Picture a man, interested in a career in the movies, who finally gets the chance to write and direct a feature film for the first time and after he does so that movie is popularly hailed one of the greatest ever made. This man you are picturing -likely it’s Orson Welles. But it is also Frank Darabont. Frank Darabont, the working-class son of Hungarian immigrants (he himself was born in a refugee camp) who fell in love with the movies upon seeing George Lucas’s THX 1138 , wasn’t the total stranger to the medium that Welles had been when he directed his first film and masterpiece The Shawshank Redemption in 1994, but he was still a guy who came relatively out of nowhere. His credits up to that point consisted of co-writing three horror films: A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 , the 1988 remake of The Blob , and The Fly II as well as several episodes of the TV series Tales from the Crypt and The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles . He made his official directing debut with a l...
It’s called The Crowd because it is about all of us. King Vidor is a director I’m not as familiar with as I should be given his stature in old Hollywood. He’s one of the earliest American directors singled out by the proponents of auteur theory as a significant visionary filmmaker. Probably it was because he was also a little more grounded and addressed certain audiences and issues left behind by a lot of the more escapist fare. Even one of the few early films of his I have seen, Bird of Paradise , feels like a direct challenge to the censor. But it’s been a while since I’ve looked at a silent film and The Crowd is one of Vidor’s greatest, a deeply humanist working-class odyssey released virtually on the eve of the Great Depression. It has to be one of the earlier movies, certainly on a large scale to truly challenge the lie of the American Dream and do so very vividly, both in its narrative and its intensely symbolic visuals -which were apart from that quite experimental in Hollywood ...