SOURCE: "Strike," in New Statesman, Vol. LVI, No. 1439, October 11, 1958, pp. 490-91.

In the following excerpt, the critic describes Strike as cinematic poetry and likens its symbolism to that used by T S. Eliot in The Wasteland.

Minor poetry is often met with in the cinema, and now and then major poetry, for the duration of a sequence. Strike stands apart from other films: it hammers the nerves and exalts the spirit as intensely as Oedipus or Lear, and it goes on so doing as relentlessly.

If the sustained empathy which Strike induces is like that induced by the great tragedies, it is, of course, quite unlike any tragedy of the stage in that it has neither a hero nor a coherent narrative. Its method is closely analogous to that of a poem with which it is almost exactly contemporary—The Waste Land. It is alike in that it...