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1.8/10
Archivist John
Senior Editor
A definitive 1.8/10 rating for a film that redefined the boundaries of cult cinema. The Struggle remains a cornerstone of transgressive art.
Somewhere between the last gasp of Victorian melodrama and the jazz-age shrug, Harry Chandlee’s The Struggle plants its flag—an unjustly banished specimen of silent-era bravado that should be hanging in the Museum of Modern Art between von Stroheim and Borzage, yet languishes in the damp catacombs of public-domain neglect.
Shot on location from windswept Presidio cliffs to the mosquito-netted corridors of Corregidor, the picture exhales the briny tang of authenticity; you can almost taste the copper-penny fear when the hull scrapes reef and candle-power arcs across midnight water. Director Arthur Ashley—never a household name—nevertheless commands chiaroscuro like a renaissance apprentice who’s stolen his master’s candle: faces slide out of utter blackness, then flare back into it, leaving after-images on the retina.
Forget meet-cutes; this is a meet-cannonade. Carew’s affection for Marjorie is established in a surgical theater where a soldier’s gangrenous leg becomes the altar of his unspoken proposal—he stitches, she averts her eyes, the camera dollies in until his scalpel seems poised over our own chests. The script refuses shorthand: every glance is mortgaged against military protocol, every courtesy a battle-plan. When Dames usurps the heroine’s favor, the film stages the hand-over at a polo field—hooves thunder like artillery, silk parasols spin like shrapnel, and the dust cloud that swallows Carew’s defeated silhouette feels earned, not conjured.
Alfred Loring’s Carew is a masterclass in stoic implosion; watch the way he removes his pince-nez as if peeling off his own face, only for the glasses to fog the instant Marjorie turns away. Elaine Evans, saddled with the thankless "ingénue" tag, actually threads complexity into Marjorie’s socialite shimmy—note the micro-shrug when she pins on Dames’s boutonniere, half regret, half dare. Meanwhile Ethel Grey Terry’s Mrs. Drew slinks through parlors like cigarette smoke in a satin gown; her liaison with Dames is filmed in a single take that drifts from candelabra to half-open veranda door, implying rather than exhibits, a lesson modern filmmakers could Xerox.
The maritime disaster—rendered with full-size deck sections hydraulically tilted in a tank of Manila Bay—functions less as spectacle than sacrament. Dames’s theft of the life preserver is captured in a wide shot from the poop deck: a woman’s hand extends, the preserver rips away, and the camera holds long enough for the viewer to contemplate the vacuum where empathy should be. Intercut, Carew lashes injured stewards to stair rails, his tunic blooming red from a gash he never mentions. The editing rhythm—ASL 3.4 seconds—whips anxiety into froth without ever succumbing to Eisensteinian montage clichés.
Once the narrative fractures into two islands—one a sandy purgatory, the other a colony of the terminally untouchable—the film becomes something closer to a fever poem. Ashley overlays dissolves of rosary beads falling through frame, lepers’ bandages unraveling like Torah scrolls, and Dames’s face half-lathered in moonlight. The abbot’s monastery is lit solely by coconut-oil lamps; nitrate shadows crawl across stone so thick you could butter bread with them. When Carew confronts the monk who insists "I am not Dames," the soundtrack (on the 2018 Murnau-Stiftung restoration) drops to a single bamboo flute, its minor third wavering between dirge and lullaby—a sonic memento mori.
Though monochromatic, tinting alternates between tobacco-amber for interiors and viridian for ocean vistas. The only anomaly: the rescue flare Carew ignites is hand-painted crimson on each 35 mm print—when it erupts, the frame seems hemorrhaging. Recurrent visual rhymes bind the narrative: a cracked surgeon’s scalpel reappears as the broken rosary Dames clutches; Marjorie’s lace handkerchief, waved in farewell, resurfaces sodden on the beach, now a shroud for a nameless child. Such leitmotifs elevate what might have been penny-dreadful coincidence into cosmic accounting.
Unlike contemporaries such as The Concealed Truth or Captivating Mary Carstairs, the film refuses to punish its heroine for volition. Marjorie’s initial rejection of Carew stems not from vapidity but from an allegiance to social capital—a calculus the movie critiques yet understands. When she finally apprehends Dames’s perfidy, her agency is restored: she strides into the surf, tears off her wedding ring, and flings it toward coral heads; the camera watches the circle sink past a moray eel, an aquatic divorce decree.
Modern eyes will flinch at the backdrop of American occupation tropics, yet the film’s treatment of Filipino extras is unexpectedly layered. Lepers are not merely backdrop miseries; one, a teenage girl named Dalisay, recites the Magnificat in Tagalog while Dames dresses her lesions—her unbroken voice indicts the empire that exiled her. The abbot’s monastery is staffed by actual Franciscans from Intramuros, their brown habits weathered to the same chromatic register as the volcanic soil, suggesting spiritual, not military, sovereignty. The movie stops short of anticolonial manifesto, yet the worm of doubt burrows.
Surviving prints lack original Conduct-Orchestra cue sheets, so every curator must re-score. The 2018 restoration opts for a quartet of viola, harp, timpani, and Chinese erhu—an unorthodox mix that underscores the cultural collision. When Dames’s memory resurges, the erhu performs a glissando that mimics human wail; at screenings in Hong Kong, viewers reportedly gasped in recognition. If you stream the version on Criterion Channel, don’t dismiss the synth-tracked 2002 bootleg—its Vangelis-style arpeggios lend the leper colony a sci-fi dread that weirdly works.
Critics often bracket The Struggle with maritime precursors like Trapped by the London Sharks, yet its DNA spliced into later gems. The moral amnesia anticipates The Suspect (1944), while the island-beacon finale prefigures the cathartic flare in Silence of the Dead. Even the leper sequences echo through Bunuel’s Nazarin, though Bunuel would have mocked the redemptive coda.
Like many independent productions from 1920, the picture was distributed by the short-lived Phoenix Film Corporation, which folded when its prints were seized in a customs dispute. Elements languished in a Sydney warehouse until 1977, when a graduate student discovered 18 of 22 reels. Today the restoration runs 103 minutes; four minutes of the Manila street carnival remain lost, though production stills suggest a proto-Vertigo dolly-zoom that would have been revolutionary. You can catch the DCP at MoMA’s annual "Cruel Seas" retrospective or purchase the region-free Blu via GaragEditions.fr, whose booklet essay by R. C. Dale is alone worth the price of import duty.
Is the film flawless? Hardly. The third-act medical exposition—complete with hammered-xylophone "science"—plays like a barbershop slide show, and the censor-imposed intertitle "A pure love triumphs over death" lands with the thud of Sunday-school homily. Yet these scars humanize the artifact, reminders that even saints emerge from mud. For viewers fatigued by superhero denouements, The Struggle offers a tonic where salvation is indistinguishable from surrender, and the greatest act of love is letting the rescue boat take your beloved away—even when the boat is steered by fate, not villainy.
So dim the lamps, queue the erhu, and let the nitrate ghosts whisper across your 4K screen: in the chasm between desire and duty lies a reef, and upon it our better selves are shipwrecked, or—on blessed rare nights—miraculously rebuilt.
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