The Crowd (1928)

Directed by King Vidor. With Eleanor Boardman, James Murray, Bert Roach, Estelle Clark. The life of a man and woman together in a large, impersonal metropolis through their hopes, struggles and downfalls.

A portion of King Vidor's spectacular opening sequence from The Crowd, 1928, in which the ambitious but ordinary John Sims (James Murray) is found at his desk.

As was the case with every film project that he cared deeply about, filmmaker King Vidor had to fight long and hard with his studio bosses to get The Crowd produced. Though Vidor's parent studio MGM was certain that this simple story of everyday people would take a bath at the box-office, the film earned back twice its cost. The story concentrates on John Sims, brilliantly played by James Murray, an extra boosted to stardom by Vidor. Born on the fourth of July in the year 1900, John convinced that he's destined to be a man of importance. 27 years later, however, Sims is merely one of the faceless crowd, an underpaid clerk in a huge New York office building. On a blind date, John meets Mary (Eleanor Boardman), a likeable if not overly attractive young lady (Boardman, the wife of director Vidor, balked at the notion of departing from her usual glamorous roles; Vidor prevailed, and as a result the actress delivered what is now considered her finest performance). John and Mary are eventually married, raising two children in their tiny New York tenement (complete with a balky toilet-the first time that this particular bathroom fixture ever appeared in an American film). As John's dreams of glory go unfulfilled, he becomes bitter and argumentative, while Mary grows old before her time. Just when John wins $500 in a slogan contest, tragedy strikes unexpectedly when the Sims' youngest child is killed in a traffic accident. Haunted by the memory of his child, John is unable to function properly at his job, and is soon fired. In despair, Sims contemplates suicide, only to be shaken back to reality by his son, who, oblivious to John's grief and disillusionment, declares proudly that he wants to be just like his daddy when he grows up. By chance, John gets a job as a street huckster for a local department store. Though both John and Mary know that this

'If you get your head up above the mob, they try to knock it off. If you stay down, you last forever.' So said Allan Dwan, the veteran Hollywood artisan who understood how much of an endangered...

Amazon.com: The Crowd [VHS]: Eleanor Boardman, James Murray, Bert Roach, Estelle Clark, Daniel G. Tomlinson, Dell Henderson, Lucy Beaumont, Freddie Burke Frederick, Alice Mildred Puter, Sidney Bracey, Johnny Downs, Sally Eilers, Henry Sharp, King Vidor, Hugh Wynn, Irving Thalberg, Harry Behn, John V.A. Weaver, Joseph Farnham: Movies & TV

Title: The Crowd Year of Release: 1928 Director: King Vidor The Crowd is one of my favorite silent films of all time. Nominated for the Academy Award for Uni...