Watch In the Border States

A little girl for the Union shelters a Confederate soldier, thereby initiating a chain of events that symbolically repairs the damages wrought by the Civil War. D.W. Griffith takes advantage of pictorial landscapes to stage his battle scenes and his famous parallel editing works here not only to create suspense but also to demonstrate a common humanity on both sides of the battlefield. The young girl at the center of the action adds a welcome note of levity sometimes missing from the master's more dour melodramas. - Max Goldberg