Last night I decided to re-visit an early drama/Western, "The Struggle" (1913), a Thomas Ince produced and directed film with Elmer Morrow, Richard Stanton, E. H. Allen, and others, including an unnamed lead female whose name seems not to be known. This became the stuff of potboilers for decades, but this is an early example of a story really well told. It opens with Morrow as a youngster, perhaps just entering his teen years (and played by an unnamed actor) who goes out with his father to help his father, leaving his sister inside to do chores in a shack that has few amenities except the love that the inhabitants put as an aura around it. While out, a stranger comes to visit, evidently asking for a meal. He's a dusty traveler, and he tries to ingratiate himself to the sister, but after a meal instead begins to try to make love to her. She tries to resist, but is forced to scream for help, which her son hears as he returns for something to take back to the work he and his father are doing. The son tries to interfere and help his mother, but is unable to fend off a vicious attack, but he escapes, runs back to his father who comes back to help his wife, but then is killed by the stranger who also beats up the son. Five years later we see a grown son who's now a scout for the army. On a jaunt to town he goes into a saloon and runs into a drunk who causes a scene which Morrow tries to smooth over by acceding to the drunk's request for "just one more". While inside a fight breaks out among four card players, one of whom Morrow recognizes as the man who accosted his mother and killed his father five years before. During the scuffle, someone shoots the man Morrow recognizes as his father's killer. Unfortunately, Morrow is accused of the murder, and the sheriff comes to take him to justice.
The next section deals with Morrow on the loose and having to fight Apaches on the warpath who try to take his life. Though this all sounds clichéd today, this must have been very exciting to early 20th century filmgoers only twenty to thirty years removed from incidents that actually occurred like this one. Of course, the pitting of white settlers against native tribes was already a trope in the early 1910s and before, and this would become a staple for Western films for decades in the future. This film is only about 30 minutes long, so three reels approximately, but it takes the story in directions that had only been touched upon a little in the few years before in which such themes had been shown.
After this battle, Morrow is again in the clutches of the sheriff, but now both are attacked by the Apaches. All the while this is going on, we have Morrow's girl, played by the anonymous actress, wondering what can be done to save her innocent guy. Her father is the commandant of the fort of soldiers in the surrounding area. He is seemingly helpless in his ability to save Morrow. Just as Morrow and the sheriff are about to be killed by the Apaches, soldiers from the fort show up to save them. Meanwhile, a dying man has confessed on his deathbed that he killed the man in the fight in the bar. A signed confession is rushed to the fort as the injured sheriff and Morrow are being helped after their battle with the Apache renegades.
The story sounds perhaps trite, but upon my watching this for the second time seems even better than before. It's well told, well directed, and the scenery is rough and tough and very real, the kind of mise-en-scene that Broncho Billy Anderson used in his early Westerns and the kind of thing one eventually saw, too, in the films of William S. Hart only a couple of years later. Thomas Ince in his early films did a remarkable job of simply giving great entertainment value to his customers. The acting still had some touches of nineteenth century histrionics, but for the most part these actors do a very commendable job. Well worth the watch!
Produced by the Broncho Film company for distribution by Mutual Films.
