Struggle Movie Review

Movie pioneer D.W. Griffith (1875–1948) couldn't get ARRESTED in 1931, so he financed his $300,000 swan song himself and released it through United Artists, the independent releasing corporation he founded with Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977), Douglas Fairbanks (1883–1939), and Mary Pickford (1892–1979). Even by 1931 standards, The Struggle is out of touch with its own era. King Vidor's version of Elmer Rice's Street Scene, starring Sylvia Sidney and William Collier Jr., produced by Samuel Goldwyn and released by United Artists the same year, dealt with strong social issues in a harsh, realistic way, AND managed to achieve critical and audience acceptance. But Goldwyn did his job as producer, Vidor did his job as director, and both let Rice adapt his own screenplay. Griffith, by that time more than a little desperate, fiddled with Anita Loos’ and John Emerson's screenplay until his whole reason for making this anti-Prohibition film was lost; The Struggle voices all the arguments for temperance that led to Prohibition in the first place. The first audience at New York's Rivoli Theatre (on December 10, 1931) giggled all through the picture, a painful reality for Griffith, who hoped that viewers would break into spontaneous applause as they had for his early silent masterpieces. Viewers of the 1990s may not feel that The Struggle is as bad as all that, but remember, this was Griffith, not some hack director churning out a Depression era quickie. The cast, except for Zita Johann (the future object of the The Mummy’s desire and then Mrs. John Houseman), is undistinguished, the grim visual realism is unmatched by the shrill aural melodramatics. The Struggle promptly went into exhibition limbo. Griffith lost two-thirds of his investment and, worse yet, wandered around Hollywood for the next 17 years, bitter and bewildered, until a cerebral hemorrhage killed him on July 23, 1948.

1931 87m/B Hal Skelly, Zita Johann, Evelyn Baldwin, Charlotte Wynters, Helen Mack, Kate Bruce, Jackson Halliday, Edna Hagan, Claude Cooper, Arthur Lipson, Charles Richman, Dave Manley; D: D.W. Griffith; W: D.W. Griffith, Anita Loos, John Emerson; C: Joseph Ruttenberg; M: D.W. Griffith, Philip A. Scheib. VHS