Griffith Masterworks 2: ABRAHAM LINCOLN, THE STRUGGLE
Walter Huston in Abraham Lincoln
Griffith Masterworks 2: WAY DOWN EAST, THE AVENGING CONSCIENCE
The most anticipated (by me anyway) part of this set is the twofer disc of Abraham Lincoln and The Struggle. Long overshadowed by Griffith’s earlier work, these have the distinction of being his final two films (from 1930 and 1931, respectively), and his only attempts at talkies. By this point, Griffith’s career had been in decline for several years, as newer and, frankly, greater talents eclipsed his trailblazing innovations of a decade earlier. These two films were his last shots at securing a place in the emerging film industry.
For the son of a Confederate soldier, Griffith was surprisingly fond of the great emancipator, and his Lincoln biopic is an occasionally moving, sometimes uneven, but ultimately delightful puff piece. As expected, Griffith and screenwriter Stephen Vincent Benet tell you pretty much everything you already knew about Lincoln, from his aw-shucks origins to his bouts of wartime depression to his premature end (though, in a nice touch, they do give more attention than usual to Mary Todd’s legendary crabbiness).
Many of the shortcomings of early sound films are on display here, such as tortured line readings and long, awkward stretches of silence — it’s clear that Griffith didn’t have much more of an idea what to do with the new technology than many others at this point. His style hadn’t evolved much from the old days, but there are nifty details reminiscent of his late-1910s films (e.g., a hand hovering over Lincoln’s shoulder as he signs the order to go to war; an echo of an earlier shot of his Kentucky cabin after the scene at Ford’s Theater). The whole thing is anchored by a strong lead performance by Walter Huston, who strikes the balance of melancholy, affability, and solemnity that future cinematic Lincolns would aspire to. Abraham Lincoln is not quite a patch on Young Mr. Lincoln, but it’s certainly more than just a historical curiosity.
The Struggle, on the other hand, may be the least of all Griffith features and seems at first to be definitive proof that his sensibilities were simply ill-suited to the new world of sound. Not for no reason is Griffith often associated with grandiose, overblown melodrama, and while that may not be a terrible disadvantage in silent cinema (or for something with the historical heft of Abraham Lincoln), it almost completely fails when applied to the realistic socially conscious drama that The Struggle wants to be.
Griffith pulls out all the stops to tell the story of Jimmie (Hal Skelly), a working-class man who brings ruin on his young family and himself through drunkenness. The moralizing tone here is somewhat at odds with the general cynicism toward social reformers found in Griffith’s earlier work (most obviously in Intolerance), and the whole thing has the unfortunate whiff of an Afterschool Special.
But I will say this for The Struggle: Griffith obviously felt very deeply about the effects of alcoholism on society in general and the family in particular. He tackles the subject without irony or ambiguity, unafraid to rub the audience’s collective face in the ugliness of dipsomania. Near the end, Jimmie has been reduced to an unshaven, muttering tramp, begging on the street for booze money. He retires to a filthy hovel, yelling nonsense syllables and waving his arms at (unseen) drink-induced hallucinations. I refuse to believe that this wasn’t greeted with derisive laughter by contemporary viewers, but I must admit that, watching this scene by myself in the middle of the night while (as it happens) nursing a drink, it was brutishly effective and a little scary.
The Struggle is notable in other ways as well, especially (and ironically) in its use of sound. Though musty and overwrought in almost every other way, it demonstrates significant sonic progress over Abraham Lincoln. Griffith’s technicians try to give street scenes aural depth, and there’s even some not-entirely-unsuccessful attempts to pull certain sounds out of a chattering crowd. Most striking is a scene late in the film: while his children listen to a pro-temperance radio program in another building, Jimmie stumbles around his apartment in an alcoholic stupor; Griffith, typically, cuts back and forth between these two locations, but extends this famous technique by bleeding the voice of the radio program over both locales, allowing it to act as both diagetic and non-diagetic sound. It’s quite a scene, in addition to being a glimpse of what Griffith might have been capable of had he continued to make films in the new era. But audiences stayed away, and The Struggle remained his last completed project.
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Tags: Abraham Lincoln, Classic Movies, D. W. Griffith, DVDs, Hal Skelly, Silent Films, Stephen Vincent Benet, The Struggle, Walter Huston
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