Director D. W. Griffith was with United Artists since its founding in 1919. However, by 1924, after a year of not producing any blockbusters, his partners decided the film pioneer and their UA studio should part company. The irony of the departure's timing is Griffith directed in what today is considered his last great masterpiece, November 1924's "Isn't Life Wonderful."
As great as the film is, "Isn't Life Wonderful" had a difficult time finding an audience. The public just wasn't interested in seeing a Polish refugee family painfully trying to exist in an economically dysfunctional Germany. The postwar country was experiencing an inflationary monetary system never seen before, with its marks currency escalating literally by the minute. Fatigue, hunger and crime greeted its citizens after its defeat against the Allied countries, especially France, demanding Germany keep up with its reparations for its invasion in 1914. Griffith, reading Geoffrey Moss' account of the German's life in his series of 1923 short stories, decided to produce a movie based on one of them. To make his production appear even more authentic, he took his crew and actors to film in Germany and Austria .
The often-criticized actress Carol Dempster, a favorite of Griffith after Lillian Gish left his fold, has been particularly praised here as showcasing a credible performance as the orphan Inga. Her fictitious character had grown up with the Polish family before their immigration to Germany. Griffith changed the citizenship of the film's central figures from German to Polish, knowing American viewers would be more apt to sympathize with them than the German populace.
The movie's male love interest, Paul (Neil Hamilton), suffering from a mustard attack in the war, has a twinkle in the eye for Inga, even though he's hobbled by the injury. In the one dramatic scene that "Isn't Life Wonderful" is known for, Inga stands patiently in a long queue in front of a butcher's shop after pooling the family's money for some long-desired meat. As the minutes tick by, the store owner repeatedly steps out to the blackboard and changes the escalating price of the meat, so much so that the money Inga has in her hand becomes inadequate. Incidentally, actor Hamilton, who had a long career in over 260 films, is recognizable today as the police commissioner in the 1960's 'Batman" TV series.
