Isn't Life Wonderful (D.W. Griffith / U.S., 1924):

D.W. Griffith answers the title as Renoir or Ozu would, "yes, but..." Germany after the Armistice, "war's harvest" paraded before the camera, home to a family of Polish refugees. Scion (Neil Hamilton) and maiden (Carol Dempster) are the struggling sweethearts, he returns from the trenches with poison-gas scars and she stuffs paper in her mouth to conceal sunken cheeks. (The fragility of their happiness is embodied in the way the lyrical figures strolling by the edge of a lake suddenly freeze with unease, "into this sweet sunlit holiday comes a troubling sorrow.") Horse turnips every day, a broken chair for a dowry, breadlines that turn into riots. The grotesque fluctuations of inflation give rise to one of cinema's great suspense sequences, just the heroine waiting for her turn at the butcher shop with all of the family's savings while the price of a cut of beef skyrockets every few minutes. The dream of potatoes growing in a barren lot, the burst of joy that finds the characters doing an impromptu shuffle down the road like nothing so much as Jules and Jim on location in Weimar, "love gilded their eyes" as well as the luminescent Griffith lens. "A lucky day," the Dickensian miracle of an abundant dinner contrasts with the pervasive misery outside, where the burly malefactor is simply another starving soul. "Years of war and hell, beasts they made of us." A rare joke has the strolling player's roommate calmly pulling an oversized knife out of his breast pocket whenever vexed, an up-angle in the woods gives "the beauty of the moving wind in the trees." Famine to feast and feast to famine, the couple who've just had their harvest stolen still have the moon, cf. Nights of Cabiria. The neo-realist connection has already been noted, the immediate response belongs to Pabst in The Joyless Street. With Erville Alderson, Helen Lowell, Marcia Harris, Frank Puglia, Hans Adalbert Schlettow, and Paul Rehkopf. In black and white.

--- Fernando F. Croce

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