How DW Griffith made some noise in cinema’s silent era
In bringing sound to film, the controversial director gambled it all on ‘Dream Street’. By Tim Robey
This year, a slew of major silent films celebrate their centenaries – reflecting, in 1921, a vigorous torrent of new productions coming through after the economic drain of the Spanish Flu and the First World War. Chaplin’s evergreen The Kid was among these, as were the smash-hit war epic The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and The Sheik, which made Rudolph Valentino an international sex-symbol.
What none of these films boasted, though, was an experiment with sound, six years before The Jazz Singer changed the medium for good. The man to try it out was DW Griffith, in his romantic drama Dream Street, which premiered on May 2 of that year. Indeed, his was the first voice New Yorkers would have heard: the main feature was preceded by a filmed introduction from Griffith, recorded in a nearby studio using the early sound-on-film process Photokinema.
Within the film, too, there were a couple of sequences of recorded audio. Ralph Graves, who played one of the film’s two rivalrous McFadden brothers, sang a love ballad, and some background sound sparked up during a game of craps. Dream Street clings on to that footnote distinction. In most other respects, however, it was not a success, and it started the slow decline of what had been a massively influential, if controversial, career.
David Wark Griffith, then 46, had made his way in the industry from next to nothing: his father was a Confederate army colonel who died when David was 10, leaving their Kentucky family penniless. For years,
David supported them as a cash-boy at a dry goods store, an ore shoveller, and then a stock theatre actor roaming the country. While shopping ideas around New York, he met the ingenious cameraman GW “Billy” Bitzer, who would become the cinematographer on most of Griffith’s features.
Griffith’s Ku Klux Klan epic The Birth of a Nation, which cost $110,000 in 1915, was the supreme, and most supremely divisive, popular blockbuster of its age. Its follow-up, Intolerance, was a study of prejudice across four historical periods, which cost a then-astronomical $2million. Breathlessly promoted, both films displayed a revolutionary scale and sophistication with montage, photography and performance, which awed viewers and critics alike.
Off the back of those successes, by 1920 Griffith had become the premier showman-filmmaker of his day, even if his money management was hopeless, not helped by a compulsive gambling habit. He was creatively spent, too, after the long, difficult and pricey production on Way Down East (1920), which was gradually going into profit, thanks in part to its spectacular finale with the prone Lillian Gish adrift on an ice floe, edging ever closer to a raging waterfall.
That sequence alone had taken two months to shoot, subjected Gish to hypothermia, and pushed the budget sky-high again. Turning away from such exorbitance, Griffith wanted to make something more intimate, like his Broken Blossoms (1919) – a critically adored collaboration with Gish, about an interracial romance with a Chinese guardian angel, which had made many times its $88,000 budget back.
Returning, logically enough, to the writer he’d adapted there, Griffith took two of Thomas Burke’s London-set short stories, “Gina of Chinatown” and “Song of the Lamp”, and merged them into a screenplay. An elaborate Limehouse set was built on the Long Island Sound, and the central role of
Gypsy Fair, a stage dancer who finds the McFadden brothers vying for her affections, was given to Carol Dempster, the protégée Griffith had cast in Intolerance at just 15. Dempster would appear in almost all his 1920s productions, edging out both Gish and Mae Marsh, to the combined displeasure of those actresses and fans.
Criticism of a overripe performancestyle has stuck to Dream Street. Though Griffith had popularised the close-up as cinema’s most emotive tool, here it seemed to expose his storytelling as hokey and absurd, with a predictably hoary grasp of the London milieu. He didn’t have the advantage of landscape photography or opulent period décor, and filled his sets with smoke instead.
While reviews at the time were mild, some remarked on Griffith’s heavyhanded symbolism: a masked violinist (Morgan Wallace) prowls the streets as a representative of temptation, while an “eternal” evening star “hangs over the little characters… and seems to guide them”, as Griffith explained in an interview. In a 1924 Photoplay article, the critic James Quirk admonished Griffith directly: “Your refusal to face the world is making you more and more a sentimentalist. You see passion in terms of cooing doves or the falling of a rose petal.”
Beyond these aesthetic vices, Griffith had already perpetuated some of the most grotesque racial stereotypes in film history with his treatment of black characters in The Birth of a Nation. Dream Street’s
Chinese villain, Swan Way
– a leering predator with his designs on the white heroine – was very much a figure in this grim mode. But it didn’t stop the director virtue-signalling to the press, arguing with shameless hypocrisy that no peace for humanity was possible without eliminating the use of racial epithets.
Dream Street lost $150,000, making it a flop, if not a debacle. It was a fast fade. Even Griffith’s experiment with sound was a damp squib. No film theatres had sufficient amplification to deal with the invention yet, so it was a one-off demonstration, scarcely more than a publicity stunt, at New York’s Town Hall.
While Griffith praised “the sensitive mechanism, so marvellous and accurate”, that allowed audio to be synchronised with lip movements, observers were unimpressed with the “metallic” results and audible needle-scratching. Many wrote sound off as a newfangled gimmick that would never catch on.
With Dream Street, Griffith let slip for the first time that he was behind the curve of audience tastes, and indeed it started a slump in his commercial fortunes that would plague him to the end. On the other hand, his attempt to show off state-of-the-art innovation was almost tragically ahead of its time.
No one else was ready for sound quite yet. By the time they were, other directors seized on its possibilities with more vigour than Griffith had left in him: his only two talkies, Abraham Lincoln (1930) and The Struggle (1931), were flops. His career had been the single most important catalyst for cinema getting off to the races – but in later years, he watched the medium speed right by him, like a father cheering on from the sidelines.