Isn't Life Wonderful

So now Griffith gets the credit for neorealism too? As if American films like Regeneration and European films like The Outlaw and His Wife (not to mention plenty of Griffith's Biograph shorts) hadn't been shooting grim reality for years? Perhaps he did encourage Germans to film their own urban reality, but if so, they soon surpassed this film.

It isn't that this is a bad film by any means. But Griffith can't get past his own Victorianisms to see the people as well as the bleak streets he's putting on screen-- you'd never believe that the young couple in this story fought in the same war that produced A Sun Also Rises, and were part of the culture that was depicted in Cabaret. Even set aside the purplish titles, and his view of postwar Germans is closer to the homespun idealized Americana of Tol'able David than it is to Brecht and Weill. Only in the climactic scene-- when a mob is nearly dissuaded from a crime by Dempster's pleas for worker solidarity, and then shockingly turns back into a mob anyway-- do you feel that Griffith is really seeing the society that, in a few years, would form the mobs of Nuremberg and Kristallnacht.

And stylistically, the film resists coming alive, as so many of Griffith's 1920s films do. The first problem is casting-- how the director who made Pickford, Gish, Bobby Harron, Mae Murray and so many others in the teens could have staked his career at this point on the dim romantic fire between Neil Hamilton and Carol Dempster is one of film history's mysteries. In truth, the much-maligned Miss Dempster does give perhaps her best performance here, but even fully lit she's a 40-watt bulb next to the klieg lights of Gish et al. And Griffith's style, once so hyperactive, willing to shred the continuity of a scene in order to give us the closeups that would make us feel the actor's moment, is too often staid and stagey (except, again, for the entirely admirable climax).