D.W. Griffith's Hearts of the World

Director: D.W. Griffith D.W. Griffith

Overview

Much of this WWI film is devoted to Lillian Gish's family, rent asunder by the war. The early scenes are stolen by Dorothy Gish as "The Little Disturber," a mademoiselle of questionable morals who wreaks comic havoc with the allied troops. The Germans are depicted as little more than animals.

Product Details

Release Date:	06/07/2021
UPC:	0762184805726
Original Release:	1918
Rating:	NR
Source:	Reelclassicdvd
Language:	English

Cast & Crew

Performance Credits

Lillian Gish	The Girl, Marie Stephenson,The Little Disturber,A Refugee Mother
Robert Harron	The Boy, Douglas Gordon Hamilton,Boy with Barrel
Josephine Crowell	The Mother
Adolphe Lestina	Marie's Grandfather
Jack Cosgrave	Douglas's Father
Kate Bruce	Douglas's Mother
Ben Alexander	The Littlest Brother
Marion Emmons	Older Brother
George Seigmann	Von Strohm
Robert Anderson	Monsieur Cuckoo
George Fawcett	The Villager Carpenter
Fay Holderness	The Innkeeper
L. Lowry	A Deaf and Blind Musician
Eugene Pouyet	A Poilu
Anna Mae Walthall	A French Peasant Girl
Yvette Duvoisin	A Refugee
Herbert Sutch	A French Major
George Nicholls	A German Sergeant
Mrs. Harron	Woman with Daughter
Mary Hay	Dancer
Erich von Stroheim	A Hun
Noel Coward	Man with a Wheelbarrow/Villager in the Streets
Bill Elliott	Actor
George Nichols	A German Sergeant
Carli D. Elinor	Composer

Technical Credits

D.W. Griffith

D.W. Griffith

Director,Producer,Screenwriter

Editorial Reviews

The relatively minor achievement of Hearts of the World, especially compared with its two predecessors, The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, is not necessarily the fault of filmmaker D.W. Griffith. After all, he was in desperate financial straits when he agreed to make essentially a propaganda film that would encourage the American people to come to the aid of the beleaguered French and British in their desperate fight against the Germans. Seen in its original form, with more extreme versions of the German soldiers (who still manage to come off as lusty and brutal in the 115-minute version reviewed here), the film might have worked better for its original intentions. As it exists now, it's a sentimental love story, though strongly realized by Griffith and played by his two leads, Robert Harron and the always astonishing Lillian Gish. After a conventional back story of The Boy wooing The Girl, the film shifts into high gear with its horrific scenes of violence and privation, Griffith masterfully alternating between the battlefield and the home front. In one pair of sequences, drunken German officers watch scantily clad women twirl in an officer's club while The Boy's three young brothers watch their mother die of overwork and then bury her body beneath dirt floor of their hovel. The film's heart-stopping climax -- will the French retake the village before the Germans kill The Boy and rape The Girl -- sounds impossibly corny on paper, but Griffith and his performers make it work. Achieving a near miracle, Dorothy Gish almost steals the film from her sister with a vivacious portrayal of an effervescent street singer. Relatively minor stuff, to be sure, but only in the context of Griffith's groundbreaking career.