Seamen Enoch Arden (Alfred Paget) returns home after a long absence marooned on a desert island. At home he finds his wife (Lillian Gish) married to another (Wallace Reid), and though he loves her, he cannot bear to disrupt her current happiness.

John Howard Payne (Henry B. Walthall) leaves home and begins a career in the theater. Despite encouragement from his mother and his sweetheart (Lillian Gish), Payne begins to lead a life of dissolute habits, and this soon leads to ruin and misery. In deep despair, he thinks of better days, and writes a song that later provides inspiration to several others in their own times of need.

In its time, "The Birth of a Nation" was a masterpiece. Its racist undertones and revisionism are quite disturbing, but it is still worth watching for its historical influence. IMDb entry: http://imdb.com/title/tt0004972/

An old-fashioned but excellent melodrama film directed by D. W. Griffith.

Henriette and Louise, a foundling, are raised together as sisters. When Louise goes blind, Henriette swears to take care of her forever. They go to Paris to see if Louise's blindness can be cured, but are separated when an aristocrat lusts after Henriette and abducts her. Only Chevalier de Vaudrey is kind to her, and they fall in love. The French Revolution replaces the corrupt Aristocracy with the equally corrupt Robespierre. De Vaudrey, who has always been good to peasants, is condemned to death for being an aristocrat,

Director D.W. Griffith's expensive, most ambitious silent film masterpiece Intolerance (1916) is one of the milestones and landmarks in cinematic history. Many reviewers and film historians consider it the greatest film of the silent era. The mammoth film was also subtitled: "A Sun-Play of the Ages" and "Love's Struggle Throughout the Ages." Griffith was inspired to make this film after watching the revolutionary Italian silent film epic Cabiria (1914) by director Giovanni Pastrone.