Popular reviews

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 5

  Well, I don't like dogs or racism, so I don't much like this.

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  Review by Dr. Ethan Lyon ★★½ 7

  7th DW Griffith

  A good litmus test for a Griffith film. Synch Ride of the Valkyries up to the last five minutes. If it gives you a really uncomfortable feeling at the centre of your gut, then it's a good Griffith finale. Griffith is brilliant at constructing action and cross-cutting storylines together, especially in twenty-five minutes. Indeed, this feels like a dry run for Birth of a Nation right down to the terrible racism, though here directed at the Native American community, complete with a stereotypical pow-wow and dog eating. No amount of Mae Marsh being adorable can erase the nasty taste the whole affair left in my mouth. Cine Analyst on here analyses the film and its ideological elements…

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  Review by Neil Bahadur

  AHHHHHHhggheeiieajjaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhaaaaaaawhhaaaaha

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  Review by Carlos Cano ★★★★

  Para mí, el cine no es tanto un arte como una forma de contar historias. En cuanto empecé a hacer películas, empecé a fijarme en ellas para ver de qué iban, porque no había visto muchas antes. The Battle at Elderbush Gulch (1914), de D.W. Griffith, con Mae Marsh y Lillian Gish, se me quedó grabada. Lo que me impresionó de ésta fue que realmente contaba su historia mejor que cualquiera de las películas que había visto. No me fijé especialmente en la forma o el método que utilizó Griffith. La historia destacaba y la contaba bien. Un director de cine es un contador de historias. Si sabe cómo enfatizar y acentuar, conoce el arte de contar historias.

  Henry King

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  Review by yegipetskyie.nochi 3

  Não seria de mau tom dizer que os filmes de Griffith antes de 1915 são, num certo sentido, rascunhos para a fase mais exitosa de sua filmografia. Eu diria que os aspectos que fariam do cinema do autor de True Heart Susie distinguir-se do teatro (como bem disse num curto comentário sobre Edgar Allan Poe) podem já ser observados num período incerto desta primeira metade da década de '10. É aqui, pois, que se insere The Battle of Elderbush Gulch. Embora o diretor ainda não tenha de fato encontrado a harmonia entre imagem e movimento* observada em Way Down East, por exemplo, há aqui os close-ups que já tanto se disse e tanto se diz, infelizmente a ponto de tornar…

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  Review by Drew Edelstein ★★

  My first morally reprehensible D. W. Griffith film! The short is actually pretty well constructed for the era, with an impressive amount of manpower thrown into the big battle (roughly comprising of reel 2, or the latter half of the short). Of course, when the inciting incident for this battle is that a couple of Native Americans tried to eat an orphaned little girl's dogs, the blatant and unnecessary racism of the whole affair kind of takes away from any entertainment value there might be. This is a fairly prototypical work though; among many, I'm sure it had some influence on John Ford's work in Stagecoach, but this film manages to be meanly racist and totally vapid beyond it's surface…

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  Review by Sean Gilman ★½

  This is a movie wherein a massacre is sparked by a pair of drunken Indians stealing a little girl's puppies so they can eat them, part of their tribe's Dog-Eating Festival. One of them, "the chieftain's son" gets killed and the Indians attack the local village, killing dozens and driving poor Lillian Gish into hysterics over her lost baby. Mae Marsh rescues the baby (though I swear we see an Indian killing a baby earlier in the film, and there's only supposed to be one in town), but the Indians close in, the survivors cowering in a lone cabin. As they begin to break down the door, we see Gish cowering at the bottom of a set of stairs. From above her head, off-screen, we see a pistol slowly descend and cock, ready to kill her rather than see her be taken by the Indians. It's Griffith at his worst in a nutshell: racism in the defense of exalted femininity.

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  Review by jason__kelly41 ½

  I had to watch this in my cinema studies class and this was just simply disgusting. Not only is it boring as all fuck and stretched out incredibly to a painful 29 mins, it's also horrendously and relentlessly racist towards Native Americans. DW Griffith deserves nothing.

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  Review by Rick Burin ★★½

  This one finds Griffith throwing off the shackles of one-reel (10-15 minute) films, and continuing to experiment and innovate, on his way to The Birth of a Nation, the notoriously racist blockbuster epic that changed the face of American cinema.

  If The Mothering Heart showed the director's capacity for sustained drama, then the 29-minute Elderbush Gulch gave him a dry-run at crafting an action spectacular, complete with a cavalry charge climax. The story's really stupid and racist – the battle is started by two Native Americans trying to eat a puppy – but some of the crosscutting, long shots and smoke-strewn bits of battle are pretty nice, and that gun inching down from the top of the frame is a…

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  Review by Miguel Muñoz Garnica ★★★★

  La tendencia a situar a Griffith como un instrumento transitivo entre dos estados del cine (fue eso que permitió asentar un "lenguaje" más estructurado que el cine primitivo, y por tanto el germen de otros grandes directores y no tanto un gran director en sí mismo) hace que perdamos de vista lo que tiene de único o insuperable, y que cada vez hace que me interese más. En esa línea, aquí hay varios elementos conocidos de su maestría estilística: la poética elemental del polvo, el humo y la pólvora, la oscilación entre lo candoroso y lo violento, lo violento entendido como movimiento puro. Y uno un poco menos evidente, pero para mí el más arrebatador: la manera en la que Lillian Gish* se enreda el pelo con unas ramas.

  *cada vez más convencido de que el combo Griffith + Gish es el máximo argumento posible a favor del concepto de fotogenia.

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  Review by Gabby ½ 1

  Watched in class. Why is this piece of shit still being taught in schools.

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  Review by Ethan Vestby

  Curiosity was piqued regarding this 30-min pre-BOAN Griffith film after appearing on a recent list of Hamaguchi favorites. Regressive to say the least, but I guess I can see him being impressed by the narrative compactness/spectacle. Lillian Gish running around screaming in the middle of battle with the accompanying intertitle "my baby!" brought to mind JoBeth Williams in the climax of Poltergeist, which I just watched again. A little bit of film history connective tissue there for ya.

  I can assure you the kids and puppies make it out alive.