At the corner of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards once stood a monument to one of the greatest movie flops of all time. A 300ft-high plasterboard Babylon, with walls wide enough to shoot chariot races on, it was flanked by giant white elephants (oh the symbolism!). Intolerance (1916), a three-and-a-half-hour silent movie, performed so catastrophically at the box office that its megalomaniac creator DW Griffiths couldn’t afford to demolish the set. For years it remained, crumbling, as a warning to Hollywood – “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”
Thankfully Hollywood didn’t give two hoots, because otherwise we’d have missed out on Tim Robey’s erudite and brilliantly entertaining chronicle of movie excess.
