Jim Patterson Keepers and Mention of Lillian Gish

Keepers: The Greatest Films-and Personal Favorites-of a Moviegoing Lifetime by Richard Schickel (Knopf) 2015.

"D.W.Griffith struggled financially and artistically, trying to support a studio of his own and his habit of making historical spectacles that were awkward and seemed old-fashioned to a public that wanted something jazzier.

"There was another side to Griffith, which he chose not to exploit, yoked as he was to spectacle and 'importance'. He was rarely entirely comfortable with the broad canvasses  of works like Way Down East or Orphans of the Storm,. though he occasionally had some success with them. He was best at films like True Heart Susie and A Romance of Happy Valley, smaller pictures that referenced his early Biograph days and his own boyhood days in rural Kentucky. They have an ease and charm (and Lillian Gish, not trying too hard) that is sweet and funny and ages better than his more expensive and portentous efforts.

"Griffith made, and released in 1024, what I think is one of his best pictures, Isn't Life Wonderful, a story of a German family plagued by famine and inflation. It summoned not over blown history, but the austere pleasures oh what was his best vein: simple people struggling with simple, yet deadly, issues of survival. As a Griffith biographer, knowing much too much about him, I stand in a more ambiguous relationship to his life and career than most. He was a bit of a humbug and something of a poseur, and--never forget--the author of he noisome The Birth of a Nation. He ha a lot to answer for. But in his early days he had a taste for simple stories about ordinary people that were gently sentimental, faintly comical and very appealing. Isn't Life Wonderful represents a reversion to that vein, and the truest indicator of his feelings.

"It is perhaps the least well-known of his feature films--not that any of them are well known anymore--and it did nothing to halt his slide first into irrelevancy and then into silence. Yet itis a beautifully felt and realized work, and though he made many other films with much lager impacts on the public and on film history, I believe Isn't Lfe Wonderful deserves a place in this book. 

"If you study movie history at all, you learn this, if nothing else: It is all irony. Griffith, for instance, flopped back to bombast and empty spectacle immediately after Isn't Life Wonderful and never recovered his former pace or significance. ANd that says nothing of the larger irony of all: the fact that silent movies reached their highest level of sophistication and achievement (certainly in America) just as thy were rendered irrelevant by the coming of sound."
pages 25-26

Page 30:
During a discussion of King Vidor: "Vidor made two other pictures, of course, notably La Boheme, during the filming of which he actually thought Lillian Gish had died, so still did she become in one of her swoons."