Last night (March 20) I was able to catch up with a movie I’d long wanted to see but hadn’t had a chance to yet: The Crowd, a 1928 silent film directed and co-written by King Vidor. Though he made at least two other films between Vidor’s smash hit The Big Parade and The Crowd – a Rafael Sabatini swashbuckler called Bardelys the Magnificent and La Bohème, starring Lillian Gish in an adaptation of Henri Murger’s novel rather than Puccini’s opera – The Crowd was a deeply personal project for Vidor. As Vidor told Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg in The Celluloid Muse, when MGM production chief Irving Thalberg wanted to know how he intended to follow up The Big Parade – a blockbuster hit and the second highest-grossing silent film ever made (after The Birth of a Nation) – “I suggested the theme of a man observing everyday life.”
The Crowd was essentially a neo-realist film 20 years early; like the Italian directors like Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio de Sica who founded the neo-realist movement in the closing days of World War II, Vidor not only picked a story about ordinary people but shot it largely on location. The setting is New York City and, as Vidor told Higham and Greenberg, “I shot probably half of the film on location in New York. We went all around the city with hidden cameras, which was way ahead of its time. Mostly we shot out of the back end of a truck through a hole cut in the flap, and occasionally out of a camera hidden in a packing box.” Vidor worked with Cedric Gbbons. Head of MGM’s art department, and special effects master A. Arnold Gillespie to create some of the most audacious sets ever seen in a film to that time, including an unforgettable geometric construction to reflect the anguish the film’s central character, John Sims (James Murray). feels when his father dies. There’s also the huge room of identical desks in the office in which John Sims works, in which his is desk 137, a scene so chillingly impersonal (I suspect Vidor was influenced by Elmer Rice’s 1923 abstract play, The Adding Machine) that only after John Sims quits his job in disgust and his wife Mary (Eleanor Boardman, Mrs. King Vidor at the time) doesn’t know this, that they attend a picnic at the company and we find out it was called Atlas Insurance.
Vidor acknowledged being influenced by German directors’ films, including E. A. Dupont’s Variety (1925) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), though the film’s main dramatic issues are the sheer ambitionlessness of Murray’s character and the huge number of people in New York City, so that even when John and Mary try to entertain or recreate themselves, they’re confronted by huge masses of humanity. The Crowd opens on July 4, 1900, when John Sims is born and his dad decides that that’s an omen that he’s destined for great things. I couldn’t help but think of Louis Armstrong, who always celebrated his birthday as July 4, 1900 (and who was destined for great things) even though his birth certificate, not discovered until after Armstrong’s death, revealed his actual birth date was August 4, 1901. Unfortunately, after John Sims’ father dies and he grows up, he decides to move to New York City and the city and its huge population basically swallows him up. John Sims is determined – or says he is – to study and make something of himself, but one night his best friend Bert (Bert Roach) asks John to join him on a double date to Coney Island. Once there, John falls hard for Mary, proposing to her on the spot.
The two honeymoon in – guess where? – Niagara Falls, where there’s some dazzling process work showing John and Mary at the falls, at a time when process work was still in its infancy and only filmmakers in Germany and Denmark had much experience with it. Later there’s a scene in which a squad of fire engines suddenly cross the street just as John and Mary are trying to get by, and I thought of the “Help is on the way!” sequence from the Marx Brothers’ Duck Soup – ahd then I realized the two films actually had at least one thing in common: Henry Sharp was the cinematographer on both. John and Mary Sims’ life together is one of barely holding on to middle-class status; they have two children, a son and a daughter (in that order), and they take them to a crowded beach where the son kicks sand over their cake (baking layer cakes seems to be a Mary Sims specialty). Through much of the film John Sims iinvents advertising slogans and plans to enter contests for them but never actually does so; the one time he actually submits an entry on time, he wins a $500 prize and then, just when we’re finally relieved that something good has happened to him, something else happens to him that’s far worse. His daughter is run down in the street by a truck driver, and there are a few tense moments with the doctor before she finally dies.
The shock of losing his daughter totally unhinges John. He loses the ability to concentrate on his work (illustrated in another ahead-of-its-time shot by Vidor and Sharp showing numbers literally dancing around John’s head). He’s upbraided by his former friend Bert, who worked his way into management by hob-nobbing with the bosses, and quits the job before they can fire him. John tries to find work but the only thing he can get is jobs selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door, at which he’s hopeless. He’s on the opint of committing suicide by throwing himself off a trestle onto the path of a moving train, but he thinks of his son – who’s with him at the time – and changes his mind. Eventually he lands a job juggling ont he street to attract attention to a new product –º he has to do this in a clown suit and Vidor is enough of a master at story construction that the costume he has to wear is the same as he saw on someone else on his way o ut to Coney Island the night he and Mary met. Mary is about to leave him and her mother and two brothers are ready to take her back, only she relents when John shows up with tickets for three to a vaudeville show. John explains to Mary that he’s finally landed a job and is going to work hard to make something of himself at long last, and half our mind is thinking, “At last!,” while the other half is thinking, “Yeah, right.”
The Crowd was a box-office disappointment; thanks to Vidor’s guerrilla style of filmmaking, it hadn’t cost much to make (about $325,000) but “its success was mainly critical,” as Vidor acknowledged to Higham and Greenberg. “The theatres, which were all very large, would be maybe half-filled with a lot of very enthusiastic people. The Crowd would have been an ideal art-house film, attracting the 1920’s equivalent of the audiences that now patronize Fellini films, but we didn’t have art-house chains then; they were slow developing.” I suspect The Crowd would have beena tough sell in any era – it’s clearly a magnificent piece of work but it’s also so relentlessly depressing – and its Zeitgeist is more that of a Warner Bros. Depression-era film than something one expects from MGM at the height of the 1920’s economic boom. One of the saddest wonders of The Crowd is how much the real James Murray resembled the character he plays: an un-driven alcoholic who met his end at age 35 in a drunken accidental drowning. When Vidor was making his fascinating independent film Our Daily Bread (1934), he found Murray and offered him a role “provided he sobered up and lost some of his beer fat,” Vidor recalled. “Oh, screw you,” Murray told him, and that was the last time Vidor ever saw him.
