Birth of a Nation

The Brattle has probably made a profitable move in showing Birth of a Nation: for all its excusable crudities and questionable motives, the film is interesting because it was the first member of the aging dynasty of Hollywood epics.

The celluloid epic patterns set by D. W. Griffith in 1915 have changed very little: you just take some romantic, legendary, historical period like Reconstruction in the South, add a zesty love affair or three between ideal "period" characters to raise the story above documentary level, and interpret history in some engrossing way. Nowadays you also spend five million dollars or so and tell people movies are better than ever, in hope that you will make back the five million.

When it is not peeking in upon Northern boys swearing love to dainty Southern belles, and dashing Southern gentlemen swearing love to Northern girls, the movie pursues a great epic-theme: the heroic South certainly got a rotten deal after the Civil War. In an attempt to insure that "carpetbagger" will leave a bitter taste in every moviegoer's mouth, the film details the labor pains of the nation's birth.

Hollywood's answer to Harriet Stowe has an antebellum South where slaves sing in King Cotton's fields, and dance joyfully to the amusement of the kindly massas from the Big House. The South will not endure the North's dictation, and so her sons ride off from Wingate Halls garlanded with tears and cheers, to christen the Stars and Bars in Yankee blood at Bull Run. Though the war ends with Lee's majestic surrender to sloppy old Grant, the wounded sons return home to begin a spirited restitching of their tattered Dixie-land until Lincoln--brave, tall, sad, lonely Lincoln--is assassinated in a historical facsimile, and Northern monsters, carpetbaggers, give the Negroes more than equal rights, disfranchise the gentry, and set the South back countless years.

The power-mad blacks overstep the bounds of propriety to murder, plunder, and rape the helpless whites, who finally save themselves and the South "from complete anarchy" by banning together to form the good man's friend, the Ku Klux Klan.

It's all pretty laughable. But one wonders in just what spirit the theme was presented. Like Uncle Tom's Cabin, Birth of a Nation is based a good deal on fact; the South was terribly oppressed after the war, and the K.K.K. did begin as a messianic organization. But like Miss Stowe, Griffith selected and shaded his facts to slant his subject; the Negroes especially suffer under his direction: with the exception of a few loyal, sensitive family retainers, all Negroes are coarse, crazed, slovenly animals. In conveying the impression that people are the same now, Griffith's Reconstruction becomes an actuality in 1915. It is laughable, but a little frightening to recall that starting with the first World War, the Ku Klux Klan's ranks swelled to nearly four and a half million.

The acting is poor, but not wretched; the film is choppy, lacing together snapshots, almost, of war on the front, life at home, carpetbagger atrocities, and Lincoln--brave, good Lincoln in death; but it achieves some continuity, and is the best epic I have seen; which doesn't say much for movie epics in general--or for Birth of a Nation.