The Strike (1912) User Reviews

No Conflict In An Emergency

[boblipton · 6/10 · 23 March 2020]

The workers have shut down the plant by striking -- why was it called 'industrial action' when it meant inactivity? -- when the boss rejects all of their demands. In retaliation, they decide to blow up the factory. T man chosen by the committee to do the deed leaves the bomb at home, and gone to orate to the union. His wife calls to tell him that a fire has started, and they're trapped in the bedroom.

One of the moral points that a lot of Alice Guy's films made is that character is what you are in a crisis, when there is no time to think: do or don't. That's what goes on here, and it leads to an interesting conclusion.

There's an undercranked action scene in here, and at one point, Madame Guy's technique calls for two people to be on a telephone call with each other. A different director might cut from one performer to the other. Madame Guy splits the screen in half to show you their reactions simultaneously.

Another Anti-Union One-Reeler from Alice Guy

[Cineanalyst · 29 March 2021]

The confused anti-union commentary of "The Strike" reminds me of the muddled message of a union abandoning its leader in "The High Cost of Living," another Solax one-reeler that Alice Guy also made in 1912. Apparently, the owner of her own production studio wasn't so much into that whole organized labor prospect. Whereas "The High Cost of Living" covered its sermon from above in the guise of Dickensian sentiment and a truly interesting flashback structure, "The Strike" offers some fiery special effects and a bit of last-minute-rescue drama, as the union leader's damsels-in-distress of a wife and daughter must be carried out of their burning home. Let that be a lesson to all strikers, I suppose, to mind that while they're complaining about factory jobs where the boss ain't such a bad guy after all, their families might be burning from the cigarette-in-the-trash hellscape that was their home.

Three tinting/toning changes are employed to represent a room where the lights are turned off and, subsequently, let ablaze. Most of the decomposition speckling occurs during the fire, too, which seems unintentionally apt. There's a split-screen shot for a telephone call to start the last-minute rescue, although the middle space of the composition is oddly left black. Besides, Guy reworked the popular genre, especially remembered in the Biograph shorts from D. W. Griffith, more creatively in "Matrimony's Speed Limit" (1913). There's also the factory whistle that alludes to sound in a silent film, which is somewhat interesting, although Guy, who once made early sound films at Gaumont, played on that contradiction more thoroughly elsewhere, too, such as in "Canned Harmony" (1912). Otherwise, there's not much to recommend this anti-union propaganda.