The Crowd (1928)

(On Cable TV, February 2020) The concept of Hollywood was in its teenage years when The Crowd was released, and you can almost see in here an inkling of the medium’s maturation. Rather than give in to upper-class melodrama, cheap comedy or grand adventure, writer-director King Vidor’s film chooses to focus on ordinary people. At times, he even makes an ironic point about the unremarkable nature of its characters—despite early proclamation that the protagonist is destined for great things (and him spitting on “the crowd” early on, instantly accumulating karmic debt), we spend most of the film seeing him fall in love, get married, resent his job, get into domestic fights and eventually resigning himself to his own lack of distinction. The Crowd is not exempt from melodrama—there’s a particularly cruel twist of fate two thirds of the way through that seems curiously at odds with the idea of following an ordinary man. Still, our protagonist suffers through the last act before accepting his newfound humility as a member of the crowd, and that’s a fairly unusual point in a medium usually obsessed with the exceptional individual. Where the film does become distinctive even in showing indistinctive people is in its direction. Clearly inspired by the German expressionist school, Vidor goes for some crude but effective special effects and mise-en-scène from time to time. The zoom up a building and into an endless sea of desks to portray work alienation remains a striking sequence, and other moments in the film show impressively symmetrical shot compositions. This is an extraordinary film about ordinary people—not quite a slice-of-life kind of thing, but a grandiose symphony for the common people. I started watching it without particular expectations (I do struggle with non-comic silent movies) and ended up far more impressed than I expected to be. The Crowd strikes me as more accessible and, in many ways, more interesting than many other silent dramas—I suppose that the idea of common people remains just as relevant today.