SOURCE: "Theme, Felt Life, and the Last-Minute Rescue in Griffith After Intolerance," in Film Quarterly, Vol. XXVIII, No. 1, Fall, 1974, pp. 39-49.

[In the following essay, Cadbury asserts that a mature artistic vision is present in Griffith's earlier films.]

There have come to be two positions on D. W. Griffith, a modern orthodoxy and a much-needed revisionism. The orthodoxy is a picture of Griffith the great innovator, whose values and intentions however amount only to a style for his times. When those times changed (it happened with startling suddenness, Karl Brown reminisces, between the making and exhibiting of Intolerance), Griffith's values and his style fell away from those congenial to his audience. In this view the later films are spasmodic attempts to accommodate the new audience without, however, any aesthetic growth on Griffith's part. Griffith is aesthetically the same throughout his career, and the films only come to look a bit different because they get worse.

The welcome revisionism offered recently by John Don-challenges both aspects of the orthodoxy. It admits Griffith the early innovator but sees him breaking new aesthetic ground afterIntolerance, moving to a new style built not on melodramatic action and last-minute rescues but on investigation of spiritual states through close-ups; not on passive victim-heroines but on actively assertive New Women; not on Lillian Gish but on a Carol Dempster quite different from the poor actress of the orthodoxy. In this view, Griffith's real value only emerges after the "great" period is over, and his later films improve in style and content. In effect, Griffith changes and his films get better.

The revisionism is most welcome, as it encourages recognition of the wonderful later films. But I think the earlier films are as wonderful, and render the same rich vision, as the later; and the later ones use just as brilliantly (though often, naturally enough, a little differently) the devices of the early. Dorr misreads key Dempster films to make them seem more different from key Gish films than they are. And he misanalyzes the structural centers of the late films, which simply develop the parallel editing techniques which always were at the heart of Griffith's conception of expressive cinematic form.

Let us first deal with the claim that the late films mark a change in vision. Dorr argues that in Dream Street "a decidedly neurotic element enters Griffith's cinema." For instance Billy, the younger brother of Gypsy's (Dempster's) favored Spike, is "pathologically insane." He murders someone, but wins release, to our full approval, by lying about the crime during court-room confession of it. But in fact that is not what Griffith shows us. In the initial presentation of the killing we see Billy first maddened by the demonic violin-player and then in close-up shooting the intruder whom he has found in his room. (The shooting is intercut also with Sam Jones, the incredibly offensively portrayed "black" comic relief, running away from the sound of the shot.) We then see the victim go out of focus and fall, and when we finally return to medium long shot of the room we see that there is a chair overturned on the floor which wasn't there at the start of the sequence, before we went to close-ups and diversions.

Then in the confession Billy tells us remorsefully of the killing, but this time we see the victim in fact hit viciously at Billy with the chair, miss, and come at him again with it; it is only at that point that Billy shoots him. Clearly Billy is not lying; clearly we are seeing what we had not seen before because we cut away from it; clearly the killing was in self-defense. And equally clearly it is appropriate that in Billy's turmoil of mind the fact of the shooting, its quality of matching by its violence the violence of his own motives (half crazy with love for Gypsy, he has just seen her in an impassioned love scene with his brother Spike), would be what we would rightly be shown at that point. It is not the fine points of legal culpability which count for Billy there, but the fact that his assertiveness, always before submerged for his brother's sake, has suddenly gotten out of control and caused him, to his own abject panic, to lash out. But in the clearing of accounts of the confession it is equally appropriate that the extenuating circumstances which actually held might come to Billy's consciousness. There is reconciliation here, not the achievement of a criminal loony's freedom through a false confession.

Similarly, though Dorr says there is doubt about the paternity of Gypsy's baby, Griffith gives us no reason to doubt that the baby is Spike and Gypsy's, and Billy's being included in the domestic scene at the end, when Gypsy and Spike and Billy all watch the baby play, is no "perversion of earlier scenes and situations" but just what you would expect after anguish, repentance, and a last-minute confession which admits and purges moral even as it clears of legal guilt. Likewise, Dorr finds it shocking that Gypsy dances around her father's deathbed; but her action is not some strange rite but because he, knowing himself dying, asks her to dance for him. She does so until she learns that he has died. There is nothing perverse there.

Nor does the dance to quell the panic in the burning theater work as Dorr says. He calls it a "daring and unsettling scene," in which close shots of the rioting audience come to seem "defined and confined" while "Dempster's movement within the larger frame" of the long shots "is anarchy." "Dempster is more out of control than the riot." But what Griffith shows us of the audience is a series of vastly disturbing vignettes of as motley a crew as you could hope to find. They are indeed in close-up, but not thereby confined and defined but rather bursting outwards from a crowded, explosive, painful, ungainly frame. In contrast Gypsy, saying "Sit down, I'm the only fire here!" rushes on to a bare stage and, shot always in clear air with adequate psychological space, does what is far less a dance than a set of acrobatic posturings and steps which all say "Here I am, attend to me and have fun, look, look!" It is ridiculous as a dance, but its effect is immensely charming. The contrast is not between anarchy and control. Rather, Gypsy is personal assertiveness, innocent and gamboling and avowedly sexually appealing, and the riot is inward fantasy, oppressive and oppressed, crushed and crowded and breathless.

In no sense is Gypsy's innocence "tainted and dangerous," as Dorr thinks. Nor is there ambiguity to the themes or the heroine. Spike indeed "demonstrates his love for Gypsy in heavy-handed bullying ways," but this is not because Griffith is rendering a statement about the forms love must sometimes take—how for instance like the violin player it is grotesque under its mask of beauty. Spike must show love in awkward ways, at first, because of the "thoughtlessness of exuberant youth" (this is about the first title defining Spike) and because of the pressures militating against sensitivity in the ghetto. But he learns, he learns—and that he does so is the very theme of the film.

Dorr may say that not "all Griffith films [are] about Lillian Gish and the imminence of rape," but it remains true that in Dream Street Spike does try to rape Gypsy, who is saved only by Billy's intervention. "Oh Lord, why won't the men love me right?" asks Gypsy, whose charming desire is frank and open, sexual and innocent. We see her in her street pensive and yearning with a flock of doves, and in her apartment playing with a stuffed rabbit, and it is as natural for her to be shown that way as for Susie of the true heart to be shown with her chickens and cow, or Anna Moore with her pigeons, or Mountain Girl with her goat. There is indeed "animal freedom" in Gypsy's desires, but there is no "moral anarchy"—unless for a woman to be sexually yearning is an anarchic situation. The irony of Gypsy's lot is not that she is "lethal, erotic and demanding," but that men confuse sex with aggression.

Far from Dream Street rendering a neurotic perversity, it simply works its way toward a typical Griffith image of the good, a picture of a mutuality only barely achieved against pressures from within and without—tendencies to withdrawal and to insensitivity to others, the tendencies we find in most Griffith films. How is the unprotected person like Gypsy, full of desire for self-expression, to achieve fulfillment when it looks as if the two sorts of character we find in the world are equally powerless to avoid turning monstrous? Spike's jovial, demonstrative assertiveness all too easily becomes brutal because it is unable to accommodate or to respect others. But Billy's responsive reflectiveness, sensitive and concernful, all too easily becomes paranoid because its very valuation of others hinders action.

But it turns out that assertiveness and reflectiveness are not the only character choices. On another level in this world other forces are fighting it out, represented by the violin player in touch with the forces of evil and the preacher in touch with heaven, and themselves supervised by the morning star. What happens is less that Billy loses and Spike wins than that a new organization displaces the hopeless contraries of assertiveness and reflectiveness which had seemed all the world had to offer. There may be selfishness and unselfishness, in free variation with the different character types. Assertiveness may limit itself, and reflectiveness may learn to come forward. Thus Griffith turns what looked like "You can't win either way" into "You can win both ways."

Dream Street's structure works up to rendering the conquering of selfishness first for Spike and then for Billy. We have discussed Billy's climactic confession; the whole first half of the film shows how Spike gets over his problems. When he first courts Gypsy in front of her house, as a "man of action" he bends her wrist back and tries to force a kiss. He even slaps her before she runs into the house to escape and complain to the Lord about her incompetent suitors. She has been attracted to Spike, leaning toward him as if magnetized when he sings a song for her on the dock, but she claps her head as if to clear it, and one feels that her attraction and his desire will have much trouble coming to terms.

Again on the inner stairs of her house Gypsy is attracted to Spike, only fleeing to her room when he tries to kiss her. Though she tells him not to come into her room he does. She is bothered, but after all she wants to love him; she plays langorously with a piece of string, she claims that his feet don't match (such play amazes Spike, he has no idea how to deal with it), she sits across the room when he pulls up a chair for her, she jumps away from him and does little enticing steps. Griffith makes us understand perfectly the necessary admixtures of aggression in the sexual games, the requirements that integrity be preserved for both people to allow them to let their guards down and let each other in, the tentativeness of it all along with the obvious sexuality of the atmosphere.

But Spike can't sustain it, and he fails her. The violin player sounds for him, and Gypsy's proud testing, by which she will keep her sexual submission from being a defeat, just comes to make Spike mad. The scene of courtship becomes a rape. But though Gypsy is as terrified as later she is of Sway Wan, we have seen enough of Spike to be full of pity for him as well as for Gypsy. He would like to love her right, but knows no other way than force and no other motive than self-gratification. Billy with his roses comes in, and helped by the preacher's voice gets Spike to leave—but Billy is overcome by sentiment, and can merely offer the roses (as earlier he offered a song) and flee. If Spike cannot go towards Gypsy except to force her, Billy cannot go towards her at all but turns everything inside in a very paradigm of self-defeating sentiment.

At home, then, Spike is torn between the voice of the preacher and the violin player, as he visualizes Gypsy terrified as she was when he attacked her and also as she might be, seraphic and lovely. The preacher shows him Gypsy coming to her door and waiting for him outside her house, yearning and ready on the bench in the empty street. Spike goes to her, indicates his rejection of his old ways, and "The first battle won, the pure flame at last," they kiss each other in a holy and sensual ecstacy. No more awkward rough fumbling, but full mutuality—and it is utterly convincing, despite how conventional the description makes it sound, that Gypsy should blush, be embarrassed, hide her head on Spike's chest. The sense of "felt life" is very strong for me in these sequences, as Griffith convinces us of the plausibility of shy retreats from such openness, and of just how hard it is, in unsupportive surroundings, to get together with others, to get past one's own limiting styles and awkwardnesses.

After following Billy's story for a bit, we return to Gypsy and Spike on their bench. The scene is designed as a contrast to the scene of the near-rape; Gypsy tells Spike not to come in and this time he obeys. She closes the door on him but as he falls on his knees in adoration outside she looks back out. She sees him, laughs as she had laughed before, but goes in again refusing to let him follow: and this time far from being offended Spike is delighted, and struts off down the street comically far more self-satisfied than he could ever have been if his forcefulness had been successful. Above, Gypsy does one of her little dances and sinks in her chair to kiss her stuffed rabbit. As we see Spike walk off happily we realize that though they are separated, though they are withholding, though Gypsy is teasing Spike and he is being teased, both are infinitely satisfied. Griffith here has to prove the case, difficult to make plausible, that there is net gain from abstention. He proves it by embedding the decision to abstain in an emotional context in which not to abstain would have to amount to dominance of the man over the woman and her abject submission to him. Dorr thinks it neuroticism to hold it difficult to "make pure and sweet the dreams" of a "Life [which] is not always what it seems," as the titles have it. But it seems to me that by showing the actual emotional danger of selfishness and the emotional rewards attendant on mutuality, Griffith proves that a forceful but sensitive responsiveness to others can give joys as great as those symbolized by Gypsy's happy little shuffle with her rabbit or Spike's delighted strutting as he leaves Gypsy's door.

But I do not think this proof is higher in quality than those of the best Gish films, nor indeed that it is different in point. Griffith films tend to have the same form, with which they render Griffith's insistent imaginative vision, and the form is supported by the principal actors whoever they are. Characters in Griffith's films are pressed by circumstances into emotional holding actions. From these their natural vitality can only briefly glance out until the issues of accommodation of personal assertiveness and constraining commitment (which each film raises in its own terms) can be brought to resolution. And when they are, the force of the characters' privately held assurance of the good can be implemented and the necessarily hidden power of their buried life can reach the surface of the action.

We knew the force of buried life in Dream Street in part through Gypsy's dances, public and private. And Gypsy went out to Spike in quite overt ways. But to think of Gish as "sweet, innocent and cloying," in a way Dempster is not, is simply untrue to Gish's display of inner life bubbling up in a hostile world. True Heart Susie, for instance, is as solidly Gishian a film as one could find. And the main sense we have of Susie is of someone who has to suppress her natural spark because of the cloddishness of those around her. Just like Gypsy, Susie isn't loved right, and we keep seeing her worth, like Gypsy's, press against her lover's inadequacy to appreciate it.

Just as Gypsy from the start has a project—to express her sexuality so the men will love her right—so from the start has Susie." I must marry a smart man," she confides to her cow after outspelling William, and sending William to college is her way to make him that man. Susie comes forward sexually to William as much as Gypsy to Spike, though William can no more figure how to love Susie right than Spike can Gypsy. After the spelling bee Susie reaches up to be kissed, but William awkwardly turns aside. When William is going off to college, Susie at her gate tries again for the kiss and William fails her again. After Susie has overheard William's heavy flirtation in her own rose garden with the flapper Bettina (Truffaut recreates Susie's later faint in that garden in Two English Girls), she dresses up and "prepares for war," putting on necklace, silk stockings, and cornstarch for make-up. But then she makes "a dangerous move," and goes back to her old clothes and sits on her porch to let William see her as she is and, hopefully, love her right this time. But he misses her quality again and only asks her if she thinks he should marry. She says yes, but he goes away, having Bettina not Susie in mind.

Like Gypsy, Susie offers herself delicately but clearly, and her assertiveness is as plain as her decorum. A girl tries to stop William and flirt with him—Susie plucks insistently at his sleeve until he comes with her. Walking with William, Susie does an amazing little side-kick every three or four steps as she walks. It has no verisimilitude, but it perfectly renders the quality of Susie's inner life, the vitality which pops through the demure surface of her social relations. And that vitality, the sense of Susie with energy to spare, in a context which, like Gypsy's, is not up to appreciating it, charges the film for us.

The assertiveness Susie must suppress is summed up in a climactic scene which is full of felt life. Bettina has sneaked out from William to party with her friends, has lost her key and been caught in a rainstorm coming home (she catches her death, in fact). She comes to Susie, begging to be taken in and to have Susie cover for her. Of all the people in the film, only Bettina has trouble pushing Susie's gate open, and Susie herself is, entirely reasonably, most reluctant to help or to lie for Bettina. But she agrees, and we see the two of them in bed. Susie thinks about it, gets madder and madder, and hauls back to punch Bettina out, with a most disgusted expression.

But we see Bettina in close-up and in troubled sleep, and we see Susie realize her inadequacy and pathos as a person. She shakes her head a little, accepts it all, and cuddles Bettina with open eyes to a fade. And Griffith earns it: the scene is not coy or cloying, since Susie is aware of Bettina's unworthiness of William and that that is just what makes Bettina so annoying and at the same time makes her human appeal so irresistible. Susie's inner life is suppressed here as everywhere not because Griffith intends to praise passivity, but because activity itself, in a world out of tune with one's needs and deserts, must often take this form. In the bind Gypsy is put in by Spike, action becomes yearning and waiting. In the bind Susie is put in by William, it becomes this sort of annoyed amused tolerance.

Of course Griffith renders not just the buried life pushing outwards but also what holds it in. Just as the low point of Dream Street is Gypsy finding the very man she longs for turning monstrous before her eyes even as she tries to work out a way to adjust her assertiveness to his, so the low point of True Heart Susie is Susie mounting a full-scale effort finally to get William for herself yet finding herself suddenly pressed upon in as nightmarish a way as anything provided by Sway Wan. Susie arrives at a party, all dressed up and ready to charm, only to have to come into a crowded room to congratulate William as he tells her he took her advice to marry and that Bettina has accepted him. Susie must be demure and proper here, and before the scene closes on her surreptitiously wiping her eyes Griffith gives us a virtually Eisensteinian set of close-ups of the people in the room, of Susie's aunt looking disturbed and Bettina's looking triumphantly complacent, of Bettina looking smugly down on William looking fatuous, of various members of the group sitting silently in what amounts, as a series of shots, to a montage tableau. The very treatment renders the complacency, the irrevocable quality, the sense that possibilities have suddenly been exhausted and feeling has been socialized in the worst possible way, which characterize the situation. In its varnished parlor stasis it forms the diametric opposite of the hitch-legged walk down the country path which renders this film's picture of the good. Such kinds of control of feeling through the cinematic surface, and its truth to narrative context, are what make Griffith great.

Both early and late, Griffith invested his films with that felt life which the revisionism of Dorr finds only late, and, both early and late, Griffith structured it by variants of the device of the "last-minute rescue" which the orthodoxy of Casty finds thematically dessicating and which it is the essence of the revisionism to say that Griffith went on beyond. Fundamentally a technique of parallel editing leading to a climax, the rescue is properly neither a category of content nor a mere technique for audience manipulation, but rather a specifically cinematic device for rendering the development of the issues raised by a film in order to give an aspect of their resolution a striking representation whose feeling will match its thematic import.

Thus in True Heart Susie the entire sequence leading up to Susie's gesture against and then accepting Bettina is treated in the characteristic rhythms and patterns of the device. We observe Bettina sneak out and enjoy her party, get caught in the storm and come to Susie. But we observe two other locations as well, William agonizing at Bettina's door and Susie caring for her sick aunt. Bettina's charming weakness is played against Susie's charming strength as she sits on the covers to keep her aunt's restless arm under, and Susie longs for William's house from her own window, toward which William yearns from his. Bettina's dancing and Susie's caring, William's moral unease and the aunt's physical unease, the lost key and the arm out of the covers, all illuminate each other and lead to Susie's sadly going to her bed just while Bettina equally sadly can't find her way to hers. The sense of converging lines and the treatment in mutually revealing shots of decreasing duration are just those of the last-minute rescue, and the climax in Susie's moral triumph of acceptance feels just like the rescue's triumph.

Even in films where action sweeps us up and where there is a literal rescue, the sequence of the last-minute rescue interplays with the issues of the film for enrichment and specification of theme. No one, for instance, would deny that Way Down East is overwhelmingly impressive for the rescue from the ice. But the rescue is experienced in the context of the sequences by which Anna Moore has come to be there. Anna's progression from openly sexual delight in Lennox Sanderson, to emotional closedness as she walks toward Bartlett's, her fiercely but restrainedly scornful antagonism to Lennox and her developing feeling for David Bartlett are richly particularized. There is a dogged quality to Anna Moore, more serious because more initially wounded, and more determinedly assertive of her right to happiness, than Susie's youthful quality. It gives consistency and appropriateness to the lovely close-ups of Anna in her party gown and as Elaine of Astolat which would have been impossible for Susie, and gives psychological density to the famous confrontation scene.

It gives also a specific thematic effect to the rescue from the ice. Anna's despair as her possibilities come to nothing, and then her virtually committing suicide on the frozen river, are not mere passivities like those of The Boy being taken to execution in Intolerance, but are, like Susie's ironic resignation, the very mode of action of her dogged and serious character in that plight. And David's finally chasing her is an eruption into action of a character whose error (like the errors of all the Billy types) is to turn feeling inward and be ineffectual; but his saving of Anna expresses as it rewards the value of her character as well as of his own.

Like Anna's, Henriette's vitality in Orphans of the Storm is squelched between the same alternatives: by Lennox-like aristocrats who press for sensuality during a party, and by rubish revolutionaries who catch Henriette up in a dance of their own but, finding she is not one of themselves, threaten her with their guillotine. (In a doubling, we note that Pierre Frochard and his brother Jacques who threaten Henriette's sister Louise are perfect versions of Billy and Spike.) It might seem, in summary of the action, that Danton's rescue of Henriette from the guillotine is just like David's rescue of Anna from the ice. But it by no means feels that way or renders the same theme; Griffith is not repeating himself even if he is using the same structure. As soon as it happens it is clear to us that David's change of mind, by which he breaks free of his family and cleaves to Anna, represents a counter-assertiveness to the tendencies of his social system to become inflexibly intolerant—and he goes after Anna very much for himself. But Danton's rescue, motivated by his recollection of Henriette's kindness to him and of her lover the Chevalier's having fed the poor, represents rather a selfless submission to the appeal of old values, treasured kindnesses, personal relations. What David does for himself in rejecting his family's stasis, Danton does for others in turning his revolutionary society's chaos in the direction of more humane action. David's action is a personal triumph of assertion of energies, but Danton's is a triumph of the channeling of energies into a broader tolerance.

Even in these avowed spectaculars, the rescues do not replace thought with action, but rather articulate and resolve particularized themes. The Griffith themes, as we have seen, center around issues of social constraint against which, without becoming monstrous, human character must somehow find a way to assert its legitimate demands. Often the solution for the individual is acting morally by refraining from action or by acting counter to his or her own immediate interests. But the force of that moral action impells someone else into activity, for instance a rescue, which will reward it. The last-minute rescues, as well as rewarding the central figure, also thus manifest his or her force, since it is the moral force which made the difference. Thus it is only natural variation that the last-minute rescues may be either by someone else, as in Orphans of the Storm, or by the hero or heroine, as in True Heart Susie. And as with any device which may be used to render developments of specific issues in terms subtly adjusted to the issues' necessities, the last-minute rescue is capable of other variations as well, to match the particular requirements of specific variants of Griffith's general theme.

In True Heart Susie the rescue pattern leads up to Susie's triumph. In Abraham Lincoln the rescue pattern is set aside from Lincoln's triumph in order both to manifest it and to keep a clear distinction between its spiritual and social aspects. The film has two strands, one of which is the establishment of Lincoln's value in his sacrifice of himself. As is typical of Griffith's structures, Lincoln's assertiveness is made clear at the start. In John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln Lincoln faces down with stern patriarchal repression a bully who shouts "I'm the buck of this lick," but in Griffith's film it is Lincoln himself who fights a bully and then explodes into shouting the same sentence. But the assertiveness is constrained by the demands of history, and for the bulk of the film Lincoln's inner life can only express itself in acts whose assertiveness is largely to deny assertion. Lincoln pardons a young deserting soldier whose legs ran away with him when he saw his friend's corpse—a reminder of Lincoln's own legs' running away with him when he first tried to marry Mary Todd. The soldier's reluctance is linked, through his dead comrade, to Ann Rutledge dead, and to the whole weight of Lincoln's personal obligation to a vanished frontier past. It is in this context that Lincoln pardons the South itself, despite the pressures on him not to do so.

But pardonings take their toll. Rather than acting as against a bully, the pardonings are a giving up of what Lincoln might have done as buck of this lick. For all their sense of moral tranquillity they entail also Lincoln giving up a part of himself, becoming less than he was. The assassination is of course the climax of this development towards giving himself up, as it completes the chain by which the heroic and boastful frontier hero becomes an awkward dancer, a president whose legs will not fit under the White House sofas, a rube who cannot be kept in his own shoes. For "The Union, we've saved it at last," Lincoln gives up dignity and life itself; the sacrifice of personal forcefulness for the Union is Lincoln's cost for which we are to be grateful to him.

But Griffith wants Lincoln's movement toward assassination to be seen as an action: it is Lincoln's spirit which leads him inexorably, as the last set of shots makes clear, from log cabin to the Lincoln Memorial. The fact that it is not submissiveness but profound assertiveness which drives that development is shown in another plot strand which presents the feeling appropriate to Lincoln's achievement. In it Lincoln passes on his assertiveness to others like him, whose activity may thus be assigned to him. The war is run at first by a grotesque ineffectual General Scott, a kind of Toby Jug parody of a European general, but Lincoln takes the conduct of the war from him and gives it to Grant—as backwoodsy and disreputable as Lincoln himself. And in turn this assertiveness is passed on to another cut from the same cloth: Sheridan's ride, his turning of the losing army to "rally round the flag, boys, rally once again," is treated in Griffith's best last-minute rescue style, with pounding hooves and all his most stirring techniques of mass action, striking close-ups, and exciting editing. Since these events derive from Lincoln's assigning the war effort to people who are like what he was once himself, it can seem to be Lincoln's best quality (though implemented by others while he sits in the White House in mystic trance) which actually saves the Union through just that forcefulness for which Lincoln earns our gratitude by allowing it to pass out of himself for the general good. He has found the way, as do the heroes of many Griffith films, to socialize assertiveness and to make restraint action.

The case against the last-minute rescue is that it simplifies, so that as a rhetorical pattern obligatorily coming near the ends of films it limits the imagination about what can be in the films which must be ended with it. In the later films especially, says Alan Casty, "even the style seemed to collaborate with the reductive conceptions, restricting the kinds and degrees of felt life that could become the content of the work." But that is simply not true. Abraham Lincoln symbolizes a passive-seeming achievement so that its truly active nature will be rendered in the surface of the film; Isn't Life Wonderful? goes further and uses the last-minute rescue pattern to raise feelings in us which the whole film will deny. Far from investing all value in the conclusion of the rescue, that film puts into it everything which will turn out to be false. Clearly we must say, faced with cases like these, that Griffith (like any artist) uses the devices he learns to control to make his points; and he employs whatever clever variations on their ordinary use will serve his purpose. That is not being impoverished by one's rhetoric, but enriched.

Inga and Paul in Isn 't Life Wonderful? have harvested their potatoes, but they are spotted by destitute workers who seek profiteers transporting hoarded food. The chase is treated just like Gus chasing Flora through the woods in Birth of a Nation. Paul and Inga are caught and their potatoes are stolen—but it is as clear a moral triumph as Susie accepting Bettina in her bed that Inga creeps up the side of the empty potato wagon, realizes that all is lost, and then decides that life is wonderful after all. The potatoes have been treated as the necessary and sufficient means of Inga's achieving what she wishes most in life, her marriage to Paul. And the marriage will have to be put off because they are stolen. But Griffith does not want just to say that putting off is not renouncing, or that while there is even a life of resignation there is hope. He wants to say that life is wonderful, not just bearable. And for this he sets up a double proof: intensity is what one treasures, moment by moment and success or no; true intensity may entail transformation of its natural drive into a more general understanding than of one's own purposes. The real danger is not of loss, but of truncation. It is a particularly rich version of the general Griffith theme, rendered in a particularly rich treatment of the characteristic Griffith device.

Intensity is provided most obviously in the particularization of experience which has struck so many viewers of this film. Dempster's extraordinary acting, the fully realized personal relations throughout the family, the warm rendition of the festivals of turnips and feasts of liverwurst in gamely struggling lives, and the light-sculptured love scenes between Paul and Inga combine to make us feel the attitude to life which can properly experience such things, and not the goal to which they are directed. As usual in Griffith, the bulk of the film builds up an intensity of felt life to which whatever happens later must be related.

But Griffith means us to see, through his last-minute rescue in which all is gained as all is lost, that this sort of intensity has its psychic hazards, developing attitudes which in their selfishness may be like the monstrous character deformities we have seen in the other films. Throughout the film a disturbing double valuation has been built up toward the pursuing workers. On the one hand, we have a lot more sympathy for them than for most villains. In the very middle of Paul's family's "lucky day" dinner we are shown "the giant" who leads the chase resolving to spare his wife the suffering of having only rotten meat; that resolution leads to the foray into the woods. Much as we like Paul and Inga, our awareness of the suffering of others makes us aware too that the family's good fortune is unusual, and perhaps in a sense unjustified. In the workers we have a brutalism which is simply assertiveness gone too far, and for which, as for Spike's similar case, we feel sympathy.

But on the other hand (and this is characteristic for Griffith), there has been throughout a distinct aura of sexual menace. We were told at the beginning that the giant's righthand man would rob Inga of her greatest earthly possession. A little later, unaware, she is followed home by this man. While she displays lots of leg taking off her stockings in her room the man pauses outside as if entranced—we can see her, and it is distinctly as if he can too. The same man is among the loutish idlers Inga must pass on her way to the meat store, and he is one of those who menace her as she walks her chickens on a leash. The episodes suggest that Inga's most precious possession may be her chastity. So when, with the couple caught, Inga babbles naively to this very man that of course the gang won't hurt a fellow worker like Paul, we fear the worst.

But the giant rejects Paul's union card, and the whole tone changes. The henchman shares in expressing self-loathing and ironic laughter at the justice of their self-description as no longer workers but now made beasts through war and privation. Rape was on no one's mind but ours, and the simple personal threat against Inga dissolves (for her too) into understanding of the straits to which people may be forced by deprivation. It is against that sense of reduction, of the vulnerability of people pressed into turning monstrous, that Griffith sets the assertiveness of Inga's final "Oh, isn't life wonder-ful?"—since she still has the relation to Paul which matters, and which in this social context is all she may have without selfishness.

Clearly here, as in many other Griffith films, the last-minute rescue has been used to undercut the very expectations of simplification of theme which its use suggests: potatoes are not everything, nor even chastity. Here, as elsewhere, the device supports and renders a striking demonstration of the Griffith theme: that despite pressures towards simplifications of self-gratification or of brutalism, the assertiveness of selfhood can through patience, unselfishness, and love find a way of acting in the world so as to find fulfillment in terms not forced upon it, but its own.

Far from passing beyond the mere melodrama of the last-minute rescue, as Dorr suggests, or from decaying into its mere employment for simplification of response, as Casty argues, Griffith as he develops the technique throughout his career gives the device, as André Bazin said of Hitchcock's development of montage itself, "a relativity and a meaning." And there seems little more we can ask of an expressive device than that it bear exactly what shades of meaning, what relativities to its context in a developing story, its author's subtly developing but stable vision would have it bear.