The greatest film ever made? Don"t believe a word of it. "Intolerance" bored and irritated the audiences of the time. They were right, and the critics are wrong. This is not a good film, even if there are some interesting ideas. It has claims to be a bad one.

"Intolerance" was certainly influential. Griffith pioneered a range of techniques that were widely imitated later. He likes spectacle: there are horses, cars, trains, chases, a gunfight, the walls of Babylon, portrait shots of pretty girls, a riot and a battle. Other directors saw what could be done, realised that Griffith had a wonderful box of tricks, and thought they could do it better. If you want to see what came out of it, you need look no further than the work of Cecil B DeMille.

By most modern standards, however, the film is a massive failure. The root of the problem lies in the lack of any dramatic narrative. Griffith hadn"t worked out how film can be used to tell a story. A movie doesn"t need to tell people what to think; it can show them instead. Where Charlie Chaplin won our sympathy through demonstrative actions, Griffith tells us whose side we ought to be on. He hectors us about motherhood. He gives his characters epithets instead of names, like the "Dear Loved One", because that"s what we"re supposed to make of them. He informs us, for example, that the charitable women are officious, but there is no evidence of this until very late on. Griffith isn"t interested in people, and it shows. There are no personalities. If there is any human interest, it depends on what we, as an audience, bring with us.

This is all compounded by the incoherence of the design. Cross-cutting four sequences sounds like a promising idea. It might have worked if the sequences - like, say, the different plots in "Traffic" - had some relationship to each other. Unfortunately, these don"t - saying they"re about "intolerance" is about as helpful as saying that "War and Peace" is about "history". If the film drags, it"s not just that it"s long and slow by contemporary standards; it"s that the spectacle isn"t enough to hold our attention. The result is not so much a group of stories, more a magic lantern show. It is a moving picture rather than a movie.