Isn't Life Wonderful!D

D. W. Griffith is the great fons et origo of cinema.  David Thomson calls him moviemaking's "scout" --  he showed the way to new lands.  Griffith's influence on the Soviet school of agit-prop filmmaking in the post-revolutionary period is inestimable.  His experiments with montage and close-ups are decisive in the history of cinema.  Griffith virtually invented the close-up and acting techniques exhibited by his characters inspired imitation that governed the screen well into the sound era.  A film like Orphans of the Storm establishes methods for creating suspense on screen that have not been bettered by Hitchcock or Spielberg.  And with the remarkable Isn't Life Wonderful!, Griffith pioneers themes and techniques that would be reinvented 25 years later in Italian neo-realism.  It's not clear to me that Rossellini or de Sica actually saw and studied Isn't Life Wonderful! The picture failed at the box office and I'm not aware of references to this movie in the context of Italian neo-realism -- nature and art knows instances of evolutionary convergence.  But Griffith's scrupulously authentic and documentary-style filmmaking in this 1924 production seems incisively truthful in a way that eludes many of the director's other more spectacular productions -- in a way, the film represents the antithesis of what audiences expected from a Griffith picture.  With Isn't Life Wonderful! Griffith makes an anti-Griffith film -- he seems to repudiate the more manipulative and lavish effects in early pictures.  Indeed, a preliminary title makes this point directly, citing in a self-aggrandizing way, a favorable review that observes that the director has eschewed the spectacle that earlier made him famous. 

Griffith had a tendency to work against his previous picture.  The incendiary Birth of a Nation inspired hatred and revived the Ku Klux Klan.  Stung by legitimate criticisms of bigotry, Griffith, then, made Intolerance in reparation for his previous intemperance in the Civil War film.  Broken Blossoms with its gentle Chinese hero is a miniature -- a lapidary film also designed, in part, to restore Griffith's credibility as a progressive humanist.  Hearts of the World is a viciously partisan work of propaganda contrived to inspire hatred against the murderous Huns -- it's W.W. I propaganda at its most extreme, a parade of rape and massacre.  Griffith is said to have regretted the excesses in Hearts of the World and, therefore, made Isn't Life Wonderful! in reparation for that earlier film.  (A similar pairing can be made of Griffith's domestic melodramas Way Down East and True Heart Susie -- the former film is aggressively mawkish and manipulative whereas True Heart Susie is modest, unassuming, and charming.)

Griffith shot much of Isn't Life Wonderful! in Berlin and its suburbs in 1922 and 1923.  Many of the people on-screen don't appear to be actors.  The film doesn't strive for obvious effects and is curiously understated.  Most remarkable is the movie's subject -- stated simply, Isn't Life Wonderful! is a film about starvation.  Hunger is the motivation for the characters in the picture -- love is an after-thought. 

Some semi-apologetic titles establish that the film was made in Berlin and that riots over scarce foodstuffs, primarily potatoes, resulted in many deaths.  American audiences may not have been willing to see a picture about a struggling German family in 1924.  (By 1930 and All Quiet on the Western Front, the wounds had healed enough for a film featuring German soldiers to be produced; 1924 seems to have been too early.)  The protagonists in the film are (somewhat evasively) said to be refugees from Poland, although they seem to be Germans -- presumably, they are ethnic Germans displaced from Poland when the war was lost.  Isn't Life Wonderful! is a family drama -- the plot is intensely focused upon the refugees confined to two tiny cheerless apartments (consisting of three crowded rooms).  The family consists of an eccentric old father and his wife, a grandma who seems always dying except when she rouses herself to make snarky and pessimistic comments, three sons, and an orphan girl, Inga, that the family has brought into their fold.  Inga is in love with one of the sons, Paul, who has returned damaged from the war -- he's been gassed and almost suffocates in a harrowing scene early in the film.  Paul narrowly survives and recovers sufficiently to return to work in a shipyard on the other side of the Berlin.  The ship-workers are allotted tiny tracts of land and Paul plants potatoes, lovingly tending the plants with which he hopes to feed the family.  At the same time, he has built a hut from ammunition boxes where he intends to live with Inga after he marries her.  Mobs of starving men roam the streets, beating people up, and stealing any food that they are carrying.  Inga and Paul harvest their potatoes and fill up a cart with the spuds, putting themselves in harness to drag the food through a daunting forest.  The starving men see their women and children dying of hunger and are desperate.  There ensues a frightening chase through the forest and a fight with the gang of food thieves. Paul and Inga are severely beaten and their potatoes are all stolen.  At first, Inga is convinced that the unconscious Paul has been beaten to death.  But he revives and this fills her with joy.  Although they have lost everything, they still have each other.  Inga points out the beauty of the moon shining on the still river and there's a fade-out.  A tiny coda follows.  We see Inga and Paul's little hut built from the ammo boxes with blossoms in the flower boxes:  children are dancing in the alley.  Inga enters the hut and a close-up shows us her bridal bouquet but also a hen tucked securely under her arm -- the specter of starvation has been held at bay, but the hen is still a decisively important source of food for the couple. 

Griffith's audacity in this picture is to work directly against his optimistic title.  As depicted in the movie, life isn't wonderful -- it's a morose struggle against starvation that makes most of the people in the movie into comatose zombies.  Indeed, the film's whole premise -- love is better than a reasonable caloric intake-- seems highly questionable.  On the other hand, Inga's dauntless resolve to make the best of the things after the film's awful and dispiriting climax is curiously inspiring.  Griffith begins the scene with a soft-focus image of lovers seated on a river bank gazing across the picturesque and romantic stream to some hazy old-world castle walls -- it's a faded cliché nocturne.  After Paul and Inga have been beaten and robbed, we see the same shot -- but now we notice that they are sitting on the sod next to their looted cart and the picture takes on an entirely different resonance.  (The shot exemplifies that context is all -- in the opening of the film, the image is just programmatically pretty; at the end of the film, it's profound.)
  
Griffith organizes the last half of the film into three powerful set-pieces.  In the first, Inga with 12 million marks in her purse stands in a long queue waiting to buy a pound of meat.  Initially, the meat is selling for 9 million marks.  But the line is long and by the time Inga gets to the front of the queue, the meat's price has increased (due to rampant inflation) to 15 million marks -- beyond the her ability to pay.  She goes home to the family empty-handed.  Her wages for the week, sufficient at mid-day, are no longer enough to buy more than a half-loaf of day-old bread.  This sequence is cut for suspense and it is notably exciting -- Griffith shows us the desperate people in the food line, the family at home half-conscious with starvation, the butchers, and the clerk periodically changing the price on a blackboard.  It's a classic and exemplary piece of film art.  The second set piece involves one of the sons who has received a gift of a couple pounds of liverwurst by some wealthy, if indifferent, Americans at the café where he works.  Inga's hen has just laid one egg and there are a lot of potatoes available.  The family (they have been eating "horse turnips") feasts and one of the sons, who worked in Polish vaudeville apparently, plays the accordion while performing gymnastic stunts and everyone dances.  It's pathetic, joyous, and indescribably weird to see the accordion-player in effect breakdancing with his instrument.  Of course, the final set piece is the nightmarish chase through the woods with the mob in pursuit.  (Griffith moves the camera sparingly, but here he uses several tracking and dolly shots that have enormous force.)  Members of the gang seem to be played by real survivors of starvation and their desperation is frightening.  At one point, Inga has Paul show the mob-leader his union card to establish that they are fellow working men.  The mob-leader, a giant wearing clothing about four sizes too large for him due to starvation, looks at the union card, relents for a moment, but, then, remembers his wife finding that their foodstuffs are all rotten -- his face shows a horrifying mixture of rage, regret, terror, and shame.  But he tears up the union card, beats Paul, and, with his men, loots the potatoes.  Griffith's use of alley ways and tenement corridors is impeccable.  You can almost smell the squalor on screen.  Carol Dempster who plays Inga has a long, haggard face -- she looks like the victim of starvation with sunken cheeks and big, bulging bright eyes.  Paul has a thousand-yard stare -- he's clearly suffering from serious post-traumatic stress.  The minor characters are all similarly gaunt, staggering around like the undead in the horror films made in the thirties.  It's a remarkable picture.