THE MUSKETEERS OF PIG ALLEY

Little Lady lives with her sick mother in a suburb of New York. Her lover, a penniless young musician, goes to seek his fortune on the other side of town, the victim alone with the thugs of Pig Alley…

Restored by The Museum of Modern Art with support from the Lillian Gish Trust for Film Preservation

Griffith’s films, among them The Musketeers of Pig Alley, were marked by such avant-garde formal experimentations as extreme wide and close-up shots and sequences of fragmentary, distinctly shot scenes. Since there was little precedent after which to model his approach, he invented it as he worked, collaborating closely with his cinematographer G. W. (Billy) Bitzer. Musketeers is part of a cycle of films through which Griffith criticized the violence and deceitful public officials plaguing America’s inner cities. It tells the story of gang warfare, police corruption, and the people at the mercy of these forces on New York’s Lower East Side.

(moma.org)