Isn't Life Wonderful

After "The Great War" (later called "World War I"), unfortunately orphaned Carol Dempster (as Inga) goes to Germany, with an also-on-the-move homeless Polish family. There, she waits for handsome soldier Neil Hamilton (as Paul), childhood sweetheart from her "adopted" family. So, living virtuously must have been difficult for the couple, since they grew up together. Presently, Ms. Dempster and Mr. Hamilton find their changes for happiness averted by devastating post-war conditions…

Absent collaborators G.W. Bitzer, Robert Harron, and Lillian Gish might have given director D.W. Griffith another masterpiece with "Isn't Life Wonderful". His closest film-making partner was, by now, protégée Dempster. One of the problems with Dempster is evident herein - note the scene where she forces herself to "smile" while Mr. Hamilton is bedridden; this acting business is swiped from Ms. Gish's "smile" in "Broken Blossoms" (1919); and, Hamilton is directed to act like Mr. Harron.

This doesn't mean Dempster and Hamilton aren't adequate in the parts - but one of Mr. Griffith's problems was pigeonholing an actress like Dempster into something she was not. Griffith directed a "type" - the old lady, the mother, the virginal heroine, the suitor, etc. Herein, he is obviously directing his cast to act like the "types" co-created with performers like Gish and Harron; and, he incorrectly assumes one performer (Dempster) is able to deliver the same kind of performance as another (Gish).

This thematically beautiful film was said to be Griffith's apology for his ostensibly pro-War and necessarily anti-German "Hearts of the World" (1918, with Harron and Gish). But, Griffith apologists should have looked at "Hearts" more closely, and beat a hasty retreat; because, the turnaround began within that film. Like a war weary world, Griffith foresaw a pacifist mood. He knew how to be both ahead of the curve and behind the times; pulling no punches, "Isn't Life Wonderful" serves up blistering pessimistic optimism.

******* Isn't Life Wonderful (11/23/24) D.W. Griffith ~ Carol Dempster, Neil Hamilton, Lupino Lane, Frank Puglia

Well, after seeing this D. W. Griffith film, it seemed very odd to me that the same director who apparently despised Black people had a very sensitive place in his heart for the German-speaking people following WWI. By the way, if you don't believe me about the "despised Black people" comment, try watching his films BIRTH OF A NATION and HIS TRUST. In both films, the Black actors are in fact Whites wearing makeup. In BIRTH OF A NATION, Blacks are shown as being evil and lazy and out to rape the White women if left unchecked by the wonderful KKK. In HIS TRUST, a Black slave acts like a lapdog in his devotion to his White "betters".

So, despite this awful baggage, it was shocking to see how favorably the former enemy were treated in this film. The main characters are Germans who had lived in land previously part of the old Germany--now part of Poland. They moved back to their ethnic homeland and settled into an impoverished Berlin. This sensitivity towards America's former enemy actually mirrored the change in attitude in general in the US, as people were now reassessing their role in the war and many felt, in hindsight, that we should have just stayed neutral.

The film shows the daily privations of this family as they just try to survive. Starvation and the difficulties of existing, interestingly enough, do NOT destroy or diminish their humanity--though it does do this to some of their fellow countrymen. This abiding faith and goodness in the face of adversity is why the film is entitled "ISN'T LIFE WONDERFUL". And, despite Griffith's tendency to often use "schmaltz" and heavy-handed melodrama in his films, this is a pretty restrained and beautiful movie.

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.

Not as mind blowing as "Intolerance", as Epic as "Birth of a nation" or beautiful as "Broken Blossoms", this film still holds up very well in Griffith's catalogue. Some great stuff, and many masterly sequences. Funnily, this was made at a time when Griffith's influence and credibility was waning, but in many ways this film is as influential as any of his others. "Isn't life wonderful" takes social realism to a new heightened level, and had immediate impact on G.W. Pabst when he made "Joyless Streets", which in turn influenced the entire Italian Neo-realist movement! This film confirms Griffith's position as the most important director of them all.

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).