D.W. Griffith - The Struggle (1931)

The standard film histories blame the “old-fashioned” technique of “The Struggle” for bringing on the end of Griffith’s career. But seen today “The Struggle” looks less like the quaintly antiquated Victorian melodrama it is often described as than like an exercise in radical realism that flew in the face of standard Hollywood practice in 1931. (Audiences apparently loathed it: a 1939 profile of Griffith in The New York Times suggests that the film played only a few days at a Broadway theater before being withdrawn.)

On an immediate, emotional level, “The Struggle” is Griffith’s most personal film, the story of a factory foreman (Hal Skelly) who suffers, as Griffith did, from alcoholism. Stylistically, the movie could not be further removed from the gauzy products of Hollywood’s dream factory, then functioning at its height.

Shot in the Audio-Cinema Studio in the Bronx and in the surrounding streets, “The Struggle” has a hard, weighty quality that goes beyond documentary and taps into the solid, stubborn materialism that Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet would develop decades later in films like “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach.”

Griffith, who died in 1948, might have remained a Victorian at heart, even as he stood on the cutting edge of the most modern of arts. But he was a Victorian in the sense of Dickens and Zola, a man who struggled to see the world as it was. Griffith played a key role in the invention of Hollywood, but he never shared the industry’s escapist sensibility; in the end it was his difference that took him down, not his datedness.
From Dave Kehr, NYTimes review Linked here.










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