The Crowd (1928)

directed by King Vidor
Frames in this review are taken from the VHS tape, produced by Thames Silents and released by MGM/UA in 1988.

In Hollywood there's always been the idea that a director with a smash hit gets to write his own ticket. We see it today with Peter Jackson and King Kong, but it's been there long ago, from disasters such as 1941 (Spielberg) to unlikely masterpieces such as 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick). In the case of King Vidor, his 1925 anti-war film The Big Parade would've made him a millionaire had he not sold his share of the profits to MGM. But he got to direct The Crowd with the understanding that it would be an art movie rather than a crowd pleaser.

It's an unlikely story for 1928, when the stock market boom was still going strong. Johnny Sims (James Murray) is born on the Fourth of July and told that he'll be somebody someday, but his childhood innocence is quickly shattered by his father's death. He grows up to become an anonymous worker ant in the financial capital of New York City, and dreams of making it big. Going on a double-date set up by his friend Bert (Bert Roach), he has tons of fun with his girl Mary (Eleanor Boardman, then Vidor's wife), and proposes to her that same evening after seeing an advertisement on the subway. Over the years, their love waxes and wanes, the regular squabbles of marriage mixing with joyful events like the birth of a baby. Yet tragedy strikes, Johnny falls into a depression, becomes unemployed, tries several jobs, and contemplates ending his own life. The intertitles speak of how difficult it is to walk against the flow of the crowd, and Johnny ultimately regains his anonymity and returns happily (and a bit implausibly) to the crowd.

As with The Big Parade, this is a simple story told with deftness. Here, the emotional ride is more of a roller coaster, going up and down with the tide of events. He wins a contest to write an ad jingle, but doesn't have long to bask in enjoyment. He quits his job in frustration, but Mary is supportive. He's so depressed after failing to find a job that he almost jumps into the path of an onrushing train, but his heart is gladdened when his son looks up to him and says, "When I grow up I wanta be just like you."

It's a lot of work to play with the viewer's emotions so much, and it is a testament to the film's craftsmanship that it succeeds. It's done in a very similar style to The Big Parade, right down to the exclamatory intertitles and the diegetic music conveying mood. Camera motion is infrequent but dramatic when done, and the editing is flawless, conveying the dizzying pace of Johnny and Mary's romance in the big city with a faster rate of cuts than elsewhere. The acting is superb and restrained — five decades later, director King Vidor would be interviewed for Kevin Brownlow's landmark Hollywood documentary series about silent-era Hollywood:

"At that time we were feeling that we had developed this new technique ... pantomime, but believable pantomime, not exaggerated [or] melodramatic ... a silent film acting language ... just about 1927, we were very aware that this was happening ... the feeling that you could think anything, and it would come through on the face."

This is silent filmmaking at its prime, with everyone in his element and techniques down pat. From playful romance to physical comedy to anger to depression, the actors span the gamut. The "believable pantomime" has to be very subtle to work — often in The Crowd, an intertitle would contain some familiar dialog, and the scene would run for several more lines without intertitles, but you could predict what the actors and actresses would be saying and their lip movements would match up. Only the body language and facial expressions can carry the viewer through, and they do so with ease. Emotions are enhanced by makeup — for example, hair is neatly made up when things are happy, but frazzled in anger or depression, sometimes slowly with cuts as one scene progresses! The set and lighting are very reminiscent of German expressionism, from the long shadows when Johnny returns home to his sullen wife after a wild evening, to the featureless and stylized office corridor as the workforce heads for the elevators at five o'clock.

The film is filled with parallelism and details. Johnny and Mary make fun of a street clown during their first date ("The poor sap! And I bet his father thought he would be President!"), but Johnny eventually takes such a job after failing to find anything else. There's the famous tracking shot up the facade of a Manhattan skyscraper, sweeping into a giant room with row upon row of anonymous workers adding up figures, and pushing into a closeup of John Sims at his desk watching the clock approach five. With the childhood as prologue, this serves as the introduction to the film, and is neatly bookended by a pullback from the theater where Johnny and Mary have disappeared back into the crowd. As his wife is having a baby, Johnny finds expectant father sitting on a bench, but there are two benches. One of them is filled with Caucasian men, impeccably-attired in three-piece suits, sporting trim mustaches and slicked-back hair, clearly well-to-do. The other is more common, more disheveled hairdos, working clothes mixing with Sunday best, and unusually diverse racially for Hollywood of that period — a Chinese and a black and possibly a Latino and a working-class Caucasian.

Indeed, there's social commentary aplenty in The Crowd. The hundreds of accountants add up numbers by hand — a white-collar assembly line. The elevator attendant barks at Johnny to face the door like everyone else. And, of course, the Crowd. It's rather prophetic of the 1950s, another era of great prosperity in America when conformity was paramount. Indeed, one shot shows a stretch of identical houses that could easily have come from Levittown or other post-World War II suburban development projects. Just as Madison Avenue would come to symbolize that easy affluence of the 1950s, the "New Economy" so to speak (The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit placed its protagonist in advertising), The Crowd has Johnny thinking up advertising jingles for contests.

The title of The Crowd is actually not all that related to the theme as it plays out in the film. It tries to be a film about conformity, with scenes such as Johnny's coworkers approaching him in the (gigantic) washroom and several asking some variation of the meaning-free "Scrubbing it up, Sims?" Deep down this really isn't a film about conformity so much as a film about false promises of prosperity. Johnny Sims' troubles don't come from rebelling against the system, they come as a natural consequence of his surroundings and by accident. Likewise his inability to find and keep a job after losing his old one, hardly a result of individualism. I see it in a Chaplinesque way, akin to Modern Times in its criticism of the worker and his inability to find happiness by fitting into the crowd. The ending, which makes the opposite statement, is a bolted-on tub of sugary happiness, just a bit more likely than the bolted-on happy ending to Murnau's The Last Laugh. Looking at Johnny's career, it is his friend Bert who rises to the top, and Bert is a happy-go-lucky, party-loving guy who always has two fast women with him. Johnny in comparison is more earnest and forthright, the model worker so to speak. Of course, the modern viewer sees it with the perspective of the stock market crash that would come in the next year.

The modern viewer can also see The Crowd as a time capsule of American life. The advertising jingles, the jazz and fast women, the bottle of liquor hidden under the bathtub in this era of Prohibition — very characteristic of the 1920s. Johnny's son is named Junior, a very American thing to do. And there's a bashfulness about sex, as Johnny and Mary share a bed for the first time on a Pullman sleeper on their honeymoon trip to Niagara Falls. He heads to the restroom to prepare for bed, where two men spy a newlywed manual in his back pocket — one reads about such marriage manuals these days in articles about gender roles or sex of old, and it's tempting to discount them (Who would read them anyway?) in our oversexed age, but seeing a film from the era drives the point home. The Crowd also seems to have captured the nation's hopes and dreams, from the excited entrance into New York City to the advertising jingles. There's also the ambition to grow up to be President — I am reminded of Russell Baker's observation about the quaintness of this wish in his nostalgically humorous Growing Up, the first part of his autobiography. Kids want to be like Bill Gates or Michael Jordan or Nicole Kidman, few want to be like George W. Bush (or Bill Clinton). It's as if The Crowd set out to catalog American society of the time so its critique can be more broad; one can find any number of social dramas or detective mysteries, for example, where the time capsule aspect is entirely incidental to the film.

The Crowd can perhaps be regarded as MGM's answer to Fox and Sunrise, distilling an ordinary story into a flask of concentrated emotion. Sunrise is a better movie — its more modest goals allow it to succeed better and with a less ambivalent message, and it's not hamstrung by an artificial ending. But The Crowd ranks very highly as an example of artistic studio filmmaking, accomplishing with pictures and intertitles a deep introspection and a commentary on the human condition.

Music and Technical

Upon starting the film, I was reminded that Carl Davis can't write main title music (exception: Ben-Hur, which is superb). But he's great at conveying mood and at quoting, both of which serve this film well. The bustling scenes of New York are especially frenetic. And the score complements the film well as it journeys into darker moods.

The source print for the VHS transfer is uneven. Sometimes contrast is fine, other times outdoor scenes are blown out and you wait for some contrast pulsing so that you get a tantalizing glimpse of the scene for a few frames per foot. But for the most part the image is quite good. Likely a few scenes from the best available print were damaged and had to be transferred from lesser materials. All in the name of the game for silents, though.

Like other such wonderful classic silents released under the Thames Television banner and produced by Kevin Brownlow, this one remains unavailable on DVD. Warner Home Video is just barely starting to lumber towards silents on DVD, though, with the upcoming release of The Big Parade and Ben-Hur. The video is very nice, though, and with the stereo orchestral track gives a good silent film experience.

NB: Sunrise is unavailable standalone but is available in a four-pack in "Studio Classics - Best Picture Collection," three great films and one good film (the perennial complaint about the Academy Awards) for less than one Criterion DVD would cost.