Intolerance

D.W. Griffith's mammoth reply to the criticism of The Birth of a Nation, intercutting four stories of intolerance across the ages: the fall of Babylon, the crucifixion of Christ, the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, and a modern labor conflict. The Babylonian sets, with their towering walls and armies of extras, remain among the largest ever built, and the cross-cutting between the strands influenced nearly every epic that followed. Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Robert Harron, and Constance Talmadge lead the enormous cast. As a work published before 1930, the film is in the public domain in the United States.