Remember the scene in Saving Private Ryan where the German stabs what's his name, all "up close and personal"?
What a ripoff that was!
In the assault on Babylon in Intolerance, practically the exact same scene plays out between an Assyrian and Babylonian. It had the almost erotic closeness, the whispering in his face as the guy dies (this is a silent film, the words were merely mouthed), all very enlightening.
There really is nothing new under the sun...
Some other things of note:
VIOLENCE! This flick would get a PG-13 or more today, lots of beheadings, blood, and gunplay all serve to make this a more gory flick than a lot of our contemporaries would expect out of 1916.
BOOBIES! I did see boobs and nipples behind the gauzy costume gowns of those early Hollywood chickskas!
AWESOME SETS! Kenneth Anger titled his book Hollywood Babylon after the main set of Nebuchadnezzer's dining hall in this film; which stood for years, derelict and abandoned in Hollywood. It was fecking beauteous.
CAMERAWORK! Griffith rightly deserves a place in film history for his groundbreaking work in this aspect, again, I was amazed this was shot in 1916.
However, the maudlin morality and muckish attitudes are downright irritating, and the fact that this is a D.W. Griffith movie cannot be overlooked.
Not only was D.W. Griffith virtually singlehandedly responsible for the 20th century revival of the Klu Klux Klan with his other notable flick, The Birth of a Nation, but he was an alcoholic who preached temperance, and was all for Prohibition.
Racist hate mongerers and moral hypocrites make me ill, but he was a pioneer in so many areas of filmaking that you can't overlook what he accomplished simply because of those very tragic character flaws.
