Get your own Free Home Page
Directed by King Vidor
Starring James Murray, Eleanor Boardman, Bert Roach
USA, 1928
Not Rated (mature themes)
SURVIVAL VS. AMBITION, OR: THE POETRY OF THE MASSES
King Vidor’s silent masterpiece, The Crowd, may be the best movie I have ever seen. It is surprisingly depressing for its era- the upbeat, roaring twenties- and was one of the last great silent films made before the talkies were ushered into the mainstream. Vidor, one of the greatest directors who ever lived, had made his huge box-office hit for the studios in 1925, The Big Parade, a war movie. He was an intensely artistic, creative presence in films and, to survive in the studio system, his intentions for filmmaking alternated with each of his creations: he made one movie for the studios, and then a movie for himself. The Crowd was a film he personally wanted to do and it is a stunning work of cinematic poetry often compared to F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, which was released the same year.
The Crowd’s setting is everyday, 1920s America. It opens on the birth of its lead character, John Sims (played as an adult wonderfully by unknown actor James Murray), born on July 4, 1900 (this date obviously being symbolism for the all-American, everyday person.) His father promises to give him every opportunity and believes John will do great things when he grows up, perhaps become president. John’s father dies when he is twelve but, with ambition, he moves to New York at 21, gets married, and becomes a part of the crowd- men with similar aspirations as his who are smothered by a blanket of namelessness.
The film is essentially about the basic human instinct to survive, and how the natural obstacles of adversity and competition make it difficult for the ordinary man to make a living and become what he desires in the real world. John is like every young man. His ordinariness is accented by Vidor and actor James Murray, and one of the most famous shots in history has the camera swooping over a room of endless desks and workers who all look alike and coming into a close-up of John, who is numbered worker ‘137.’
Crowds surround and follow John throughout the film. Vidor, to shoot the streets of New York realistically, hid his camera on location. He captures images of sameness, with hordes of moving people going to work. In the scene where he discovers his father is dead, he walks up a staircase with a crowd of people watching him, which highlights the loneliness John would feel throughout the rest of his childhood. He courts his future wife, Mary (played beautifully by Eleanor Boardman, Vidor’s wife), at Coney Island, and a crowd waits outside a ride to see if they ‘neck.’ On the subway ride home, it is made clear by the crowd of similar people with their similar dates that Coney Island was the place where people of the ‘20s had fun with their boyfriends or girlfriends and was the place where they felt they could escape the crowd. However, they can only forget they are part of the masses, but they are forever stuck in it.
John’s honeymoon scene at Niagara Falls with Mary is poetic and moving, like the rest of the film, and is heightened romanticism with the powerful score. John tells his wife that she is the most beautiful girl in the world and that he will always love her. Months later, their marriage is crumbling and Mary’s brothers and mother are disapproving of John. Their marriage is healed by a pregnancy in a scene which is done with such delicacy and without title cards. The scene in which John waits in fevered anticipation in the hospital to see his newborn child features a crowd of men who are likewise waiting to see their babies. John, throughout the years, continues to tell Mary to wait until his "ship comes in," but it never does and the family suffers heartache and poverty strewn with a few brief moments of happiness in which John wins five hundred dollars for a slogan and when he gets a meager raise in salary. Mary is both a wife and a parent to John, who is depicted as a good-hearted jerk.
After months of great financial hardship, John contemplates suicide. He has promised himself all his life that he would be big and famous, but he begins to realize that he is not the only man whose father convinced him he would be president, and he is just a speck in a mob of people trying to climb the social ladder. He is completely dependent on his loving wife, and he is the kind of man a woman with a mind would leave immediately. But Mary is a woman with a heart bigger than her mind and she, even after her brothers come to take her away, stands by her man.
Thematically, Vidor’s film is like Vittorio DeSica’s The Bicycle Thief, which is also rooted in the cycle of scrounging for money and food and about the seeming impossibility of fame in this loop. Stylistically, The Crowd is rooted in German Expressionism seen in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Murnau’s Sunrise and The Last Laugh. It is visually astounding, with cinematography by Henry Sharp and sets by the great Cedric Gibbons (who worked on more than 900 films during his career, including several Vincente Minelli musicals) and Arnold Gillespie. This film cannot be described in words because, like most great silents, it lives in its visuals. The Crowd’s only slightly evident flaw is its unnecessary use of too many title cards. I think its visuals and visual compositions of the crowds and sets in the film are more emotionally appealing than the awe-inspiring, endlessly-acclaimed Babylonian sets in Intolerance because they reverberate the emotional and thematic core of the film, which is the frightening anonymity within the crowd. That strength alone makes it a masterpiece of poignancy and artistry, but what makes The Crowd a truly great film is the fact that it is still vital and relevant. Times have changed since that decade, but people still struggle with the illusion of ambition and the reality of one’s seeming insignificance.
Strangely, Vidor’s classic made quite a lot at the box office when it was released, more than cheery films by Buster Keaton and the like. I’m not sure how audiences responded to it. When I first saw it, I was stunned by its nonjudgmental honesty about the simple duties of putting food on the table for your family and how one struggles with higher thoughts of self. John has no evident talents, but it is human nature to believe you will be somebody. In The Crowd, the men in the masses are ‘somebody’s, but only to their families and friends, which is ultimately how life is for most people.
What is ironic and beautifully stinging in the film is the scene in which John finally gets a job as a juggler- in a much earlier scene, he laughed with Mary at a juggler on the street, saying, "The poor sap! I bet his father thought he would be President!" It is sad foreshadowing of John’s descent. The final scene in The Crowd is very stirring: after John gets his job as a juggler, which is an optimistic suggestion at the future of the Sims’ but isn’t entirely promising, John takes his family out to a vaudeville show. They laugh and forget their troubles, and then the camera pulls away from their seats, revealing rows and rows of people laughing, until the Sims’ disappear into the crowd. This ‘losing yourself’ with entertainment is at the heart of film. John may never become ‘important’ and he may never be financially stable, but, instead of fighting through the crowd to meet his desire for status, he has learned to take comfort in the anonymity the crowd provides. He has not vanished into the masses; he has come to terms with the fact that he is one in many.
By Andrew Chan
Get your own Free Home Page