SOURCE: "A Great Folly, and a Small One," in Going Steady, Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1970, pp. 42-8.

In the following essay, Kael reflects on Griffith's pioneering cinematic accomplishments.

"She is madonna in an art as wild and young as her sweet eyes," Vachel Lindsay wrote of Mae Marsh, who died on Tuesday of last week. She is the heroine of D. W. Griffith's Intolerance, which came out in 1916 and which will soon have its annual showing at the Museum of Modern Art. Intolerance is one of the two or three most influential movies ever made, and I think it is also the greatest. Yet many of those who are interested in movies have never seen it. The Birth of a Nation, which Griffith brought out in 1915 (with Mae Marsh as the little sister who throws herself off a cliff through "the opal gates of death"), still draws audiences, because of...