The Heart of Humanity (1918)
The Heart of Humanity (1918)
DVD5 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC | 4:3 | 720x480 | 4600 kbps | 4.2Gb
Audio: English AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: English Intertitles
01:44:00| USA | Drama, War
DVD5 | VIDEO_TS | NTSC | 4:3 | 720x480 | 4600 kbps | 4.2Gb
Audio: English AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps | Subtitles: English Intertitles
01:44:00| USA | Drama, War
The story of a loving family separated during the Great War. Stroheim plays the brutal Prussian officer who tosses a screaming child from an upstairs window during the climactic rape scene.
Director: Allen Holubar
Cast: Dorothy Phillips, William Stowell, Robert Anderson, Walt Whitman, Margaret Mann, Erich von Stroheim, Lloyd Hughes, Frank Braidwood, George Hackathorne, Pat O'Malley, William Welsh, Lieutenant Smith, Joseph W. Girard, Valerie Germonprez, Gloria Joy, Tom London
The Heart of Humanity (1918)
The Heart of Humanity (1918)
The Heart of Humanity shows a Canadian mother seeing her five sons off to Beligum to fight in The Great War. The young wife of the oldest son soon decides to follow in order to serve as nurse to the suffering children in the zone of war. The hearts of all these characters are bound together by their love for each other, and this emotional telepathy gives them the power to overcome all the horrors and tragedies that they become witnesses and victims to in the course of the film.
Griffith is clearly the godfather of this film, with its broad strokes of heroism, flagwaving, suspenseful editing and general visual bravura. The director, however, was Allen Holubar – a prolific actor, screenwriter and sometimes director of the early Hollywood. Holubar's lovely wife, Dorothy Phillips gives a very worthy performance as the wife-nurse, and at the other end of the spectrum we of course find von Stroheim, giving an icy performance as a Prussian officer and autocrat, who carries out his doctrine of steel with iron fist and heart of stone.
In short, this is an excellently crafted film, which, given its time of production, unapologetically paints the war in stark contrasts. Stroheim is the personification of Prussian aggression, and his breed is not afforded a single redeeming moment in the film. We see the soldiers of the Prussian army capable of driving the Belgian women, elderly and children in front of themselves as a shield against the allied forces, we see them as devious and blood-thirsty dogs, and we see them engaging in drink, rape and infanticide.
IMDb
The Heart of Humanity (1918)
The Heart of Humanity (1918)
