Director King Vidor was fresh off his anti-war classic The Big Parade when he approached legendary Metro Goldwyn Mayer production chief Irving Thalberg about an experimental picture depicting American ideals and realities.
A third-generation Texan, Vidor began making movies in his native Galveston. Arriving in Hollywood, Vidor founded his own studio and took out an ad in Variety which stated, in part, “I believe in the motion picture that carries a message to humanity.”
When his studio failed, Vidor became a star director at MGM, then earned the skepticism of Thalberg and L.B. Mayer by proposing a humanist feature about a would-be go-getter’s downward spiral into poverty and near-suicide.
James Murray and Eleanor Boardman Co-Star
Not quite the stuff the studios were feeding to a Roaring Twenties public reeling on speakeasy hooch, a wild stock market and an exploding pop culture with an anything-goes attitude.
Vidor wanted to show the other side of paradise (apologies to Fitzgerald). He cast a real life Everyman, movie extra James Murray, as John Sims, born symbolically on July 4, 1900. The movie tracks Sims’ tumultuous journey from American optimist to defeated cynic.
As Sims’ wife Mary, Vidor cast his then-wife, the glamorous Eleanor Boardman. He dressed her in a working class wardrobe and later in the picture, she’s reduced to wearing nearly rags as the Sims family descends into desperation. This enraged the diva Boardman, who was known as a vain, imperious clotheshorse. But the absence of her usual elaborate makeup and wardrobe allows Boardman’s natural beauty to emerge. The effect is breathtaking.
Empire State Building Missing
We follow John Sims from childhood traumas through his arrival in New York. (Much of the film was shot on location; we see a Manhattan skyline strangely devoid of the as-yet unbuilt Empire State and Chrysler buildings.) We then witness his courtship of Mary, including a fascinating sequence shot at Coney Island. And we come to know his mind-numbing office desk job.
Sims is a dreamer, but one without the talent or breaks needed to get ahead. And that’s Vidor’s point: that ambition alone doesn’t cut it, that it takes genuine talent, luck, connections, intangibles -- and that John Sims represents people who’ll never really make it.
Vidor shot several endings, few of which pleased the studio, and eventually was able to use the one that remains true to the picture’s Everyman sensibility. Some complain it rings false – that there’s a deux ex machina at work. But the final shot itself is utterly appropriate to the conceit that John Sims, for better or worse, will always remain a face in the crowd.
Classic Moment in Cinema History
One of the most famous shots in movie history comes early. The camera pans far up the side of the uniquely 20th century phenomenon, the skyscraper, before turning to maneuver through a seemingly random window to reveal vast rows of anonymous, drab, perfectly aligned desks, each hosting a business-suited worker. The camera soars over the desks stretching to infinity, slowly homing in on John Sims -- one young man in a sea of would-be Horatio Algers.
The acrobatic shot inspired no less than Orson Welles in Citizen Kane; Francis Ford Coppola in turn copied Welles’ shot in One from the Heart. And the vast interior shot of men and desks was “borrowed” by Billy Wilder, to visually explain Jack Lemmon’s comparably low status in the corporate plantation of The Apartment.
Between themes and cinematic execution, it’s no wonder The Crowd was among the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for preservation on the U.S. National Film Registry.
"Genuine Americana"
“The Crowd,” wrote the late film historian James Card of Rochester’s Eastman House film preservation museum, “is undeniably an essential work of genuine Americana and, minus the grand-scale spectacular nature of The Big Parade, is an even richer exposition of valid human responses particular to the twenties era.” (Seductive Cinema: The Art of Silent Film, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1994.)
A sad irony involves lead actor James Murray. At one point in the story, he stands atop a bridge, weighing whether to jump and kill himself on the railroad tracks below. He is dissuaded by the innocent love of his own son.
Eight years after The Crowd, Murray’s body was found floating in New York’s East River. His career had collapsed – never gained traction, really – and he’d succumbed to alcoholism.
Vidor had tried to help. Even hired the down-and-out Murray for Our Daily Bread and told him to clean up. But Murray could not, would not be saved and ultimately jumped to his death in a macabre echo of The Crowd. Sadly, there was no sweet-faced boy to take his hand at the last moment -- a poignant reminder that life doesn’t cooperate when we need it most to imitate art.
Barry M. Grey - Barry M. Grey is a non-fiction TV writer-producer in Los Angeles whose love of classic film borders on the dangerously obsessive.
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