Abstract

Films

The series of old films which the Museum of Modern Art has been reviving this winter at the Dalton School reached one of its climaxes the other night when D.W. Griffith's motion picture "Intolerance" alternately amazed and amused an audience composed, it would seem, of people who did not know how or when to laugh-if laughter was in at all. "Intolerance" is probably bad; the public was right which rejected it twenty years ago, and the artist Iris Barry confessed as much in her program notes. Yet the talent displayed in the film is enormous, and on this particular night the author found himself in radical disagreement with an audience which could stop to snicker at the women's hats of 1916 or at the gigantic blunders of a great director gone temporarily wrong.