The Fall of Babylon

The Fall of Babylon (1919)

*** (out of 4)

A Mountain Girl (Constance Talmadge) is pulled out of her surroundings by a man who attempts to sell her but she is saved by another man. She falls in love with this man and agrees to go to war with him to try and bring down Babylon.

When INTOLERANCE was released in 1916, it wasn't the hit that director D.W. Griffith had hoped it would have been. It was a film unlike anything that had ever been made. It took four separate stories and edited them together to show how hate and intolerance has haunted the world throughout various eras. That film was a complete masterpiece but its box office failure meant that the director would release two of the four stories as stand alone films in 1919. THE MOTHER AND THE LAW was the modern story from INTOLERANCE and this here was the Babylon segment, which contained most of the great visuals.

Having now seen this film and THE MOTHER AND THE LAW, there's no question that both are quite good and entertaining but at the same time they aren't nearly as powerful as they were in INTOLERANCE. In fact, there's no question that people should check out the original 1916 film at all cost and only check out the two stand alone stories if they want to see everything that Griffith did. Both of the 1919 versions are worth seeing since you get to see the stories on their own and they do feature footage that wasn't used in the original.

Of the two stand alone films this one here is certainly the more entertaining one. It clocks in at just 62-minutes and we basically see the Mountain Girl's story as she eventually helps bring down Babylon. The amount of extras, the mammoth sets and the grand scale of this sequence is just something that had never been tried before and I'd argue that it hasn't been topped since.