Slideshow
THE CROWD
♪ Live Piano Accompaniment by Steve Sterner
U.S., 1928
Directed by King Vidor
With Eleanor Boardman, James Murray
Approx. 98 min. 35mm.
"King Vidor’s 1928 classic, with James Murray as the “average man” picked out of the crowd by Vidor’s gliding camera. In his autobiography, Vidor claims he sold the project to Irving Thalberg as a sequel to his hit war film, THE BIG PARADE: “Life is like a battle, isn’t it?” Accordingly, the misfortunes that befall Murray are hardly average, but the melodramatic elements are integral to Vidor’s vision of individual struggle. The camera style owes something to Murnau, but the sense of space—the vast environments that define and attack his protagonists—is Vidor’s own." – Dave Kehr, The Chicago Reader
Reviews
“The film is moving without being unequivocally happy or tragic, the theme summed up by one of the film’s intertitles: ‘the crowd laughs with you always… but will cry with you for only a day’”
– Bruce Hodsdon, Senses of Cinema