When I first hit upon the idea for Yesterday’s Hits about a year and a half ago, the idea was to look at movies that were extremely popular when they were first released, but which might not have maintained this popularity to the present day. In looking at movies that haven’t necessarily stood the test of time, I hoped to gain some anthropological insight into what audiences of the past responded to, both stylistically and ideologically. And while some of the movies I’ve selected have held up pretty well (and some even better than that), some of the more interesting cases have been the ones that haven’t, for various reasons. In some cases, the popularity of these films have been due to their employing some then-impressive technical breakthrough, while others were very much of their time, featherweight entertainments that simply weren’t built to last.

But ever since I began writing this column, one movie has remained at the back of my mind- D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation.

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