The first American epic film is which title?

• A. The Squaw Man
• B. Intolerance
• C. The Birth of a Nation
• D. The Great Train Robbery

Answer: (A)

Epic films are defined by their long running time, expansive scope, and grand scale of production, aiming to tell a monumental story across multiple settings or threads. In American cinema, this standard is most often applied to The Birth of a Nation (1915), which runs about three hours and presents a sweeping narrative of the Civil War and Reconstruction with large-scale battle scenes, ambitious production values, and a cinematic ambition that set the template for later epics. The Squaw Man is an important early feature and helped establish length in American filmmaking, but it doesn’t embody the same expansive, multi‑scene spectacle that defines an epic. The Great Train Robbery, while groundbreaking for narrative cinema, is a short film and not an epic in scope. Intolerance is another major epic, but it came after The Birth of a Nation and is typically viewed as Griffith’s even more expansive follow-up. So, the first American epic is generally cited as The Birth of a Nation.