"Civilization" stars actress Enid Markey, who during 1915 also starred in the film "The Despoilers" (Reginald Baker), co-written by Thoms Ince and J.G. Hawks.
The periodical The Moving Picture World announced "Civilization" as "his greatest masterpiece to date", a "mammoth production" of eleven reels about which Ince was remaing reticient before its release. Moving Picture World later quoted Thomas Ince after having been invited to Shadow Lawn to meet President Woodrow Wilson, "I found Mr. Wilson courtesy and affability personified. A more cordial reception I could not possibly have had."
Picture Play Magazine titled their review of the film "Making an Eighth Wonder". Picture Play announced the "film spectacle" as having been written by "that highpowered literary dynamo, C. Gardner Sullivan, his wizard of photodramatic construction".
In a similar way that H.G. Wells depicts idyllic ante-bellum England as being a remote and isolated unsuspecting participant it the sudden outbreak of World War I, perhaps Iris Barry hints that the idea of war was new to modern America "But for the moment the United States was preparing to enter the European war: J.Stuart Blackton's pro-war and anti-German The Battle Cry of Peace and Thomas Ince's anti-war and anti-German Civilization had already indicated the uses to which films might be put and now it was the moment for propaganda for the Allied cause." The propaganda of the time period seemed abruptly more direct, more explicit than yellow journalism and propaganda of American Imperialism in the Phillipines decades earlier. Iris Barry later credits Thomas Ince and D.W. Griffith as having "taught the Scandinavians to use an isolated face or guesture as a unit of expression rather than (as on stage) the actor".Anthony Slide approximates the film detective of my leitmotiv of Lost Film, Found Magazines by chronicling "The Battle Cry of Peace" as a lost silent film while providing a synopsis to the film from the programme of the film's premiere from which "the content can clearly be gauged". Slide, in his volume The Big V, The History of the Vitagraph Company, relates an ancedote within the extratextural discourse of the film where J. Stuart Blackton, who lived near Theodore Roosevelt on Long Island, read the scenario of the film to Roosevelt, who took out a Holy Bible and read Ezekial 3:33 and asked Blackton to include it in the film. Luckily for film detectives, J.Stuart Blackton published a seventy two page novelization of the film, subtitled A Call To Arms Against War, which included a letter Theodore Roosevelt had written to him from Sagamore Hill.
In the film, Magdalene is portrayed by actress Julia Swayne Gordon. Images of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and General Grant are evoked in the film. Several allegorical scenes invluding the figure of Columbia appear toward the end of the film. Kenneth MacGowan, in his volume Behind the The Screen, called "The Battle Cry of Peace" the "preparedness polemic" that catapulted actress Norma Talmadge to fame.
In Boston, the film opened at The Beaux-Arts Majestic Theater, which is still in operation at present. The periodical Motography gave the running length as ten reels, which was to be cut down to nine or less during the season. Motion Picture News proclaimed, 'Battle Cry of Peace' is an Epic of Patriotism". It wrote, "Interest sustained by plot. The picture contains a well-defined story...The photography is remarkable for a number of beautiful dissolves and fade-ins....The film does not end with this terrible climax but goes on to show a brighter America, as a reminder of what we now have and ought to take pains to cherish."
