Good morning Babilonia

Story has two Italian brothers who are stonemasons going to America and eventually finding themselves in California where they eventually find work as part of the team that builds the Italian Towers and the Tower of Jewels for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915.

When legendary movie maker D.W. Griffith sees the film CABIRIA and the exposition lit by searchlights he calls for the Italians to come to Hollywood. He has a grand idea for a film he's making. The films is INTOLERANCE.

The brothers finally break through the bureaucracy surrounding Griffith and design the gigantic elephants and other designs for the massive Babylonian sets for the film. Along the way they marry movie extras and settle into a successful life as artisans in Hollywood. Then comes World War I.

The film by the Taviani brothers has a dreamlike quality that blurs the line between fact and fiction. While Griffith (played by Charles Dance) is front and center in the Hollywood segments, his wife, Linda Arvidson, is never mentioned by name nor is cameraman Billy Bitzer. Aside from Griffith, no real person in Hollywood is mentioned by name.

Vincent Spano and Joaquim de Almeida are fine as the Italian brothers, and Greta Scacchi is good as the doomed wife.

After all the hubbub about INTOLERANCE and much time spent on the building of the sets, there's only a very brief clip from the real film shown.

the last scene was the key to enter the whole fact of the film. Two brothers in 2 fronts against eachother, but the brother from US holds his hands up to show he is defeated by the other brother. But the film tells us why it shows us these brothers story: FILM...which makes people eternal on the celluloids. It shows us people in different centuries who worked on that church but the only ones whom we know are these brothers, because they curved themselves on the film which was in a camera around. Wow, the Film was softly striking... I wanted not to watch at first, but the first scene grabbed my heart and make me stay to watch it completely...

1st watched 1/19/1997 - (Dir-Paolo Tavioni & Vittorio Tavioni): Good story and interesting characters. About two inseparable brothers and their encounters when coming to America in the early 1900's and their way into a D.W. Griffith movie.

A drama by Taviani brothers. Although the depressing poverty and brutality against animals, core elements in their harsh "Padre Padrone", were also present in "Good morning, Babylon", the latter is, most of the time, a light-hearted film, until the sad resume. Their adventures in Hollywood amuse. Something intereeting tonbe renarked is that Charles Dance was able to make us be sympathetic to Grifitth (off course that fact that he was directing "Intolerance" and not "The birth of a nation" helps).

The idea, at least, was intriguing: to recreate the magic and decadence of early Hollywood as seen through the eyes of two innocent, impoverished Italian stone cutters working on the set of D.W. Griffith's monumental 1916 epic 'Intolerance'. It's the perfect setting for a meditation on the end of Hollywood's precocious adolescence (Griffith's film was the first and most ambitious megabuck box-office flop), but rarely has a film launched with such promise landed with such a thud. In their first English language feature the Taviani brothers evoke none of the heady freedom that followed movie-making out West. Their Hollywood is a pitiful facsimile, patched together from a few myths and daydreams into an artificial costume drama, with cardboard characters mouthing dialogue that (one hopes) suffered in translation. The brief glimpse of footage from 'Intolerance' itself only underlines how little the Tavianis aspired to and how limited their resources were.