[3] According to Richard Abel, The Strike was one of the few films shown in America at the time representing labor unrest.

[4] He also mentions that the film received good notices in the 1904 reports of the Keith movie theatre managers of Cleveland and New York.

He notices however that the film is "liberal rather radical" as it attributes the exploitation of workers "to bad management rather than to the capitalist system".

In scene 2, after an initial frontal view, the camera pans first to the right and then to the left to follow the workers rushing past it, placing the viewer at the centre of the action.

He stresses in particular how it creates an unusually "deep space" playing area and how in scene 2 the camera pans to follow the crowd "perhaps in an attempt to reproduce the verisimilitude of an actualité".