Wednesday, March 19, 2008

The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1913)

In this two-reeler, expansive, action-packed western, Griffith is moving closer and closer to the grand sprawl that he will present in just two years’ time. By the production’s standards of the time, this film is extremely large - it almost could be called enormous, even a blockbuster. I wonder what its response was in its day.

Here and everywhere, we find Griffith pushing the fabric of what could be put on screen. What we have here is essentially: an all-star cast, dozens of extras, dramatic action, two stories - a plot and subplot that interleave at the end, very large, controlled battle scenes, innovative point of view shots, particularly from very high angles, and a storming momentum throughout most of the entire 29 minutes of screen time. Shortly stated, this has to be one of the very most ambitious films ever undertaken to this point in time.

To a large degree, Griffith manages to pull off this audacity of spectacle. If the final result is less than impressive today, here is one movie that one must see with backward-looking eyes to imagine just how powerful such a vast and violent epic might have appeared to audiences in 1914.

As a western - that is as an early contributor to one of the major genres in American film history - The Battle at Elderbush Gulch is difficult to judge. Its western setting seems more an excuse for filming action rather than an exploration of any of the basic mythic elements of the genre. We have white settlers, we have Indians - and yes, we have violent conflict, ending with the arrival of the U.S. Cavalry.

But it is difficult to assign any true perspective upon the myth of conquest from this film. As for the Indians, Griffith depicts them very simply, as savages, sleeping out in the open, eating dogs, and jumping around maniacally - is this supposed to be a ritual war dance? - before attacking the white settlers. But Griffith gives them an undeniably excellent reason for the attack. The Chief’s son has been shot to death by one of the white men. The tribe is naturally enraged, and they come on horseback, guns blazing, to exact revenge.

The white settlers, on the other hand, are simply going about their daily business. The ranch upon which most of the action takes place has now become the home for two female "waifs" - orphans, who are now staying with their cowpoke uncle. This good man’s boss won’t allow any dogs in his house, thus setting up the problem that the girls’ little puppies will cause when two young Indians wander back late for a doggy feast.

Soon, it’s all-out war between the two peoples. The Indians invade the ranch and storm the town. The subplot - the "town plot" deals with a mother (Lillian Gish) and her baby, who has disappeared and become a potential victim for the marauders. So essentially we have the same situation as in Griffith’s first film, The Adventures of Dollie (1908) - a helpless child is threatened by ethnically different people.

I don’t want to go too deeply into the racial implications of this film, except to note that Griffith’s decision necessarily implies a white perspective. If "different" in his world does not equal "evil," it at least conjures up "other." We can’t imagine the movie showing an Indian child in danger from the white settlers.

Hollywood’s myopia concerning Native Americans begins early in its history - but that was merely an extension of the prevailing views of the time, as close as they were (in 1914) to actual skirmishes out west and on the plains. It is the same carry over as in Griffith’s "southern" attitude towards Blacks. All Hollywood will do is solidify and codify the myths about savage Indians for another forty years or so, until these assumptions will begin to be challenged in the 1950s and 60s.

The production and acting of Elderbush Gulch is superb. The performances are thoroughly professional throughout: featuring Gish, newcomer Mae Marsh, Alfred Paget, Robert Harron, along with small cameos from Griffith’s other stock players. It is a film that is perhaps more impressive for what it achieves than it is enjoyable to watch, however. At least from my perspective, the near-century of repetition has almost completely worn down any residual power that the film once had. But there is no question that it is a technical triumph and another important giant step forward towards the establishment of cinema as a major art form from its most important early master.

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

The Mothering Heart (1913)

What can one say about this film? In one sense, it seems the culmination of all work that Griffith had done for Biograph - and at the same time it represents the kind of hokey melodrama and Victorian values that the director is too often linked. The truth is somewhere in the middle - there is no question of The Mothering Heart’s old-fashioned melodramatic overtones, yet there is a naturalness and an honesty that seems to shine forth throughout it, essentially overcoming it. There’s something here that seems to turn the film into a true tragedy, as well as an artful depiction of human affairs that speak directly to an audience the way only the new medium of cinema could.

Of course, the primary key to the film is found through the extraordinary film presence and unique acting style of Lillian Gish in the lead role. There is something so natural, so fresh about Gish’s performance, something so absolutely convincing, that it drives the film home, making it truly heartbreaking rather than simply maudlin.

This is not to say that the film isn’t maudlin as well, for it certainly is. All the faults are there, in plain view. Griffith has made many more imaginative and innovative films than this one, but there is something about The Mothering Heart that is simply unmatchable in sheer emotional power. To make something this commanding, with these few elements, is a testament to a certain kind of mastery - and an indicator that this long, tried-and-tested veteran of early cinema is ready to move the art form on to another level of sustained narrative and emotional impact. The director has only a dozen or more one-reelers left to make for American Biograph (out of more than 400!) before leaving to direct the four-reel feature Judith of Bethulia. One year later, he will create The Birth of a Nation, and the modern age of cinema will have formally begun.

Griffith plays with archetypes in The Mothering Heart - a less kindly critic might call them cliche’s. Gish plays the role of a young wife, and eventually mother, with such immaculately chaste and pure emotions that she becomes, in essence, the era’s pin-up girl for feminine propriety. On the other hand, her natural joyfulness, her native instinct for play endears her totally to the audience and creates a kind of purely believable icon of the best of young American womanhood.

She is matched perfectly on screen with Walter Miller, her inconstant and befuddled male counterpart. Miller (Gish’s musician husband in The Musketeers of Pig Alley, as well as the spurned-lover, good-guy partner in Death’s Marathon) is really a more pitiable character than a cad. With disarming, Jimmy Stewart-like confusion, he is sincerely in love with Gish, as well as seriously baffled at his own contradictory desires and his pitiful puppy-dog wandering.

Perhaps that is the central link that binds this film together so well - the conflicting human emotions are quite real. The young Miller is completely in love with Gish’s mothering character, and at the same time, he cannot seem to resist his natural urges for frolicsome fun.

The central - and for me, the most uncomfortable - sequence of the film is when Miller convinces Gish to go out to a nightclub for some uninhibited good times. Gish’s discomfort at the nightclub is unsettling - why can’t she relax and have a fun evening? Her fastidious prudishness is off putting, and her refusal to share a glass of champagne is tangibly annoying. Can we really blame the young husband for being attracted by the bare-armed temptress at the next table?

Well, yes and no. To us today, the problem seems to be that Miller has gotten himself stuck in an either/or world which simply does not exist for us in the next century. Of course there is a question as to whether this dichotomy actually existed in 1913, but I have enough personal family evidence to suggest that it certainly did. When women were easily divided up between "mothers" and "tramps," it’s easy to see how there might be no gray area in between.

Griffith, naturally, is on the side of the "mothers." And following his loaded narrative, there is no question that Miller is the character in error and that Gish is the one who must unjustly suffer for her husband’s shortcomings. And of course, disaster looms in the end. The question is, is this really how Griffith saw life? Is this how he saw woman?

I find enough evidence in this collection of films to suggest that D.W. Griffith, though a naive sentimentalist, was morally more complex than one might at first assume. In One Is Business, the Other Crime, he goes to great pains to show the unjust parallel between treatment of justice in class relations. Religious hypocrites are taken to task in The New York Hat. The Burglar’s Dilemma demonstrates that even familial betrayal can be overcome through love and a good will. And The Last Drop of Water shows us that one need not be an exemplary person to prove a valiant hero.

But when it comes to women’s issues, however - as it will come to race - Griffith seems much much more inflexible. It is in his unquestioning acceptance of the stereotypes of his age - for both gender and race, that he runs into such insupportable moral and aesthetic conditions.

The great irony is that these blind spots placed Griffith in a morally indefensible position that he really could not probably see. By siding so whole-heartedly with Gish’s "mother" figure, he believes he is championing the cause of womanhood. Ironically, he is selling the human center of the female frightfully short, demanding her to place both herself and her husband in an impossible world of ego division.

By the same token, it is easy to see that in celebrating the "virtues" of the old Negro in His Trust, that while attempting to laud and celebrate Old George, he is essentially taking away both the character’s dignity and humanity.

That is, it is easy for us to see this. For Griffith would remain tragically unaware of the implications of his own moral universe. And this is sad, because we continually see in cinema’s first great artist a towering nobility and defender of humanity. We see a man with a sense of moral ambiguity - a man who can respect even a gangster’s honor in the covenant of "one good turn deserves another." The ultimate tragedy of Griffith, however, just may reside in his entrapment in certain social conventions that are glacially solidified in his time-bound sense of consciousness. In the end, he was basically and simply, quite unaware of the terrible moral ironies that he would commit to the screen.

Inside D.W. Griffith, however, lies a "great heart." At the end of The Mothering Heart, the most emotionally wrenching and authentic moment of the film is finally not the husband’s betrayal of his wife - nor even the devastating death of the couple’s sickly little baby. It is, indeed, the great wash of forgiveness and acceptance that Gish offers to the devastated Miller, a boundless generosity of spirit that bind the two - and indeed all of humanity - in a shared redemption based on the undying and unquenchable spirit of human love and the capaciousness of grace.

It is true that much of Griffith’s work will forever seem not only outmoded - not simply morally inadequate, but at times truly repugnant. But there exists within his moral and aesthetic vision such a broad and heartfelt commitment to the dictums of love and the eternal dignity of humanity, that we must search beyond the surface to reach the good (however flawed) man underneath. This is not just conscientiousness on our part, but it is the very essence of the vision that the artist and his art held out as a proud banner for the human race.

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Death's Marathon (1913)

Here’s a little potboiler that, while it falls short of Griffith’s best work of the period, is notable for the shocking effect of violence and some deranged acting from the bizarrely versatile Henry B. Walthall (the "Weakling Brother" of The Burglar’s Dilemma.) The plot, basically, is pure melodramatic hocum - the only thing that truly makes Death’s Marathon interesting is the unexpected shock ending - plus Walthall’s hammy, but weird, performance.

Walthall and the dashing young Walter Miller (the handsome Musician from The Musketters of Pig Alley), are business partners. They both have a love wish for the lovely Blanche Sweet (who is hardly given anything to do in the picture but sit around looking charming or pitiful.) Sweet rebuff’s Miller’s advances, but takes to the cocky Walthall. In a year, the couple are married and with child. Walthall, however, is bored with domestic life and would rather spend his evenings at the club, playing high stakes poker. On a losing slide, Walthall steals money from the company safe to go play, which is discovered by Miller, who tries to chase him down. Too late - he’s blown it all - and now he’s on his way back to the office, where he pulls out a revolver, determined to do away with himself.

Oddly, he calls his wife on the phone first. Arriving there in time for the call, Miller, along with Sweet, attempt to talk him out of it. Sweet stays on the phone with him as Miller races back to the office to stop him. All her tears and persuasion cannot dissuade him - even an emotional communication with their baby son cannot do it. Miller arrives, but too late - Walthall has blown his brains out.

The last scene shows Sweet, at home alone. Miller delivers roses to her, and their shared happy smiles are supposed to tell us that they will soon be together, living happily ever after.

The film’s structure, which is basically a chase in the second half, is pretty conventional by the standards of the day. Griffith uses his usual jump cuts to set up and intensify the tension leading up to what one expects to be Walthall’s rescue or change of heart. But there is no rescue - and there is no change of heart. I have to conclude that the climax was quite a shock for the audience in 1913.

One has to ask oneself what Griffith was thinking when he made this decision. The writing credit goes to a William E. Wing, a relative newcomer to film writing. But Griffith could certainly have changed the ending had he wanted to. There’s something just a little diabolical about Death’s Marathon - it’s as though Griffith had wanted to finally let the audience know that he would not always let them off the hook - thus returning credibility for suspense to a medium that might have been becoming a bit too predictable by 1913.

Whatever else can be said about Death’s Marathon, there’s a kind of sadistic fun at work in it, and nowhere is this more apparent than in Walthall’s long and strange performance over the phone to his wife and partner. One cannot tell what he is saying, but he is certainly taking his time about it. He grins evilly at the gun throughout the long conversation, knowing for certain it is what he is going to do. What he seems to relish is the torture that he is putting his wife through on his way to oblivion.

How can we explain this? Well, one suggestion is that Walthall is just a nasty guy - he certainly doesn’t give a hoot about his wife, and at one point in the film even threatens to slap her for wanting to go out with him. I suppose the ending implies that Sweet made the wrong choice at the beginning of the film with the two fellows - yet if she really didn’t fancy Miller then, why should she any more now?

One can say that Griffith is (rather heavy handedly) giving a warning about vices such as gambling. But that matter is so much on the surface and the subtext of Walthall’s strange performance and the agonizingly stretched out taunting of the wife (and the audience) suggests something a bit more sinister about the cinema.

Who knows how banal Death’s Marathon was when it was begun? Did Walthall’s crazed acting suggest a new direction during the filming? Perhaps it originally had a happy ending? This is just idle speculation, of course, but it would make sense of what we are seeing on the screen. Here, Griffith has taken good, old-fashioned Victorian melodrama and twisted it just enough to make something with a nasty little bite.

It’s important to note this tendency in Griffith if we are not to fall into the trap of oversimplifying him. Moral ambiguities in such films as The Painted Lady, The Musketeers of Pig Alley, and Death’s Marathon display something of more subversive depth lurking under the surface of the Griffith world, and it’s something to keep one’s eye on. It is this very subversive tendency, perhaps inherent to the film-making process itself, that will deliver some of its most iconoclastic character of cruelty.