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Yawn. Poorly Filmed Snooze Fest.

Good concept, poorly executed.

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

This was made in 1911! Give me a break! When one sees what was done with primitive assets available to this filmmaker, this is an astounding effort. I did not get in on the Tangerine Dream soundtrack. I watched it cold, without music. It was wonderful. And that is from someone who has absolutely no literal belief in any of this fairy tale. The director frames each circle wonderfully, barely repeating himself and giving us a view of the Danta/Dore woodcuts in cinematic terms. One could sit her and criticize the religious bigotry that brings about this portrayal of God's wrath and all that. There are some pretty nasty jabs at some remarkable people. Nevertheless, the film never strays far from what the great Italian poet intended. I was annoyed at Dante at times tormenting the already tormented souls. Lets face it. These guys are going to be here a long time. They don't need some jackass visitor pulling out their hair or reprimanding them. But that's neither here nor there. I've always wanted to see this film and it fills in a gap in my cinematic experience.

This was a gigantic production for the time. Its use of sets and hour-plus runtime would help influence the movie-making industries on both sides of the Atlantic to produce longer and more epic films. Additionally, the film-making here isn't bad for 1911 standards, but besides the sets and narrative, it's still basic even for then. The superimposition and stop-substitution trick effects had been in films since nearly the beginning of the medium. And, the tableau style this film adopts, where lengthy title cards describe proceeding action was already becoming outdated. "L'Inferno" contains barely any scene dissection (there's two insert shots I recall, and the one that isn't of Lucifer is of awkward continuity); scenes are one continuous, usually unmoving long-shot view. For comparison, this film was released the same year as D.W. Griffith's "The Lonedale Operator"; the difference in the use, or lack thereof, of the camera, editing and intertitles between the two films is striking. Griffith wasn't the only one to have used varied camera positions, dissected scenes and used crosscutting and continuity editing to make his narratives more cinematic, either.This is one of the earliest feature-length films to last at least an hour and seems to be the earliest that has survived to this day and been available on video in near complete form. (According to "Dante on View", by Antonella Braida and Luisa Calè, a couple scenes are in the wrong order and another few may be missing.) Even more impressive, however, are the sets by Francesco Bertolini and Sandro Properzi. Production values were already important to the success of the short films in Italy, as evidenced by "Nero" (1909), one of the few earlier Italian films generally accessible today, but they shy in comparison to those on display here. Milano took over production of adapting the first part of Dante's Divine Comedy from another company in 1909 and didn't complete it until 1911. Supposedly, the film cost more than 100,000 lire ("Dante, Cinema & Television"). For comparison, "Cabiria" (1914) supposedly cost 1 million lire (multiple sources) and "Quo Vadis?" (1912/13) cost 48,000 lire (Vernon Jarratt, "Italian Cinema")—all large sums for their time, reportedly. Like "Cabiria" and "Quo Vadis?", "L'Inferno" was also quite successful; in the US, ticket prices went for as high as $2.50 ("Dante on View"), and the film was the first to pave an American market for feature-length films through roadshow bookings and states rights distribution--a system, which for a time, coexisted with the Nickelodeon programs.This film, of course, is dated. Yet, compared to other early literary/theatrical features, this one holds up rather well. With the help of the sets, the bare plot of Dante's work remains involving and, at least, visually interesting, despite the static camera. The three flashback scenes are also well placed.

WARNING: This review contains explicit language which some people may find offensive.I attended a special screening of "L'Inferno" at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan; for this screening, the film's intertitles had been removed, and the movie's dialogue and narration were spoken live by the brilliant actors Len Cariou and Roberta Maxwell, accompanied by an appropriately hellish violin score by Gil Morgenstern.For all its considerable crudeness, this early film is still powerful. Much of its impact is due to the decision to depict the (male) inhabitants of Hell entirely naked. (A couple of them are wanting an arm or a leg.) The image of naked men desperately scrambling for room in Charon's cramped coracle is far more effective than the same image would have been with costumed actors. The film would have been even more powerful had it included female nudity, although I concede that this would have been too much to expect in 1911. Even the nudity which we see here is undercut by the fact that some of the men in Hell are wearing nappies. The notorious sequence in the river of excrement is cleaned up somewhat here, to feature merely a river of dirty water. The narration includes a reference to the famous sign at the entrance to Hell -- "Abandon all hope, ye who enter here" -- yet we never see this sign; perhaps it was rendered in Italian in the original prints of this film, and was therefore cut out of prints exhibited outside Italy.The exterior scenes are shot against stark cliffs plunging perpendicularly to the sea, affording no shelter: the landscapes of Hell. Several flashbacks contain interior shots, featuring painted sets of the style which modern audiences will attribute to French film-maker Georges Melies.I try to perceive every film that I view in the context of its own time. Regrettably, most of the acting here is crude even by 1911 standards. The subject matter allows for some melodramatic overacting, yet these actors exceed the limits. The special effects, too, are crude by 1911 standards. Several of the double exposures are off-register, with visible "shimmy". The hell-hound Cerberus looks like a three-headed ostrich cross-bred with a poodle. Georges Melies was doing more convincing special effects in 1906. I did like the clever method of giving Beatrice a halo by placing a whirligig behind the actress's head. The costumes in the flashback sequences are impressive.For the screening which I attended, the original Italian intertitles were newly translated by Robert Pinsky of the Poetry Society of America. I feel that he should have been less literal and more colloquial: when Dante described a damned soul "making a fig", it wasn't immediately clear to the (mostly American) audience that this referred to an obscene hand-gesture.For all its crudity, this is an astonishing film with great visual impact. I wish that the same production company had tackled Dante's "Purgatorio" and "Paradiso". My rating: 8 out of 10.

Casting an 8/10 for "L'Inferno" was perhaps the hardest vote I've cast so far on IMDb, and it wasn't because I doubted the film's quality. Considering it was made in 1911 for approximately $2 million and had to be rebuilt almost a century later, it's a fantastic exercise in early cinema. The footage is spectacular, and the primitive special effects still evoke the same shock and emotion they must have upon its premiere.My issue with the film is the soundtrack. Just as so many others on IMDb have noted, the Tangerine Dream music added to the DVD is terrible. Normally a bad soundtrack wouldn't be a problem, but with "L'Inferno" it's not optional. So, for my second viewing, I muted the television and played an old piece of classical music based on Dante's original epic. Needless to say, the second viewing was much better. Unfortunately, since there's no other version of "L'Inferno" to watch, I have to cast a bad vote for this film.