Reviews and notes

Certainly one of Vidor's best films, a silent masterpiece which turns a realistically caustic eye on the illusionism of the American dream. A young man ('born on America's 124th birthday') arrives in the big city convinced that he is going to set the world on fire, only to find that life isn't quite like that. A humble but steady job leads to love, marriage, kids and a happiness arbitrarily cut short by an accident (one of the children is run over and killed) which leads to the loss of his job, despairing unemployment, and impossible tensions starting to erode the marriage. The performances are absolutely flawless, and astonishing location work in the busy New York streets (including a giddy tour of Coney Island on a blind date) lends a gritty ring of truth to his intensely human odyssey, bounded by his eager arrival among the skyscrapers (the camera slowly panning up the side of a vast office block to discover him at work, lost in a sea of identical desks), and the last shot that has him merging as just another face in the crowd. Simple but superb.
- Tom Milne, Time Out Film Guide.



If King Vidor had made nothing but The Crowd he would still be assured of filmic immortality. It is a work of great beauty and true simplicity - in my opinion, one of three masterpieces with which the silent cinema came to maturity and bravely met a premature end at one and the same time. (The other films I think of are Murnau's Sunrise and Dovzhenko's Earth). Of course, Vidor could never have directed such a film if he had made nothing else! Its simplicity is achieved by knowledge, not luck or artistic innocence. Its rare human truth counters the numerous evasions and half-truths with which Vidor, like all Hollywood directors (and not only Hollywood directors), has had to battle and compromise and contend.

Parts of The Crowd have a bravura technique. The celebrated early scene can be quoted in which the camera glides up a huge office building and into the window of an enormous room, over the tops of many desks eventually to "discover" the average hero (James Murray) conscientiously at work amidst a sea of anonymity. Billy Wilder borrowed this idea (with acknowledgement) for the introduction of Jack Lenunon in The Apartment (1960) and the tribute involved is moving, for Wilder is not normally a director obliged to lift from anyone else. In later scenes, The Crowd's visual style is a positive anticipation of the French "New Wave" with the camera virtuoso and, in the nicest sense, a voyeur roaming the streets, on open-top buses and in an amusement park, quite alien to the studio-bound conventions of its time.

Yet one remembers The Crowd for its apparent lack of "technique" rather than for its actual cleverness. It seems simply to be the story of a likeable, unremarkable young couple in urban America. Had The Crowd not been selected for a very apt and reverberant title, the film might well have gone by a name later used in Britain, Millions Like Us. The main drama in the film involves the hero's loss of his job and subsequent despondency and despair. Helped by his wife's love and patience, he finds the courage to continue. The ending is "happy" only to a point. (I speak of "the" ending with caution, because several were filmed and tried out, so that surviving copies of the film may vary). The husband has found only a subsistence-level job as a sandwichman and his celebration with his wife is a visit to a vaudeville theatre. As they laugh at the antics of a clown, the camera pulls back from the two in their seats, revealing a large audience, unknown to us or each other, all people in the crowd.

The fact that Vidor had to fight to retain this ending, rather than having the husband become a millionaire or President or something, says much about Hollywood standards at the time. Certainly it is ironic, could be construed negatively and relates to the movies' use as an opiate to the public. But such thoughts about it would come only long after the fade-out. In terms of the plot and characters it is a joyously upbeat ending, carrying a delightful unexpected rightness. John and Mary (as in Our Daily Bread the young couple are named John and Mary Sims) find they can laugh and others will laugh with them.
- Clive Denton, The Hollywood Professionals Vol 5, Tantivy/Barnes 1976.

Weblink: Review by Michael W. Phillips, Jr., Goatdog's Movies, 2004

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