The Battle of Elderbush Gulch

There are several story lines in this film and shows some of the techniques that D.W. Griffith would be famous for (iris, capturing action up close and from a distance, etc.). This film has a few names that would become well-known, Mae Marsh, Lillian Gish, and Lionel Barrymore. Sally (IMDb has her as "Hattie" (Marsh) and her sister are sent to join their uncles on the "frontier" - taking with them two puppies.

One of the uncles won't allow the puppies to stay in the cabin. Meanwhile, at the Native American village, the natives are celebrating "The Feast of the Dog", which is apparently, the day they all eat dogs. I don't know if any tribes were eating dogs, some cultures do, and the Indian tribe of Griffith's imagination ate dogs - at least once (you don't actually see any dogs being killed, cooked, or eaten). Part of this celebration apparently is the stereotypical dancing (hiring a choreographer seems to never entered the discussions). The chief's son and his friend arrive late and try to find some dogs to eat. They soon come upon Sally's puppies, she tries to save them, and gunfire soon starts up.

The Native Americans start a war dance - this time they seem to be a bit more coordinated. A war party rides toward the whites' settlement.

Meanwhile, back at the cabin, Lillian Gish's husband (Robert Herron) takes their baby to show him or her off to some of the other settlers.

The Natives ride into town firing rifles (this is where some of Griffith's more interesting shots come in to play - capturing what looks like a much larger battle taking place). There is some hand-to-hand combat taking place in the small town. When the people at the cabin hear about the attack, Gish becomes hysterical and tries to find her baby. The men who have the baby try to take shelter in a barn and "a Mexican" (William A. Carroll) rides to the nearby fort. He also appears to mount a horse and ride off in less than a second - it's either bad editing or a few frames of the film is lost.

The Natives set the barn on fire, forcing the people inside to flee. The man holding the baby is killed just outside the cabin. In the midst of a lot of smoke and confusion, Sally (aka Hattie) sneaks out of the cabin to try to save the baby.

Will the cavalry get to the cabin in time to save the remaining settlers? Will the Natives scalp anyone? You'll have to watch to find out!

10 years after what is, arguably, the first western of all time, "The Great Train Robbery", D.W. Griffith (who is, perhaps, the most important filmmaker of all time) put his own spin on the western genre with his 30 minute masterpiece "The Battle at Elderbush Gulch".

Bullets going off! Horses running around! Cowboys and Indians in a fierce battle! This action packed western has almost everything you'd want out of an action packed western, and it is all presented in an only 30 minute runtime!

However, the plot, itself is really flawed, mainly because of how weird it is. It portrays Native Americans in a horribly stereotypical and downright offensive light (like how the African Americans are portrayed in Griffith's controversial epic "The Birth of a Nation"). They literally feast upon dogs, which triggers the whole battle. It is really weird and, overall, possibly the worst movie plot I've ever seen be paired with such an exciting and great movie!

While it is a bit racist, it is still engaging, entertaining, and historically important! Possibly Griffith's best short film.

Given the limited cinematic methods available in 1913, this is an impressive achievement, and it still makes for pretty good viewing today. It's also interesting in that its perspective is largely morally-neutral (except perhaps from what today's viewers might read into it), so that the excitement comes mostly from the danger of the situation, rather than from one side being entirely right and the other being entirely wrong.

The build-up to the battle is done rather well, enabling you to identify with the characters, while making some points of its own. Neither side in the confrontation is really in the right, yet Griffith's technique arouses your keen interest in the events to come.

But it is the filming of the actual "Battle at Elderbush Gulch" that is so noteworthy. To create such a sensation of action, turmoil, and emotion using the limited camera field of the times is remarkable. There are a lot of carefully chosen and composed shots, and Griffith also adds in some techniques that were new or relatively new at the time. There are several well-chosen 'iris' shots, and a variety of close-in and distant camera fields that pull you in and out of the action as the director wishes.

It's a fine achievement for its time, at the very least in technical terms, and would probably be well worth a look today for those with an interest in silent movies.

The Battle at Elderbrush Gulch was Griffith's longest and most expensive short he had made up to that point. In it we see him trying to perfect the large-scale action scene that would be necessary in his full-length features, packing in all the elements that had made his previous action shorts successful.

Griffith uses the western format – already the ideal backdrop for pure, straight-ahead action set pieces – as the setting for his first epic battle. Like many westerns of the 1910s, the starting point is a character from the east heading out west – a device which perhaps helped ease the audience into the wilderness, and here those easterners are a pair of children, which was important for the type of picture this develops into. For Griffith, you couldn't have action without a sense of vulnerability and here he crams it in, with the kids from back east, Lillian Gish as the distraught mother of "the only baby in town" and even some puppies that are at risk of ending up on the Indians' menu.

All this paves the way for an exceedingly complex and layered action sequence, blending the trapped heroine scenario and the ride-to-the-rescue with the battles that Griffith had been depicting since his earliest Civil War pictures in 1909. There is a phenomenal amount going on here, and Griffith does very well at maintaining the exhilarating pace throughout and keeping everything coherent and logical. However, juggling x amount of elements in an action sequence does not necessarily make it that many times more exciting, no matter how skilfully they are balanced, and Griffith did create better tension-soaked finales before and after this one.

But even a Griffith picture so heavily focused on action would not be without its drama, characterisation and atmospherics. In The Battle at Elderbrush Gulch, the emotional set-up is dealt with briefly but economically. First, we have the scene in which the waifs leave their home. The cart they travel on heads away from the camera, making use of depth and distance to express their moving away from safety and civilization. An equally effective scene is the one in which we are introduced to the young family of Gish, Bobby Harron and their baby. The people of the town coo over the precious tot, then saunter off screen, revealing that two Indians were watching them from the background, adding a sinister little note of danger.

Of course, many viewers today have pointed out The Battle at Elderbrush Gulch's offensive portrayal of Native Americans (in contrast with the more sympathetic Red Man's View), but perhaps all is not what it seems. First of all, take a look at the Indian Chief's son's waistcoat – it's black and covered in shiny white dots. It looks to me like a pearly king's jacket, perhaps modified slightly for the warmer climate. Now have a look at the "war dance" they perform later on – it has a certain "knees-up Mother Brown" air to it. These aren't Indians, they're cockneys! So it shouldn't be offensive to Native Americans. Just cockneys.

No other film before "The Birth of a Nation" better shows the potential D.W. Griffith could direct something of such scope than does "The Battle at Elderbush Gulch". His direction of the battle scenes here are the best precursor to those in "The Birth of a Nation", even so much as for this website to say that the later film references this one. Griffith's last picture for Biograph, "Judith of Bethulia", had battle scenes, too, but nothing was added to the grammar. It was a larger battle than the one in this film, yet Griffith didn't have the budget or time to make it grand. He was going over-budget and making a feature-length film without permission from studio-heads.

The battle scenes in this film are on a smaller scale. Within that battle, there's focus on small skirmishes via extensive crosscutting. It's brutal--an infant is tossed around at one point, which I hope was a trick-shot of some sort. There's lots of smoke. There are multiple plot lines throughout, which are interlinked fluently in the climax.

All of this creates an omniscient, unrestricted narrative. The bird's eye views of the fighting are a style still used today, although the irises aren't. Griffith and Billy Bitzer further display their mastering of camera distance with frequent use of medium shots. They hadn't figured out how to do an onrush shot yet, though, as the camera position of the cavalry is boring; they'd correct that in "The Birth of a Nation". There's the missing wall in interior shots; they'd never correct that.

As fellow posters have condemned, this film is a precursor of "The Birth of a Nation" in another way: racism. Although I suppose it is racism either way, I doubt that Griffith intended to portray Native Americans ridiculously (he clearly stated that he considered Blacks to be childlike, although he didn't agree that was racist), but rather it was the result of his lack of understanding any particular tribal culture or fully understanding film representation. Bad acting didn't help, either. Only Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh really knew what they're doing. Anyhow, Griffith's earlier short film, "The Redman's View" was an attempt to be respectful of the Native-American population, even though it's a boring movie.

(Note: This is one of three short films by D.W. Griffith that I've commented on, with some arrangement in mind. The other films are "A Corner in Wheat" and "The Girl and Her Trust".)