'The Struggle' is familiar to most film enthusiasts only as the rather intriguing-sounding title that ended D.W.Griffith's filmography with a whimper.
That Griffith had been left foundering by the industry that he had once led is only too painfully apparent if one is familiar with pacy productions from the same year like 'The Public Enemy, 'Monkey Business' and 'Five Star Final'. Harry Alan Potamkin wrote at the time that Griffith "has collected all his weaknesses into one film", the film was laughed off screens within days, vanished for decades and wasn't included in last summer's Griffith season at the BFI on London's South Bank. (Luckily YouTube has once again come to the rescue.)
'The Struggle' begins with an idyllic sunlit prologue deliberately evocative of Griffith's own salad days as a director twenty years earlier in 1911, when the ale flowed freely but sadly not everyone could hold it. There follows a jump to 1923, when Prohibition is plainly not making the blindest bit of difference to plenty of people's enthusiasm for booze. The film's foreword had described 'The Struggle' as "a powerful indictment of bootleg liquor, emphasizing its devastating effect on American Youth" - and this sequence draws our attention to that fact that it's not so much the boozing per se that's the problem as that what they're consuming is toxic, illicitly manufactured muck rather than brewed under license. Which may possibly be the real reason for the adverse effect it has on the mental equilibrium of our hero, Jimmie Wilson, who is introduced as one of those present imbibing most enthusiastically, but who swears off liquor when he proposes marriage. Anyone who has seen 'Days of Wine and Roses' will have a good idea of what is now coming, since by 1931 prohibition had obviously failed and alcoholism remained a major problem in the United States (Griffith himself was a heavy drinker).
Unfortunately, after this witty extended prologue, Anita Loos' hand in the script becomes far less apparent; and Griffith seems to have forgotten almost everything he once knew about composition and editing. The film is well acted - and is enhanced by some of that pre-Production Code zing - but scene after scene theatrically unfolds almost entirely in long shot with remarkably few close-ups.
Finally, about fifteen minutes from the end, Griffith eventually takes the camera briefly out into the Bronx with a bit of perfunctory cross-cutting when Jimmie becomes delirious, turns into Mr. Hyde and goes crazy. (The vaguely expressionist design of the shabby room in which he has wound up, atmospherically lit, considerably enhances the visual impact of this sequence).
Fortunately - if very abruptly - all is resolved happily; with a highly improbable conclusion reminiscent of 'The Last Laugh'.
That Griffith had been left foundering by the industry that he had once led is only too painfully apparent if one is familiar with pacy productions from the same year like 'The Public Enemy, 'Monkey Business' and 'Five Star Final'. Harry Alan Potamkin wrote at the time that Griffith "has collected all his weaknesses into one film", the film was laughed off screens within days, vanished for decades and wasn't included in last summer's Griffith season at the BFI on London's South Bank. (Luckily YouTube has once again come to the rescue.)
'The Struggle' begins with an idyllic sunlit prologue deliberately evocative of Griffith's own salad days as a director twenty years earlier in 1911, when the ale flowed freely but sadly not everyone could hold it. There follows a jump to 1923, when Prohibition is plainly not making the blindest bit of difference to plenty of people's enthusiasm for booze. The film's foreword had described 'The Struggle' as "a powerful indictment of bootleg liquor, emphasizing its devastating effect on American Youth" - and this sequence draws our attention to that fact that it's not so much the boozing per se that's the problem as that what they're consuming is toxic, illicitly manufactured muck rather than brewed under license. Which may possibly be the real reason for the adverse effect it has on the mental equilibrium of our hero, Jimmie Wilson, who is introduced as one of those present imbibing most enthusiastically, but who swears off liquor when he proposes marriage. Anyone who has seen 'Days of Wine and Roses' will have a good idea of what is now coming, since by 1931 prohibition had obviously failed and alcoholism remained a major problem in the United States (Griffith himself was a heavy drinker).
Unfortunately, after this witty extended prologue, Anita Loos' hand in the script becomes far less apparent; and Griffith seems to have forgotten almost everything he once knew about composition and editing. The film is well acted - and is enhanced by some of that pre-Production Code zing - but scene after scene theatrically unfolds almost entirely in long shot with remarkably few close-ups.
Finally, about fifteen minutes from the end, Griffith eventually takes the camera briefly out into the Bronx with a bit of perfunctory cross-cutting when Jimmie becomes delirious, turns into Mr. Hyde and goes crazy. (The vaguely expressionist design of the shabby room in which he has wound up, atmospherically lit, considerably enhances the visual impact of this sequence).
Fortunately - if very abruptly - all is resolved happily; with a highly improbable conclusion reminiscent of 'The Last Laugh'.