After 1914 cross cutting between parallel actions came to be used whenever appropriate in American films, though this was not the case in European films. It should be noted that a good deal of the American use of cross-cutting was not the rapid alternation between parallel chains of action developed by D.W. Griffith, but a limited number of alternations to make it possible to leave out uninteresting bits of action with no real plot function. In Europe, some of the most enterprising directors did use cross-cutting sometimes, but they never attained the speed of the many American examples of this technique.
Cross-cutting was also used to get new effects of contrast, such as the cross-cut sequence in Cecil B. DeMille's The Whispering Chorus, in which a supposedly dead husband is having a liaison with a Chinese prostitute in an opium den, while simultaneously his unknowing wife is being remarried in church. All this was simple compared to D.W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), in which four parallel stories are intercut throughout the whole length of the film, though in this case the stories are more similar than contrasting in their nature. The use of cross-cutting within these parallel stories as well as between them produced a complexity that was beyond the comprehension of the average audience of the time. The influence of Intolerance produced a few other films that combined a number of similar stories having similar themes, such as Maurice Tourneur's Woman (1918), but the box-office failure of Intolerance ensured that these later films had simpler structures.
