Ist das Leben nicht wunderbar?

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).

Director D. W. Griffith was with United Artists since its founding in 1919. However, by 1924, after a year of not producing any blockbusters, his partners decided the film pioneer and their UA studio should part company. The irony of the departure's timing is Griffith directed in what today is considered his last great masterpiece, November 1924's "Isn't Life Wonderful."

As great as the film is, "Isn't Life Wonderful" had a difficult time finding an audience. The public just wasn't interested in seeing a Polish refugee family painfully trying to exist in an economically dysfunctional Germany. The postwar country was experiencing an inflationary monetary system never seen before, with its marks currency escalating literally by the minute. Fatigue, hunger and crime greeted its citizens after its defeat against the Allied countries, especially France, demanding Germany keep up with its reparations for its invasion in 1914. Griffith, reading Geoffrey Moss' account of the German's life in his series of 1923 short stories, decided to produce a movie based on one of them. To make his production appear even more authentic, he took his crew and actors to film in Germany and Austria .

The often-criticized actress Carol Dempster, a favorite of Griffith after Lillian Gish left his fold, has been particularly praised here as showcasing a credible performance as the orphan Inga. Her fictitious character had grown up with the Polish family before their immigration to Germany. Griffith changed the citizenship of the film's central figures from German to Polish, knowing American viewers would be more apt to sympathize with them than the German populace.

The movie's male love interest, Paul (Neil Hamilton), suffering from a mustard attack in the war, has a twinkle in the eye for Inga, even though he's hobbled by the injury. In the one dramatic scene that "Isn't Life Wonderful" is known for, Inga stands patiently in a long queue in front of a butcher's shop after pooling the family's money for some long-desired meat. As the minutes tick by, the store owner repeatedly steps out to the blackboard and changes the escalating price of the meat, so much so that the money Inga has in her hand becomes inadequate. Incidentally, actor Hamilton, who had a long career in over 260 films, is recognizable today as the police commissioner in the 1960's 'Batman" TV series.

ISN'T LIFE WONDERFUL was D.W. Griffith's last independent production before he was forced to sell his Mamaroneck studio to help pay off mounting debts from his Revolutionary War epic America and his bad business practices. Though little known today compared to earlier films like BIRTH OF A NATION or INTOLERANCE, this little film, in my opinion, is Griffith's last great film. It incorporates the best elements of intimate dramas like BROKEN BLOSSOMS with a large scale backdrop like HEARTS OF THE WORLD. In fact it has been said that Griffith made this film to atone for the rabid anti-German sentiments of HEARTS (just as INTOLERANCE was supposedly made to respond to the rabid racial bias of BIRTH OF A NATION). This story of a poor family's trials and tribulations in inflation ravaged post World War I Germany is remarkably grim and is presented realistically. Griffith came under heavy criticism for presenting a sympathetic portrait of a family in Germany (they had to be changed from German to Polish although one character still tears up a picture of the Kaiser) and for shooting the film in Germany itself. His protégé' Carol Dempster gives the performance of her brief career showing what she could have been capable of had Griffith used better judgment as to what he put her in. She plays Inga, a poor girl trying to keep her family's spirits up while trying to realize her own dreams. As the wounded veteran Paul who hopes to marry Inga, Neil Hamilton (who would play Commissioner Gordon on TV's BATMAN 40 years later) gives a sensitive and engaging performance. The film plays like an early neorealist drama and surely had an impact on later filmmakers such as G.W. Pabst, Sergei Eisenstein, and Vittoria De Sica. It is starkly but beautifully photographed and full of social criticism which did not go down well at all with Jazz Age audiences. For modern audiences the film looks like the forerunner that it is and it brings out the best of what Griffith had to say both personally and professionally. Hopefully this will soon be released on DVD to join most of Griffith's other films which despite his fame/infamy are still awaiting major restoration.

...but I like this one better than even some of his more celebrated movies. I connected more with the story here, which to me is paramount. Nothing in this movie seemed melodramatic or implausible; even the happy ending shows that the characters still live in simplicity, not luxury. Also, he doesn't rely nearly as much on his sentimental titles; although some are present, it's not enough to be annoying. Even though it's not as groundbreaking as his earlier work, I found it very affecting and real in the best ways. Plus Carol Dempster gives a stellar performance, one of the most moving that I've seen from any era of film.

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.