Film: The Crowd
Director: King Vidor
Country: USA
Released: February 1928
Runtime: 98 minutes
Genre: Drama
Studio: MGM
Influenced: Roberto Rosselini, Luchino Visconti, Kurosawa, Spielberg
Texas-born King Vidor came to fame in 1925 with the success of The Big Parade, a romantic drama about a young American boy who goes to France to fight during WW1 and falls in love with a local girl. Vidor was deeply influenced by European cinema and his next film, The Crowd, was a departure from his previous work and allowed for that influence to come to the fore. Early in the movie, some shots show the hallmarks of German expressionism, notably the boy walking up the staircase after his father dies.
The film is very modern in its concerns, similar to Lang's Metropolis but conceived on a more human level, giving an idea of what it’s like for people (or more specifically, young men) to try and make their way in the big US cities proliferating everywhere at that time. One particularly memorable sequence in The Crowd is when the camera scales the side of a huge New York office building, and then enters into one of the top floor windows where the shot dissolves to a room of hundreds of people sitting at desks, and then zooms in further still to focus on just one man, John Sims.
King Vidor has said the film was autobiographical in certain ways, especially the way Sims learns to adapt to big city life. But the film has a tragic denouement when Sims loses his daughter in an accident, only to be saved from suicide by the love of his son. The film ends with Sims losing himself in laughter, sat with his family watching a clown performance in the midst of a large theatre crowd.
Other innovative shots include the camera disappearing first down a curved slide at a fairground and managing to track the people behind as they slide down. Employing relatively unknown actors (and so an inspiration to the Italian neorealists), the film had modest box office success, but was widely praised by critics. In 1928, Vidor received an Oscar nomination for Best Director for The Crowd, no thanks to MGM executives who, after being content to allow Vidor an "experimental" film after the success of The Big Parade, found the bleak social outlook of The Crowd too troubling, as reflected in their one-year delay in releasing the film.
What makes it challenging to watch – a young working man's descent into isolation and loss of morale who is ultimately crushed by the urban "assembly line", while his wife struggles to maintain order – is also what now makes it great. Vidor has said The Crowd was his personal favourite of all his movies (it "came out of my guts", he said) and the film has since been recognised as one of the masterpieces of the late silent era.
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