America

America (1924)

A Thrilling Story of Love and Romance

Lexington, Massachusetts, mid-1770s. Renegade British officer Captain Walter Butler struggles to enlist the aid of Indians against the tide of colonists rebelling for independence. Meanwhile, impoverished farmer Nathan Holden, in love with aristocrat Nancy Montague, reluctantly joins the Patriots – only to find himself at odds with Nancy's stern father and her arrogant brother.

Date of release
1924-02-21
TMDB
5.9 / 10 (12)
Runtime
2h 21m
Genres
Drama, History, Action
Director
D.W. Griffith

Casting

Interesting facts

America, also called Love and Sacrifice, is a 1924 American silent historical war romance film. It describes the heroic story of the events during the American Revolutionary War, in which filmmaker D. W. Griffith created a film adaptation of Robert W. Chambers' 1905 novel The Reckoning. The plot mainly centers on the Northern theatre of the war in New York, with romance spliced into individual movie scenes.

Production

In 1923, the Daughters of the American Revolution petitioned Motion Picture Production Association President Will H. Hays to make a historical epic about the American Revolution, and Hays convinced D.W. Griffith to direct the film.

Griffith used many popular movie actors at the time, but he felt that there was no need for them to play the roles in his films, and could not afford most of them anyway, after they began to consume nearly all of his money in expensive productions. As a result, Lillian Gish, who acted in a well known film of his, Orphans of the Storm, departed after he could not pay any more for her services and left him with Carol Dempster.

Filming took place at Richmond, Virginia and Somers, New York. During the filming of a recreation of the Battle of Bunker Hill at Somers, a 19-year-old soldier's arm was blown off while reloading a cannon. As Charles Emmett Mack recalled, "Neil Hamilton and I went to neighboring towns and raised a fund for him—I doing a song and dance and Neil collecting a coin."

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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