Such a frustrating disappointment

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

The idea, at least, was intriguing: to recreate the magic and decadence of early Hollywood as seen through the eyes of two innocent, impoverished Italian stone cutters working on the set of D.W. Griffith's monumental 1916 epic 'Intolerance'. It's the perfect setting for a meditation on the end of Hollywood's precocious adolescence (Griffith's film was the first and most ambitious megabuck box-office flop), but rarely has a film launched with such promise landed with such a thud. In their first English language feature the Taviani brothers evoke none of the heady freedom that followed movie-making out West. Their Hollywood is a pitiful facsimile, patched together from a few myths and daydreams into an artificial costume drama, with cardboard characters mouthing dialogue that (one hopes) suffered in translation. The brief glimpse of footage from 'Intolerance' itself only underlines how little the Tavianis aspired to and how limited their resources were.

Entertaining and interesting without much depth, "Good Morning, Babylon" never decides - through directorial eyes - whether to parody or chronicle the early silent cinema dominated by D.W. Griffith. However, directors Paolo and Vittorio Taviani deserve much credit for turning a fantasy about early Hollywood into an attractive film.Two brothers, Nicola and Andrea (check the IMDb page for this film for the actors' names) leave their aging father after he closes their family historical renovation business in Italy. Their outstandingly fine, craftsman attention to detail won't keep the wolf of bankruptcy at bay. The father and brothers, along with other relatives and assorted laborers, have done yeoman work restoring the glorious facades of an Italy alive in memory and lost in reality. But their time won't come again until Perillo Tours rediscovers Italy.So Nicola and Andrea come to the Promised Land, arriving in Tinseltown after enduring the hardship of common work, including pig herding. Given their pedigree as artisans it's little surprise that they are attracted to the gaudy and slightly wacky Hollywood in its infancy.Enduring but escaping crude bigotry ("wops" is the strongest epithet in the film), the brothers get to meet and be hired by D.W. Griffith, well-played by Charles Dance. He has Griffiths' Southern accent and mannerisms cold - must have read a biography of the autocrat of the Silents.The brothers prosper enough to land two beauties, one played by the young Greta Scacchi, as brides. The women exchange their jobs as extras for leading roles in their beloveds' lives.Griffith is shown agonizing about turning his long germinating idea of an anti-war film into reality. That was (and is) the great "Intolerance" and brief scenes from this masterpiece of the early days of cinema are provided. If you haven't seen "Intolerance," shame on you!An unfortunate but not uncommon for the time domestic problem clouds the relationship of the brothers who then separate in anger, winding up later in The Great War on opposite sides. Somehow they fortuitously meet on the battlefield and resolve their differences in a denouement that challenges the war-hating viewer not to laugh.Intentionally or not, the war scenes are a caricature of early cinema's depiction of combat. Audiences that are used to the dynamic proto-realism of, say, "Saving Private Ryan" (where real amputees were used as extras so all got the point that having a leg blown off hurts), may find these scenes very plasticized. But we didn't live in the age of D.W. Griffith.Well worth renting. The score is interesting, halfway between Puccini and an organ grinder's playlist.6/10.

the last scene was the key to enter the whole fact of the film. Two brothers in 2 fronts against eachother, but the brother from US holds his hands up to show he is defeated by the other brother. But the film tells us why it shows us these brothers story: FILM...which makes people eternal on the celluloids. It shows us people in different centuries who worked on that church but the only ones whom we know are these brothers, because they curved themselves on the film which was in a camera around. Wow, the Film was softly striking... I wanted not to watch at first, but the first scene grabbed my heart and make me stay to watch it completely...

1st watched 1/19/1997 - (Dir-Paolo Tavioni & Vittorio Tavioni): Good story and interesting characters. About two inseparable brothers and their encounters when coming to America in the early 1900's and their way into a D.W. Griffith movie.