmen prudently urge the group on around a corner to (presumably) a safer place, and they begin exiting the frame to the right. The Wheat King stands at the back of the group, when suddenly one of his assistants emerges excitedly up the steps and reaches out to him. He has a telegram, which he shows to him, as the others continue to move off.

SHOT 17 - We read the telegram from the Wheat King’s accountant, which states, "YOU HAVE CONTROL OF THE ENTIRE MARKET OF THE WORLD. YESTERDAY ADDED $4,000,000 TO YOUR FORTUNE."

SHOT 18 - We return to the previous scene. The Wheat King exult excitedly. His wife, still there, with another woman ask what the message is, and he gestures them to go on with the others, which they do. The assistant departs back down the stairs, and the Wheat King is left alone. He smiles and triumphantly raises his fist, when suddenly, he loses his balance and begins to topple backward, over the precipice.

SHOT 19 - The Wheat King’s helpless, flailing body crashes into the wheat bin, where the grain is being poured upon him relentlessly. He wriggles violently, trying to move about, but the force and rush of the grain push him relentlessly down, covering him.

SHOT 20 - A cut back to the bakery reveals a policemen with a billy club talking to the baker assuringly. The policemen exits. Suddenly, a crowd - men, women and children - storms angrily, desperately, into the bakery and begin shouting to the baker, demanding bread. The baker attempts to convince them that he has none, but the crowd will not back off. Suddenly, the policeman runs back in and strikes one of the men on the head. Another policeman pulls his gun on the mob, and they freeze.

SHOT 21 - Back in the grain bin, the Wheat King is nearly covered by the pouring grain, with only his hand visible from under the massive pile. It wriggles violently, helplessly, until it finally ceases movement and is covered completely. The Wheat King is dead, destroyed by his own wealth, the victim of his own greed.

SHOT 22 - Back at the place where he fell, the workers re-enter with the visitors. One workman stands before the threshold’s edge, holding his arms out, to protect them from a fall, and the visitors begin exiting the way they came in, down the steps to the left. They are gone, leaving the two workmen together alone.

SHOT 23 - The assistant is back at the office, when the Wheat King’s wife enters, along with the others. They notice that he did not return with them, become worried, then hurriedly exit the room to go back and look for him.

SHOT 24 - Cut to the two workman at the precipice in the mill, plus a third one. They are hauling something up from the grain pit with a rope. The wife and the group return as the men finish hauling up their burden - the corpse of the dead Wheat King. The assistant attempts to revive him, but to no avail. The wife crumples in tears and despair and falls upon her dead husband’s bosom. The others turn away, respectfully, shocked and overcome.

SHOT 25 - We return to the wheat field, as in SHOT 2. The lone figure of the farmer is walking slowly towards us in the field, once again sewing his seeds. He walks tiredly, endlessly trudging. When he reaches us in mid-shot, he stops, looks back at all that he has left to do and sighs. He slowly, turns and begins the long walk back down the next row, tossing seeds from his sack as he goes. As he continues, moving further from us, getting smaller, the edges of the frame grow dark. The American Biograph logo appears, and the film is over.

We are confronted with masses of emotionally charged imagery here, rife with potential, yet conflicted meanings. The film stands, immaculately conceived, fully realized, but left with so many open questions that I think we must conclude that here, by 1909, David Wark Griffith was unquestionably producing art.

I want to linger first on certain singular images - images on which Griffith lingers and carefully transforms into aesthetic images. First, there are the shots of the farmer and his family in the field. The light, the faces, the unhurried fatalistic motions send out a poignant vision of the eternal - and uncertain - pact of mankind with the land. There is no romanticization here, nor is there extreme melodrama. These shots are shocking in their aesthetic clarity, as Griffith seems to intuitively anticipates the great poetic realism that we will associate with Jean Renoir some thirty years later. Griffith has discovered the essence of the shot as a sense of poetry - endlessly packed with the potential for dramatic and contemplative content. There is no hurry here - no sense that he must hurry and get to the plot. Here he displays a uniquely new (as far as I am aware) sense of mastery of the form. He has such confidence in his ability to effectively tell this story, that he allows no propulsion to pull him away from the extraordinary details with which he wishes to invest his images. That is startling enough.

Even bolder is Griffith’s presumptions at editing - not only between different, contrasting characters and actions, but completely different worlds, where not only contrast is established, but cause and effect. We simultaneously follow two different stories of two social classes, both affected by one action.

The most intense, climactic scene of the film, the Wheat King’s furious struggle for life while being buried under his own grain, is not a result of a cause, however. This is Griffith’s poetic license. Griffith, the director, acts as God here, ironically punishing the villain for his own greed and insensitivity. Now this is romanticization. And it is also what keeps A Corner in Wheat squarely in the realm of melodrama, despite all of its social realist leanings.

For it is quite easy (and natural) to read A Corner in Wheat as an attack on capitalism. What else can one say about the repeated contrasts between the ostentatiousness of the rich and their blissful ignorance of those who suffer, contrasted continually with the broken lives of the poor who subsidize their opulent lifestyle?

At first, this question confused me. I knew D.W. Griffith was not a socialist - but here he is, producing as dialectically constructed a film as later would the Soviet master Sergei Eisenstein. Here is another example of what I refer to as D.W. Griffith’s fatal flaw as an artist - his naivety. For as much evidence as he produces on the screen that it is the inherent inequality of an economic system that allows one class to ruthlessly exploit the other, amazingly Griffith does not seem to come to this conclusion. His judgement? The real evil is "greed."

And yet how can one argue otherwise? In truth, Griffith is stating a universal human fact. Ultimately, it is greed that is the underlying sin of inequality. But after painstakingly constructing an elaborate, yet structurally simple (Marxianly simple!) representation of a system of institutionalized inequity, Griffith does not locate the fault in that system itself. Instead, he places the blame squarely on an individual. Everything is the Wheat King’s fault. Even with all the other greedy, animalistic speculators in the pit, the Wheat King is the villain.

I come to this conclusion based upon the deus ex machina that leads to the Wheat King’s horrific, ironic death. If this were a true piece of socialist realism, the poor and oppressed might well rise up, attack the Wheat King, and throw him in the pit. But nothing like this even remotely occurs in the film. Even the brief, desperate uprising that occurs in the bakery is quickly put down by the police. The underclass must accept their situation stoically. It is Griffith’s judgement of the frailty of human character that is to blame, not economics.

It is immensely to his credit, both as an artist and as a human being, that Griffith not only recognized the unfairness in socio-economic relationships in the United States of 1909, but was bold enough to put them up there on the screen. But Griffith, the sentimentalist, we think, finds the easy way out of the dilemma. For us, Griffith’s dramatic solution, while still melodramatically powerful, is insufficient to resolve the massive problem he has painted.

If A Corner in Wheat is, ultimately, dramatically unsatisfactory, it is nevertheless a work of exquisitely crafted beauty. As mentioned before, the strength of the images, the dynamism of the performances, and most importantly, the skill of the editing, delivers a leap in aesthetic vision in film. The film is still emotionally involving and powerful and must have been a truly overwhelming experience to its contemporary viewers. I know nothing about its critical and popular acceptance upon release, but there can be no doubt that the film carries an emotional wallop that has real staying power.

There are a couple of other observations that I would like to mention before ending this discussion of the film. One is that of the horror of the scene of the Wheat Death’s demise. Even though we have been conditioned to dislike the man, and we may even associate all the social evil in the world with him, when we are placed with him in the threshing bin, the violence of the onslaught of grain is truly terrifying. It must have terrified its original audience. We cannot help but associating empathetically with this fellow human’s suffering, and we are placed at nearly the same level of vision as he. When we return to a later cut, and all we can see is the Wheat King’s struggling hand, finally stopping as suffocation overcomes him, this may be melodramatic, but it is also truly horrific. For a moment, his death becomes our own, and through the camera’s power of identification, we share in the Wheat King’s ultimate humanity, and something in us protests that even he does not deserve such a horrible fate.

This is a classic example of Griffith’s broad humanism. We shall see it again and again, and we will most certainly keep it in mind when we come to judge The Birth of a Nation.

The depth of Griffith’s empathy is best saved, however, for the final shot of the film. Moving eternally against what must the certainly of hopelessness, the farmer goes on with his infinite labor, accepting his eternal role as toiler of the earth. Griffith gives the man a face and a sense of dignity that he is rightly due, and one that will not die with him, but live eternally in his image.