“Thomas H. Ince spent $1,000,000 to produce Civilization, as a protest against war. In the picture he showed peace, then war, and peace restored. He did this to make the contrast and show the futility in sacrificing men to the canon…”
Sadly, Ince underestimated the power of film as a means of persuasion; World War One raged on for another year and a half following it’s release (and sucked the United States into the war just four weeks after this review appeared). The blather about the “$1,000,000” price tag was just so much hooey typical of the Hollywood P.R. machine of 1917; there wasn’t a single film produced for that sum during that era (an extravagant budget would have been more in the neighborhood of $100,000).
