The best D. W. Griffith’s movies
If you love cinema, you will share this ranking of the best D. W. Griffith’s movies, although you may have ordered them differently. In any case, we hope you love it and with a little luck discovering a movie that you still don’t know about D. W. Griffith.
San Francisco
7.2/10
A beautiful singer and a battling priest try to reform a Barbary Coast saloon owner in the days before the big earthquake.
Why Be Good?: Sexuality & Censorship in Early Cinema
6.3/10
Before the G, PG and R ratings system there was the Production Code, and before that there was, well, nothing. This eye-opening documentary examines the rampant sexuality of early Hollywood through movie clips and reminiscences by stars of the era. Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Marlene Dietrich and others relate tales of the artistic freedom that led to the draconian Production Code, which governed content from 1934 to 1968. Diane Lane narrates.
Enoch Arden
6.3/10
Seamen Enoch Arden returns home after a long absence marooned on a desert island. At home he finds his wife married to another, and though he loves her, he cannot bear to disrupt her current happiness.
Rescued from an Eagle's Nest
5.8/10
A woodsman leaves a hut followed by a woman with their baby. Nearby some men chop down a tree. The baby is left outside the hut, but an eagle flies away with it.
The Tramp and the Dictator
7.8/10
A look at the parallel lives of Charlie Chaplin and Adolf Hitler and how they crossed with the creation of the film “The Great Dictator,” released in 1940.
1776, or The Hessian Renegades
5.5/10
During the American Revolution, a young soldier carrying a crucial message to General Washington is spotted and pursued by a group of enemy soldiers. He takes refuge with a civilian family, but is soon detected. The family and their neighbors must then make plans to see that the important message gets through after all.
Screen Snapshots (Series 1, No. 20)
Intimate views of the movie stars of the Silent Era, at work and play; featuring Sessue Hayakawa, Lillian Gish and others.
Star Power: The Creation Of United Artists
6.3/10
The careers of D.W. Griffith, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin are chronicled culminating in the formation of United Artists and 1919.
The Fatal Hour
5.5/10
This one-reeler is regarded as a Griffith thriller. It engages with the Chinese White slave traffic from the perspective of a female detective, Marion Leonard, whose assignment is to expose and break the traffic ring.
The Adventures of Billy
5.9/10
Billy witnesses two tramps accidentally kill someone during a robbery. The tramps lock him up and decide that he must be killed, too.
A Calamitous Elopement
4.5/10
A young couple are enjoying a romantic interlude in the young woman's home, when her father discovers them and angrily chases the young man out of the house. They thus decide to elope, and they make plans accordingly. But as they are leaving, a thief discovers their plans, and he decides to turn the situation to his own advantage.
Balked at the Altar
4.7/10
A woman who is filled with romantic ideas is making no secret of her eagerness to find a husband. Her father decides to help her by pressuring and threatening an eligible bachelor, who reluctantly allows wedding plans to be made.
The Music Master
What is more miserable than love-blighted life? For the heart that truly loves can never forget. Such is the sad fate of the hero of this Biograph story.
The Politician's Love Story
4.8/10
A haughty politician, on seeing a satirical cartoon in a newspaper, rushes to the paper's offices to shoot the cartoonist. On discovering the cartoonist is a pretty woman, he falls instantly in love and wastes no time in trying to woo her.
The Sculptor's Nightmare
5.3/10
At a political club, the members debate whose bust will replace that of Theodore Roosevelt. Unable to agree, each goes to a sculptor's studio and bribes him to sculpt a bust of the individual favorite. Instead, the sculptor spends their fees on a dinner with his model during which he becomes so inebriated that he is taken to jail. There he has a nightmare, wherein three busts are created and animated from clay (through stop-motion photography) in the likenesses of Democrat William Jennings Bryan and Republicans Charles W. Fairbanks and William Howard Taft. Finally an animated bust of Roosevelt appears.
At the Altar
5.4/10
At the Italian boarding house the male boarders were all smitten with the charms of Minnie, the landlady's pretty daughter, but she was of a poetic turn of mind and her soul soared above plebeianism and her aspirations were romantic. Most persistent among her suitors was Grigo, a coarse Sicilian, whose advances were odiously repulsive. The arrival at the boarding house from the old country of Giuseppe Cassella, the violinist, filled the void in her yearning heart. Romantic, poetic and a talented musician, Giuseppe was indeed a desirable husband for Minnie.
Cupid’s Pranks
4.9/10
After receiving a scolding for falling asleep on the job, Cupid is sent out in search of potential lovers to unite. While flying over a city, he finds a ballroom dance and identifies a likely couple. He is successful in getting them to meet, but many obstacles still stand in the way of Cupid achieving his goal for them. (IMDb)
The Invisible Fluid
4.5/10
Had the poor melancholy Dane, Hamlet, lived in this, the twentieth century, he would never have given voice to the remark, "Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew!" No indeed! He would have procured some of the mysterious fluid compounded by an erudite scientist by which things animate and inanimate were rendered non est, for ten minutes at least, by simply spraying them with it. In an atomizer, he sends a quantity, accompanied by a letter, to his brother. In the hope of his putting it on the market. The brother regards it as a joke, and, while toying with the atomizer, accidentally sprays himself. Presto! he is gone, to the amazement of the messenger boy who has carried the package thither. The boy reads the letter, and at once sees the amount of fun he can get out of it, so he nips it.
The Black Viper
4.6/10
A thug accosts a girl as she leaves her workplace but a man rescues her. The thug vows revenge and, with the help of two friends, attacks the girl and her rescuer again as they're going for a walk. This time they succeed in kidnapping the rescuer. The girl runs home and gets help from several neighbors. They track the ruffians down to a cabin in the mountains where the gang has trapped their victim and set the cabin on fire.
Filmed Prologue to Birth of a Nation
5.1/10
A dialogue between director D. W. Griffith and actor Walter Huston on the subject of Griffith controversial 1915 film "Birth Of A Nation" and it's theatrical re-release in 1931.
