The Crowd is one of the true masterpieces of silent film. It's an epic film on many levels, yet the center of the film is the simple story of an ordinary couple living ordinary lives. The director of The Crowd, King Vidor, was a master at both the small, intimate moments of life and the large-scale use of numerous actors and sets. The Crowd is one of his finest accomplishments and an intriguing choice for the first year of the Academy Awards given that it is not a typical Hollywood film.
The film begins on July 4, 1900, with the birth of John Sims. John will grow up to be the chief character of the movie, and we follow him for much of his adult life. John (played as an adult by James Murray) moves to New York City at the age of 21, telling another man on the journey to the city that all he wants in an opportunity. He gets a job at Atlas Insurance Company writing down columns of numbers all day long, but he uses any spare time he can sneak to write slogans for contests. It’s mind-numbing work, and you can tell from the way that the camera, operating from a very high crane, zooms into John’s desk area that all of these workers are really treated as little more than drones.
One night, his buddy and co-worker Bert asks him to go with him on a double date. It's there that he meets Mary (Eleanor Boardman). They hit it off immediately, and he even asks her to marry him on their first date, a trip to the Coney Island amusement park. The film’s journey to Coney Island is visually quite stunning. We get to watch various rides that the two couples enjoy, particularly the Tunnel of Love, and we are witness to some very touching moments between couples on the subway ride home from the park. It’s interesting that the two main characters have the plainest of names, John and Mary, as if to suggest that there is nothing particularly special about them; they’re just regular people. They seem to be in love, though, and the early scenes of their romance are very sweet.
Things don't go as well after the wedding, though. Their first Christmas dinner reveals how little Mary's family thinks of John, who's always talking about his prospects. Mary's brothers, though, think he's never going to be successful. The Sims family then has a series of problems with the bathroom door not closing and the bad plumbing and the furniture (the Murphy Bed, in particular) and other items in the household. They begin sniping at each other, including one particularly vicious breakfast scene. It's only after Mary reveals that she's pregnant that they reconcile and John manages to get a small raise at work.
Five years pass--or so the title cards tell us--and the Sims family now includes a daughter as well. John finally wins $500 for a slogan that he's written, but while he and Mary are celebrating, their little girl is hit and killed by a truck. John loses his ability to concentrate at work, so depressed is he by his daughter's death. The film superimposes images of what’s on his mind while he’s trying to work, and it’s a very effective way to display the distractions. He quits his job at the insurance company, revealing his decision to Mary while they are on the boat for the company picnic. John takes a series of unsuccessful jobs, including one as a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman, but he quickly walks away from most of the menial jobs. He just can’t seem to be a success even though he keeps reiterating throughout the film that all he needs is an opportunity.
The film was released in 1928, a year before the start of the Great Depression, but that doesn’t mean that economic conditions weren’t difficult for people like John and Mary even before the Depression. Like many other men of the time, John tries to get in line for jobs calling for 100 men, but he frequently gets shut out of even those hard-labor tasks. Mary's brothers try to give John a job, but he refuses what he considers to be charity. When the brothers arrive one day to take Mary away with them, he tells her that he's found a job he loves, wearing a clown costume and juggling balls to call attention to a sign he carries around his neck. Ironically, he and Mary had made fun of someone with the same job on their first date many years earlier.
This is a particularly bleak film in many ways. Almost every moment of success or happiness that the family enjoys is quickly undercut by another setback. Vidor, who co-wrote the screenplay as well as directed, chose to focus on what nowadays we might call the underclass of society, those people who are not often the subject of films because their lives are a constant series of struggles to survive. They are not "entertaining" to watch. The Sims family, in many ways, is just a set of faces in a crowd to most passers-by. Few would take note of them, and the film demonstrates just how isolated one can be even in a crowd of people such as you would find in New York City.
The visuals of the film are particularly striking. When John, at the age of 12, must ascend a staircase to his home on the day that his father dies, the staircase and walls form a pronounced V-shape, placing John as the center of the action, a role he takes on throughout the rest of the film. When he gets a job at the insurance company, the camera pans to his desk--he's clerk #137--allowing us to see the seemingly hundreds of other young men who are forced to do the mundane drudgework that insurance companies demand. The film had already panned up the side of the enormous building where he works, eventually stopping at the floor where the rows and rows and rows of desks are located. And there are numerous scenes of crowds of people, apparently most of them shots of actual people walking through the city. When Mary is in the hospital giving birth to their first child, John walks into a ward with dozens of beds throughout the room. A sequence at the beginning of the film shows crowds of people almost as swarms of insects. No one seems to be able to move against the flow of the crowd. The most spectacular crowd shot, though, is the end of the film. John and Mary have taken their son to the theater to see a show, and they're laughing and having a good time. The camera slowly pulls back to reveal hundreds of other people similarly laughing. It's astonishing to think how much coordination such a shot much have taken, considering how many people are within the frame.
The editing is also impressive. I’ll give just one example: John and Mary are on a train headed to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon. It’s their wedding night, and after they have finished their individual preparations for bed and are finally in the sleeper car together, the film cuts to a shot of the falls themselves. Yes, there are some moments of humor and lightheartedness scattered throughout the film, something to remind you that life doesn’t have to be dreary all the time. If you’re expecting a Hollywood ending, though, you’ll need to look elsewhere. The film does end with a happy event, but that doesn't mean that John and Mary’s struggles have ended.
The acting is still a bit theatrical at times, no doubt due in part to the rather hyperbolic dialog the performers are given. Boardman is quite lovely as Mary. She’s always forgiving of John’s mistakes and bad behavior, and she’s very encouraging of this dreams. Murray is always better when he’s playing sad moments. When John is defeated or feels lost, Murray manages to convey significant amounts of pathos. Silent film acting is certainly a different form of performing, and it can take some getting used to as a viewer.
Allegedly, MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer hated The Crowd, but he allowed Vidor to make the film because the director had already made so many successful films for the studio. Mayer felt the film was too depressing and that audiences would not pay money to see it. Even the final shot, allegedly made to have a happy ending for the movie (but not succeeding at the goal, ultimately), failed to impress him. However, the studio's production chief, the legendary Irving Thalberg, went ahead with the film, and now, thankfully, we have a movie that serves as a testament to just how accomplished, both visually and thematically, silent films were. The Crowd was among the first group of films to be nominated by the Academy, but the sound era was already well underway by the time the awards were distributed in 1928. Hollywood would almost have to start over, and much of the technical achievement of films like The Crowd would be lost in order to serve the new medium of "talkies."
Oscar Nominations: Best Unique and Artistic Production and Best Directing of a Dramatic Picture (King Vidor)
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