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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
King Vidor's 1928 film “The Crowd” examines the life of an “average” New Yorker, John Sims, who grows up dreaming of boundless opportunities for success yet remains stuck as a low-level clerk in a large corporation. Bored with office work, John invents advertising slogans and eventually wins $500 in a contest. He rushes home with an armful of toys and clothes for his family and jumps ecstatically about the room with his wife. From the window he displays a newly purchased scooter to his children across the street, then watches as his little girl runs to receive her gift and is struck by a huge truck careening down the block. John rushes out to find her surrounded by a large and anonymous crowd. In his grief he lifts the injured child high above them, an unconscious sacrifice to the seemingly mindless speed and swirling masses that rob modern urban people of their innocence and hope for individual fulfillment.
1 Plot outline from “March of Life,” 21 10 1926Google Scholar (an early title for The Crowd) located in the MGM collection on “The Crowd” in the Doheny Library, University of Southern California.
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Lang's, Fritz “Metropolis,” (1927)Google Scholar probably a model for Vidor as well, used surrealistic images of skyscrapers and gargantuan machines, tyrannical corporate behemoths, and insensitive, efficiency-obsessed executives to explain the drone-like condition of exploited laborers in his city of the future. The chasm between the classes seemed to hold little hope for improvement. The final message, though, was tame – and notably romantic as well: there could be “no understanding between the brain and the hand unless the heart acts as a mediator.” Thus, even seeing the future city as frightening and driven by corporate enslavement of factory workers, Lang's film, like so many others, provides little understanding of emerging cultural complexity involving problems of middle-class office workers or the diverse historical circumstances of social life. On Fritz Lang see Jensen, Paul, The Cinema of Fritz Lang (Cranbury, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1969).Google Scholar
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21 Vidor, King, A Tree is a Tree, 145–58Google Scholar. Vidor reveals fascinating details about casting the film in which he picked the lead actor, James Murray, a Hollywood extra, from a passing group of people in the street (147). After completing work on The Crowd, Murray again slipped into obscurity. Vidor later learned that he was found dead, “floating in the Hudson River…” (149). See also Baxter, John, King Vidor (New York: Monarch Press, 1976).Google Scholar
22 Treatment entitled “The Clerk Story,” by Weaver, John, 18 05 1926Google Scholar, document located in “The Crowd” file in the Doheny Library, University of Southern California Film Archives.
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25 Vidor, King, A Tree is a Tree, 153Google Scholar. “The Crowd” was produced by MGM and premiered in New York on 3 March 1928. Vidor relates that “the critics greeted The Crowd with enthusiastic acclaim and high praise, but because it didn't jam the aisles of the gigantic movie emporiums it was referred to in some Hollywood circles as an ‘artistic flop.’ At the box office it grossed well over a million dollars, which was twice its cost,” Vidor, , op. cit., 153.Google Scholar
26 On filmic techniques used see both Vidor's biography cited above and Vidor, King, King Victor on Film Making (New York: McKay, 1972), 70–71.Google Scholar
27 “Résumé of Suggestions for Expansion of the Mob-Idea for Atmosphere”, 8 06 1926, by Mr Weaver, located in the MGM file on The Crowd, Doheny Library, UCLA.Google Scholar
28 Ibid. See also the suggested treatment of “The Crowd,” dictated by Stromberg, Hunt, 28 10 1927, USC Film Archives.Google Scholar
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