The Usurer (1910)

Synopsis (with spoilers): A wealthy money-lender orders his collectors to foreclose on his debtors who fell behind on their paying duties. He then gets accidentally locked up in his own vault and dies. His sister then forgives all debts and returns the possessions that had been taken from debtors.
Appraisal: This is not the last time a capitalist gets an extremely contrived and horrific death in one of Griffith's films -- in Corner in Wheat a stock market speculator dies asfixiated in wheat flour. Griffith's ideological stance is invariably reactionary, which in his case means pre-capitalist; but in his films the villain is alway the middle-man, never the government or who really holds a power position. In "The Birth of a Nation" president Lincoln, who ordered the war, comes off unscathed, all the blame falling upon -- of all people -- the ambitious mulattoes. That way, he expresses his views without attacking popular leaders who stand for opposite ones. In Griffith's southerner view, land owners are always noble, good-hearted people; it never crosses his mind that, historically, professions like money-lenders appeared because some people -- mostly Jews I suppose -- could not possess land. Of course his idealized universe would be just one big farm, with happy Negro slaves and no need for money. Interestingly, by that time Marx's ideas were already widespread and criticized the same things that Griffith did -- only, instead of a return to a rural paradise, Marx preconized replacing capitalism with communism.