Charles Laughton’s 1955 film adapts Davis Grubb’s novel into a Southern Gothic fable starring Robert Mitchum as a murderous preacher pursuing two children for hidden money. Shot by Stanley Cortez with expressionist lighting and deliberate pacing, it favours symbolic repetition over psychological realism. Though poorly received on release, it is now regarded as a landmark of arthouse thriller cinema.
D. W. Griffith’s 1916 Intolerance intercuts four historical stories — Babylonian, Judean, French, and American — to argue that intolerance is a persistent, transhistorical mechanism of power. Shot by Billy Bitzer and Karl Brown, edited by Griffith and the Smiths, and scored by Joseph Carl Breil, it uses colour-tinting, symbolic naming, and accelerating cross-cutting to bind eras through visual and rhythmic repetition. Though uneven in dramatic weight and demanding in pace, its formal ambition and influence on global cinema remain unmatched in the silent era.
D. W. Griffith’s 1915 silent epic pioneered cinematic grammar while propagating a violently racist revision of Reconstruction history. Adapted from Thomas Dixon Jr.’s The Clansman, it glorifies the Ku Klux Klan as saviours of white womanhood and Southern order. Though lauded for its editing, scale, and orchestral score, its depictions of Black Americans—many performed in blackface—are dehumanising fabrications that incited protest on release and continue to shape debates about film preservation, pedagogy, and responsibility.