Judith of Bethulia

D.W. Griffith has the measure of the tale in two contrasting shots, near the beginning the infant wrapped in the shawl of the Young Mother (Lillian Gish) and the invader's severed head in a bag smuggled into the city before the climax. Bushes part like curtains to reveal the marauding Assyrian forces, as Holofernes "the dread bull" Henry B. Walthall has a vast beard and a decadent boredom with the "bacchanalian festivities" around him. He lounges on his throne while his men storm the walls of Bethulia and Judith (Blanche Sweet) gazes out her tower window, still portraits to punctuate the tangle of arrows, rocks, smoke and battering rams. "And a vision came from the Lord," a sacrifice for the people of the starving fortress. Plenty of Intolerance sketches in Griffith's first four-reeler, appropriately Italianate in his competition with Pastrone. (Titian and Tintoretto are among the visual modalities.) In her "garments of gladness," peacock headdress and bare shoulder and all, the heroine offers herself to the enemy, outside the tent his eunuch assistant flounces with jealousy. Wine brings Holofernes down, Judith has her own desire to struggle with so a flash of doubt crosses her face as the sword is raised, cross-cutting glimpses of her suffering subjects end the indecision. (De Mille's detailed tableaux are already here, so are Hitchcock's sudden mental images.) Out in the desert, a growing understanding of editing as emotional linkage: The little maiden (Mae Marsh) lies shackled in the prisoner camp, her beloved (Robert Harron) sighs by his spear, a cut binds them spiritually. "A thing that shall go through all generations," up to Ford's 7 Women and beyond. With Dorothy Gish, Kate Bruce, J. Jiquel Lanoe, and Harry Carey. In black and white.