Review of Orphans of the Storm (1921) by Mike M — 09 Oct 2011

May just stand as Griffith's most shameless film, "Birth of a Nation" notwithstanding... deMille-like, it's geared towards exactly the kind of excess it seeks to denounce in its characters, proving unable, in the main, to acknowledge its own colossal appetites.

Griffith stages a nicely saucy Versailles - the gardens filled with cavorting of one kind or another, with courtesans in diaphanous blouses or frolicking topless in fountains of wine - and one can well imagine audiences of the time rushing the screen to lick at the roast oxen and cakes.

("Enough wasted at these feasts to feed many," harrumphs an intertitle.) Against that, the orphans are left to roam about a not especially credible Paris, evidently shot on a studio backlot and full of pinchpennies and cutthroats, going for scale over specifics.

The historical stance Griffith adopts is once again shown with time to be patently preposterous - having to tut-tut at both the landed rich and the revolting riff-raff who came to overthrow them, while making of the snow-white Gishes shining lights of virtue, ceaselessly tending to the Revolutionaries' wounds.

(But who, alas, will save them from the guillotine?) One redeeming aspect is the film's sheer pace: unlike, say, "Intolerance", "Orphans" really does rattle along in the manner of the era's best serials, every scene introducing some new colour or other element that might distract us from the piffle surrounding it: it wouldn't surprise me to learn that its cutting, in particular, influenced Eisenstein in his later depictions of history - even if the two filmmakers' attitudes toward revolutionary politics differed quite, quite radically.