USA 98m Dir: King Vidor Key Cast: James Murray and Eleanor Boardman
Original Screenplay
The Crowd has a lot in common with King Vidor's previous film, The Big Parade. Both feature fairly normal people and are centered around a warm love story which is followed up by tragedy. Whilst The Big Parade sets this within the extraordinary circumstances of the First World War, The Crowd is very unusual, especially for films of the time, in that it focuses on normal people living normal lives.
Even today few films focus on ordinary people. Here we see John (James Murray) and Mary Sims (Eleanor Boardman) fall in love, get married, struggled with money, have marital problems, have children, face tragedy and consider suicide. It's actually a pretty bleak depiction of life but then life can be pretty bleak. The film happily focuses on the joy of the couple when it exists but it isn't afraid to really delve into the sadness when that exists too.
The cinematography of the film is fantastic too. Vidor went all out, using hidden cameras in New York and filmed with a moving camera. He also uses model work really subtly and used dissolves to transition between scenes. It was groundbreaking stuff which would have caught on at the time were it not for the advent of talkies as the moving camera innovations couldn't work with the limitations of early sound recording techniques.
King Vidor was clearly an expert in his craft and it's fantastic that he was able to make a film like this that was so different to what the film studios wanted to make.
Comments
Post a Comment