Among the distinguishing talents of filmmaking pioneer D.W. Griffith was his gift for endowing history with a sense of drama and immediacy. In his rarely-seen 1924 film "America," Griffith focused his astute cinematic eye and proficiency at melodrama on a rousing, grand scale re-creation of the war for independence. Color tinted and mastered from original negative material, this is the most complete version available of Griffith's classic.
Reader Reviews
Silent costume drama, whichever era and location it's set in, isn't the easiest silent genre to get into. There are usually a lot of different characters to keep track of, the plot tends to take awhile to really be set up, and there are a lot of long intertitles setting all of the characters and situations up. This film in particular, because of those aspects, did seem a bit slow-going to me at first, and took awhile before I really got interested in it. Before the story really got going in earnest, there seemed to be more telling than showing, thanks to all of those lengthy intertitles explaining who a character was or what a certain historical development was all about. A lot of these silents that have so many long intertitles, dialogue or just explanatory, seem like they would have worked better as sound films.
