Last Romantic

By Melvin Maddocks

D.W. GRIFFITH: AN AMERICAN LIFE by Richard Schickel

Simon & Schuster; 672 pages; $24.95

A Kentucky farm boy, the son of a Confederate war hero, David Wark Griffith seemed more suited to be a child of 19th century lost causes than a pioneer of the art form of the future. But once the young actor walked into Biograph film studios on New York City's East 14th Street, the movies came to possess him as his romance of romances.

As he tracks Griffith's long parabola, Richard Schickel also provides an exhilarating, authoritative account of the early days of film when anything seemed possible on-and offscreen. During the green director's first year, 1908, he cranked out 60 one-reelers in six months, following up with 151 more in 1909. He put in a seven-day week, sunrise to sunset. Along the way, Griffith practically invented the autocratic personality of film director. On the set he tended to treat actors as children, looking down his "fine, cantilevered nose," as Lionel Barrymore put it. He was not above firing a gun near Lillian and Dorothy Gish when those teen-agers were having their problems miming fear.

Schickel, a TIME cinema critic, views his subject as father to all the auteurs to follow, and with good reason. Griffith had both a view and a vision. In Birth of a Nation (1915) he restaged his father's Civil War, complete with dramatic scenes of the Ku Klux Klan that brought charges of racism along with blockbuster success. In Intolerance (1916) he took on, among other things, Belshazzar's feast, with elephants, dancing girls and collapsing Babylonian towers.

To do justice to these epics, Griffith, as much as any one man, devised the primary techniques of film. The closeup, the fadeout, cross-cutting--all developed on his set. But Schickel provides a lively argument for Griffith as poet as well as technician. Through the famous storms and battle scenes, the director seemed to be trying to find his own way back to a lost innocence.

By 1919 he was worth more than $8.5 million in his glamorous growth industry. He had been one of the first to move to Los Angeles, in 1910. Now he bought a 28-acre estate outside Mamaroneck, N.Y., to convert to his private studio. It was a tactical mistake. He got bogged down in logistics and financing--the producer's world in which he had no role. In 1927 Griffith returned to a changed Hollywood; Ernst Lubitsch had made The Marriage Circle, an ironic sex comedy, and the old sentimental, moralizing sagas about child-women suddenly seemed embarrassing antiques.

If Griffith's early years had the elements of spectacle, his decline seems to have been made for cinema noir. Ignored, unrecognized, the old director hung around in bars, moving in a limbo of almost-deals and the very young women he could never stay away from. Only when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1948 at the age of 73, did recognition arrive. Obituaries were laudatory; Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer served as honor ary pallbearers to the man they had ignored in his final years.

D.W. Griffith was a dreamer in a medium that belongs to the realists. Schickel admires the lean, terse one-reelers and reminds his readers of the young director who took his camera into the streets and documented New York City slums. Yet, as his biographer concedes, it was Griffith, the romantic, with all his excesses, who was the right man to give a new art the grand entrance it needed. Jean Renoir aptly summed up his inseparable gifts and flaws. "He had," the French director observed, "the naivete of the authentic great man. ' ' -- By Melvin Maddocks