Isn't Life Wonderful

Isn't Life Wonderful is the type of small-scale drama that Griffith excelled at, and this particular one, though a bit too stretched out, still managed to be effective (and affecting). The basic story is of a family of Polish refugees in post-WWI Germany who do their best to survive economic uncertainty. What keeps them going, and is the main theme of the film, is their love for each other. While that might seem trite or cliched on paper, hardly any of it is overplayed. In fact, I see the basic themes in the film still having resonance today, even if the cultural specificity is a little outdated. Of note to me was the simple way that this was photographed, with camera movement reserved for the most dramatically intense moments. I also responded to the score, which was arranged for piano and violin from the original 1924 score. The best part was how different recognizable folk tunes and classical pieces were used as motifs throughout. And while most of the most emotionally impactful moments occurred in the first half, this was overall quite an uplifting drama that represents the best aspect of what Griffith had to offer cinema.

Not as mind blowing as "Intolerance", as Epic as "Birth of a nation" or beautiful as "Broken Blossoms", this film still holds up very well in Griffith's catalogue. Some great stuff, and many masterly sequences. Funnily, this was made at a time when Griffith's influence and credibility was waning, but in many ways this film is as influential as any of his others. "Isn't life wonderful" takes social realism to a new heightened level, and had immediate impact on G.W. Pabst when he made "Joyless Streets", which in turn influenced the entire Italian Neo-realist movement! This film confirms Griffith's position as the most important director of them all.

Griffith does a really good job of showing the horrors of war as they relate to the masses and then personalizing it. We are focused mostly on a family that has connections to all the implications of the First World War. Our primary focus is on lovers, the woman in waiting, and the man with scorched lungs from a gas attack. This war was probably the most devastating ever fought because of the dirty conditions and the hand to hand combat. The Germans used poison mustard gas which killed and maimed. And yet this film has a positive message because humans are resilient and manage to move forward no matter how horrible the cost. A more mature D. W. Griffith film.

After "The Great War" (later called "World War I"), unfortunately orphaned Carol Dempster (as Inga) goes to Germany, with an also-on-the-move homeless Polish family. There, she waits for handsome soldier Neil Hamilton (as Paul), childhood sweetheart from her "adopted" family. So, living virtuously must have been difficult for the couple, since they grew up together. Presently, Ms. Dempster and Mr. Hamilton find their changes for happiness averted by devastating post-war conditions…

Absent collaborators G.W. Bitzer, Robert Harron, and Lillian Gish might have given director D.W. Griffith another masterpiece with "Isn't Life Wonderful". His closest film-making partner was, by now, protégée Dempster. One of the problems with Dempster is evident herein - note the scene where she forces herself to "smile" while Mr. Hamilton is bedridden; this acting business is swiped from Ms. Gish's "smile" in "Broken Blossoms" (1919); and, Hamilton is directed to act like Mr. Harron.

This doesn't mean Dempster and Hamilton aren't adequate in the parts - but one of Mr. Griffith's problems was pigeonholing an actress like Dempster into something she was not. Griffith directed a "type" - the old lady, the mother, the virginal heroine, the suitor, etc. Herein, he is obviously directing his cast to act like the "types" co-created with performers like Gish and Harron; and, he incorrectly assumes one performer (Dempster) is able to deliver the same kind of performance as another (Gish).

This thematically beautiful film was said to be Griffith's apology for his ostensibly pro-War and necessarily anti-German "Hearts of the World" (1918, with Harron and Gish). But, Griffith apologists should have looked at "Hearts" more closely, and beat a hasty retreat; because, the turnaround began within that film. Like a war weary world, Griffith foresaw a pacifist mood. He knew how to be both ahead of the curve and behind the times; pulling no punches, "Isn't Life Wonderful" serves up blistering pessimistic optimism.

******* Isn't Life Wonderful (11/23/24) D.W. Griffith ~ Carol Dempster, Neil Hamilton, Lupino Lane, Frank Puglia

So now Griffith gets the credit for neorealism too? As if American films like Regeneration and European films like The Outlaw and His Wife (not to mention plenty of Griffith's Biograph shorts) hadn't been shooting grim reality for years? Perhaps he did encourage Germans to film their own urban reality, but if so, they soon surpassed this film.

It isn't that this is a bad film by any means. But Griffith can't get past his own Victorianisms to see the people as well as the bleak streets he's putting on screen-- you'd never believe that the young couple in this story fought in the same war that produced A Sun Also Rises, and were part of the culture that was depicted in Cabaret. Even set aside the purplish titles, and his view of postwar Germans is closer to the homespun idealized Americana of Tol'able David than it is to Brecht and Weill. Only in the climactic scene-- when a mob is nearly dissuaded from a crime by Dempster's pleas for worker solidarity, and then shockingly turns back into a mob anyway-- do you feel that Griffith is really seeing the society that, in a few years, would form the mobs of Nuremberg and Kristallnacht.

And stylistically, the film resists coming alive, as so many of Griffith's 1920s films do. The first problem is casting-- how the director who made Pickford, Gish, Bobby Harron, Mae Murray and so many others in the teens could have staked his career at this point on the dim romantic fire between Neil Hamilton and Carol Dempster is one of film history's mysteries. In truth, the much-maligned Miss Dempster does give perhaps her best performance here, but even fully lit she's a 40-watt bulb next to the klieg lights of Gish et al. And Griffith's style, once so hyperactive, willing to shred the continuity of a scene in order to give us the closeups that would make us feel the actor's moment, is too often staid and stagey (except, again, for the entirely admirable climax).