In the Sunday NYT Magazine, Lillian Gish wrote of “The
Greatest Thing in Life”
“One of D. W. Griffith’s most interesting films and I can’t
find it. It was made as an answer to those who had been attacking “The Birth of
a Nation.” In it he deals with the colored man. Colored people raised Griffith:
he loved them and they loved him. I recall a very unusual scene at the movie’s
end. Two men are caught in a shell hole in World War I – one a dying colored
man, the other a white snob. The colored man, though he’s dying, gives all the
water he has to the white man and saves his life. Becoming delirious, the
colored man asks for his mammy to kiss him and the white snob leans over and
kisses him full on the lips. It was daring, very moving, and not funny, as it
may sound when I tell it. “The Greatest Thing in Life,” as Griffith saw it, was
love, love of your brother, your fellow man, whatever he is and of whatever
color.”
Miss Gish played the female lead in “The Greatest Thing in Life,”
and Robert Harron was the male lead. The film was released in 1918 and one of
three Griffith filmed while in the UK. Elmo Lincoln is credited as playing “The
American Soldier” in the film. Griffith cast a black man for the film rather
than casting a white actor in black face as in the most controversial scenes in
“The Birth of a Nation,” based on an early 20th century bestselling
book, “The Clansman,” written by Baptist minister Thomas Dixon. The book was so
popular stage plays based on the book toured the country.
By the time Griffith filmed “The Clansman,” he had a huge
and interested audience with a hot property and a new and inexpensive medium
for audiences to “enjoy” the film. Children, in 1915, got a reduced price to
see “The Birth of a Nation” in New York.
An interracial kiss between two men, for 1918, sounds astonishing
but I saw a photograph of it. I am not sure if Griffith had second thoughts and
destroyed it or if Griffith’s business partners wanted the film “lost.”
Descriptions of the film, like that of Miss Gish, cannot, of course, do justice
to the actual scene or seeing the scene acted.
A largely full print of the film exists. I thought the owner
would have released it in 2015 as that was the 100th anniversary of “The
Birth of a Nation.” It has not happened as of this writing. Another important
date is coming up and perhaps it will surface at that time.
In the same article, Mary Pickford wrote, briefly, on the “The
Birth of a Nation.”
Jim Patterson
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