The Crowd (1928)

Originally posted to Facebook on 7/29/2018

Our fourth film from 1928 was The Crowd. It was the second film in a row (after last week's Show People), and the third overall, that we've seen directed by King Vidor. Rather frustratingly, there doesn't appear to be an English-language DVD of this film available by a commercial publisher. I ended up buying a Spanish version ("Y El Munda Marcha"), which was fine; the title cards are still in English, so there is no difference when the Spanish subtitles are turned off. However the print was still not all that great -- an occupational hazard when you are watching silent films, but The Crowd is not some obscure rarity that has survived only through chance; it's a well-known movie, was nominated for a couple Academy Awards at the time, and was one of the first 25 features added to the National Film Registry in 1989, along with only five other silents. It's very strange that there isn't a decently well restored version of this film available for the American market.

In any case, the film stars James Murray and Eleanor Boardman. Neither are well remembered today, though Boardman had a brief but significant career, and was in some interesting films, including 1926's Tell It to the Marines which we saw earlier in this project. She also happened to be married to King Vidor at the time of this film. Murray's career was much more checkered, and he died in 1936, after many years of alcoholism and erratic behavior. The film covers the courtship and marriage of John and Mary Sims, and tracks their early lives through various ups and downs. It actually starts with John Sims as a boy, growing up in a small town, before he moves to New York City, but those scenes are almost completely superfluous and could have been covered by a line or two of dialog later in the film. Ideally the film could have started with the movie's iconic shot of a camera climbing up the side of an office building, dissolving through a window, and showing Murray in a dehumanizing sea of desks -- and that is in fact the way 1960's The Apartment started, explicitly paying tribute to that scene. And that shot also shows some of the influence of German Expressionism in American films -- sort of a white collar equivalent to Metropolis. That influence pops up intermittently through the film, another example being the maternity ward when Murray first sees his son.

I was a little disappointed by the film, probably in part because of the expectations set by its "classic" status, but also by Murray's performance. The film hits a lot of the notes you would expect in a mature film about ordinary people -- showing their ambitions and hopes meshing unevenly with day-to-day realities -- and it is indeed refreshing to see a couple on-screen arguing about something as prosaic as getting the toilet fixed. They face more serious challenges together as well, but Murray can barely keep it together under even regular circumstances. His emoting is almost a caricature of what people envision silent film acting to be. It doesn't completely distract from the film's virtues, but it does make one feel a little more sympathy for Boardman's family's disapproval of him. Another flaw is that Boardman plays a distinctly second fiddle in the film. Almost all of her frustrations are in reaction to Murray's choices or circumstances. A more modulated approach -- more emphasis on her inner life, and saving Murray's hysterics for a few key scenes -- would have strengthened the film significantly. I think the overall theme, though, of how people's relationships to one another provide meaning regardless of how mundane their lives seem, or how frustrated or despairing they may be, has almost universal appeal -- and is also what drives It's a Wonderful Life, for instance, which may well have been influenced by this film.

Next week, we'll see The Wind, our fifth film from 1928, and a re-teaming of the stars and director from 1926's The Scarlet Letter, all three of whom (Victor Sjöström, Lillian Gish, and Lars Hanson) we have seen multiple times before, together and apart. The overall list, as always, is here: https://bit.ly/2lZtfmT