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 for the time. They landed the movie a nomination for the first and only Academy Award for Best Artistic Picture (it lost fairly to F.W. Muranu’s beautifully brilliant Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans). But in case that sounds challenging, make no mistake -the movie is anything but inaccessible.
There’s a great silent movie bluntness to The Crowd right from the start as one John Simms, born in 1900 on the Fourth of July (just like George M. Cohan), is expected to have a very promising future by his father and it is instilled in him that he will become a great man -something he aspires to even more after his father dies when he is a kid. John was not born to a prominent or wealthy family though and as an adult (played by James Murray), he is told on his arrival in New York that he will have to really work to stand out in the crowd. But in perfect visual irony, the next we see is John working at a desk in a giant office room, one of dozens of anonymous employees in some big insurance company, each with the same aspirations as him.
Vidor visualizes it remarkably, starting with an extreme wide-shot of the hive, looking like something out of a dystopian movie, before panning in on John’s desk -the man barely identifiable until the camera is directly on him. It is a visual that Billy Wilder replicated near exactly thirty-two years later in The Apartment -the business in that film heavily resembling the one in this in other ways as well (most notably the vast empty halls and crowded elevators). Perhaps one of the most striking images in early cinema, and one of the most blunt -that in spite of the lofty ideals of exceptional individualism, American capitalism sees its workers as merely a collection of cogs, indistinguishable in that crowd. Where the film’s sentiments about John’s greatness could be plausibly taken with some sincerity up to that point, as they no doubt would in some movie by D.W. Griffith for instance, Vidor’s more honest cynicism is revealed here and the audience is ready for at the very least some hardship in John’s pursuit of his dream.
In fairness however, John is demonstrably woefully naive, in both his dreams for himself and how he conducts his life more broadly. He goes on a double date to Coney Island with a girl he only just met Mary (Eleanor Boardman) and by the end of it he has proposed to her -his friend predicting the marriage will fall apart relatively quickly. Still, it is sufficient in moving things to the domestic sphere and the bevy of challenges there that John is equally unprepared for: maintaining the relationship in spite of familial tensions, starting a family, and most importantly providing for it in lieu of a dead-end job.
The very unromantic pressures of all of this is striking as Vidor hones in on working-class dismay and the struggles of getting ahead in a modern capitalist society, that again was close to a major depression. John’s self-worth is frequently challenged, whether by colleagues, his wife’s brothers or even his wife herself -and where each of these might more commonly be followed by some triumph or catharsis he only seems to sink deeper as his job provides no mobility and he becomes an alcoholic. It’s miserable but very perceptive, and in may ways the film predicts such things as Italian neorealism -especially in how these common man themes are illustrated through intentional inventive filmmaking. John’s ambiguity is often visually emphasized in the way he easily blends in with the masses or is drowned by them. Even at home he is shabby and dwarfed by his bigger in-laws. Vidor moves and places the camera in interesting ways -in the Coney Island sequences he shoots from below or overhead; he creates dynamic visuals for the drab world his characters occupy. The kind of pans and tracking shots that are employed in this film weren't common techniques yet -but Vidor is concerned with his camera exposing his world. Outside of the home, scenes aren't always cut to but they are revealed -as when the shot follows John into an unusually enormous hospital room or in the final scene of the movie as the camera pans back on dozens of delighted people watching a show.
The cutting is incredibly precise too though, to some genuinely shocking effect. In the harshest, most dramatic moment of the movie when John and Mary's daughter is killed by a vehicle while playing out on the road, the way it is edited together so that you see the truck mere inches from her -it is really disturbing. The fact of the practical necessities of that time makes its impact that much more sobering as does the understanding of how much it will destroy a man already insecure in so many aspects of his life. The editing is likewise tight in the confrontation between John and Mary that results in the latter's second attempt to leave him. For as much of a visual filmmaker as Vidor is, he trusts his actors considerably.
And they do rise to the occasion. Boardman, who was Vidor’s own wife at the time, plays Mary with quiet sensitivity and depth as to her feelings and fears. She very believably portrays the strain of not only working-class struggle but marriage to an unstable alcoholic, and cannot be blamed for any of the choices she makes in trying to get away from it. And in the last scene where she puts her foot down at a time when John really has the impetus to do better and is humbly gracious if not reciprocal to her feelings, she holds a real power that is palpable. But James Murray’s performance as John is its own kind of authentic. He was legitimately from a background similar to John and had only worked in Hollywood as an extra when Vidor plucked him out of obscurity for this film. He fits the bill tremendously in both John’s undue optimism and the crushing sadness of the cavalcade of disappointment and misery he goes through. In the end there is a warm pathos in his face in his coming to terms with his fate and his renewed earnest enthusiasm for both his family and the prospect of building a new career that won’t skyrocket him to success but could be manageable. He is the heart of the movie’s bittersweet moral.
But a sad fact surrounding the movie is that Murray was not so dissimilar from John in his life trajectory. In the years after The Crowd, he made a few more movies, but he too had a problem with alcohol that briefly tempered during a marriage yet came back in time for a divorce. By the early 1930s, he was unable to find work and when Vidor began formulating a sequel film Our Daily Bread, he found Murray begging in the streets yet too prideful to take the part. He was replaced by Tom Keene. Unlike his cinematic counterpart, his story didn’t end in optimism -in 1936 he was found drowned in the North River in New York, likely from suicide.
Murray’s image though is preserved in this movie that envisions another fate for him and all the other poor souls like John Sims struggling in a harsh world. He finds the hope in a new start and a humbling of his grand ambitions. And Vidor ends the film with John and Mary going out to a show together, pulling back on them in the audience once more to the Crowd -dozens of people enjoying the show like John and Mary, with their own like stories and issues that the film suggests should not be taken for granted in this society that prioritizes individualist success at the expense of others. A powerful socialist message at a time when a Hollywood movie could still get away with that. And while The Crowd was ironically not a crowd-pleaser in the traditional sense in this era of Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks -ostensibly less welcome in the years that followed, I think it offered an ultimately hopeful story and good moral for the Depression. Its striking camera and editing innovations would have been remarkable too, and it’s a sad thing it fell into obscurity for a time that those techniques wouldn’t be much advanced upon in Hollywood for decades. Nearly one-hundred years later though, The Crowd thoroughly does stand out from its crowd of late-era silent pictures that have made a mark. It’s filmmaking is impressive still and though blunt its messaging remains very relevant. We are those anonymous faces more than Great Men, but our lives and stories are valuable regardless.
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