Vida Não é Maravilhosa?

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In fact, I see the basic themes in the film still having resonance today, even if the cultural specificity is a little outdated.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.

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).

...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.

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.

A disclaimer that appears at the beginning of this film may strike latter-day viewers as oddly worded. We're told first that we're going to see a tale of love triumphing over adversity, but then a second title card asserts that "the story is laid in Germany only because conditions there were most favorable for showing the triumph of love over hardship." The tone is unmistakably defensive, for director D.W. Griffith must have known that a story set in Berlin and focused on the desperate struggles of its defeated populace might not go over well in the U.S., or the other nations of the former Alliance. Six years after the end of the Great War there was still considerable hostility towards the Germans, which might explain why the characters at the center of Isn't Life Wonderful are presented as Polish refugees who have resettled in Copenick, a suburb of Berlin. Griffith adapted his screenplay from a short story by Geoffrey Moss, an Englishman and veteran who lived in Germany after the war, and was appalled by the suffering he observed among the common people. It is to the credit of both Moss and Griffith that they were able to put aside wartime chauvinism and sympathize with the plight of the former enemy, even if Griffith felt it necessary to blur the nationality of his fictional family. Plenty of Americans, Britons, French, and others were indifferent to severe conditions in Germany at this time, or if anything felt that the Huns had it coming. Griffith couldn't have expected a box office bonanza from this bleak drama nor did he get one, but he was courageous to make the film at this point in history, and it stands today as his best work of the period.

We follow the daily life of an average, beleaguered family (a professor, his wife and mother-in-law, their sons, and an adopted daughter) as they struggle to feed themselves, find work, and survive. Inga, the daughter, is an orphan who is in love with Paul, a veteran who comes home from the war with lungs damaged by mustard gas. In these early scenes the pacing is very slow, and everyone appears to be dazed. This feels dramatically appropriate, but also signals viewers that this film isn't going to be an easy ride, and that we'll need to adjust our expectations accordingly. As we get to know the characters we share in their setbacks and triumphs. Eventually, as Paul and Inga plan to get married and move into a small cottage we want to see their plans succeed, but feel anxious about their prospects. Paul is allotted a piece of land and manages to grow a modest-sized crop of potatoes, and we are given to understand that the couple's future hinges on the income that results. But we also know that food is scarce in Berlin, and that gangs of hungry men have been roaming the countryside attacking profiteers and taking their produce. As Paul and Inga haul their potatoes through the woods in a cart we fear for their safety, and their confrontation with the gang makes for a genuinely suspenseful climax. The film ends on a hopeful note, but the over all picture of post-war German society is grim.

When critics and historians speak of D.W. Griffith's artistic decline in the 1920s they often cite his insistence on featuring Carol Dempster in film after film as a major factor. Dempster, who was apparently the director's paramour at the time, was a rather plain-looking woman who is not especially appealing in most of her appearances, but it must be said she gives a strong performance in Isn't Life Wonderful. Of course, the role didn't call for movie star glamour: Inga is an ordinary woman struggling with the most basic problems. Dempster is particularly good in one of the film's most memorable sequences, a desperate attempt to buy food during the period of the "Great Inflation," stuck in line and watching in growing despair as the price rises beyond her ability to pay before she can get inside to make a purchase.

It's notable that when we first learn of the roving criminal gangs the director makes a point of humanizing them, rather than depicting them as thugs. We see a large, shabbily dressed man promise his wife that he'll bring her food, and later when the gangs are roaming the countryside we note that this man is one of the leaders. They're not animals, they're hungry, unemployed men -- most of whom are veterans. When Inga calls them beasts this man replies that war and years of hell have made them beasts. It's chilling to think of what the future held for Germany, and for men like these, when this film was made in 1924. Griffith filmed a number of scenes on location, an unusual practice at the time, and when he returned to the United States he wrote a letter to an associate in which he said "Germany must be restored or else Europe is lost." Unfortunately, he was dead right about that. Isn't Life Wonderful is a powerful drama that not only examines the ugly aftermath of one cataclysmic war, but unknowingly sets the stage for another that would prove to be even worse.