King Vidor

  • Our Daily Bread (1934)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2022) King Vidor is one of my favourite directors of the late-silent/early sound film era, and he certainly ends up in the top three once you remove comedies from the equation. While I have a hard time getting into straight-up drama films of the era, his humanistic, cinematically ambitious approach makes his movies easy to admire even a hundred years later. But that’s not necessarily a guarantee of success, and while watching Our Daily Bread, I found myself concluding that the Vidor touch wasn’t universally successful. I suspect that there’s an important element of setting at play: while Vidor’s other films took on urban characters (The Crowd) or wartime drama (The Big Parade), Our Daily Bread accompanies its urban protagonist to the farm in order to present a tale of hardscrabble survival in the face of a drought. That’s… not necessarily as interesting as spending time on the trenches or in 1920s Manhattan. While the film eventually culminates into a large-scale interesting event (the manual digging of a very long ditch to bring water to the withering crops), much of the film is spent in misery along with its characters trying to figure out how to survive. Vidor’s work here as a writer-director is not necessarily inferior—his humanistic touch remains comforting, as does his interest in collective action in the face of adversity. Our Daily Bread is interesting as a depiction of its time and the ways American society was playing along with different models of living during the Great Depression, but I found myself underwhelmed by the result—perhaps as a result of coming in with too-high expectations seeing Vidor’s name in the credits.

  • Hallelujah (1929)

    Hallelujah (1929)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, December 2021) The history of black representation in Hollywood is long and embarrassing — and it usually gets more problematic the farther back you go. It’s understandable to approach Hallelujah with some wariness: After all, the 1920s were not always a hotbed of film progressivism, and the idea of a white director tackling an all-Black musical could have been terrible. Fortunately, that director ends up being King Vidor, one of the best and most humanistic directors of the time and someone who had some experience with the film’s topic. As a result, while Hallelujah is clearly stereotyped in the ways a privileged white director could portray an “other,” it’s also an uncommonly sympathetic portrayal of deep-south rural black communities, and a remarkable document chronicling approximations of black culture at the time. (It’s sobering to think that, even two years earlier, it would have been filmed as a silent film and been much poorer for it.) It’s moralistic in the ways most movies were at the time, but there’s an empathy built into the execution that makes the result interesting despite its flaws. I did like Nina Mae McKinney quite a bit in the thankless of the seductive fallen woman. Perhaps the most negative thing to be said about Hallelujah is that it probably influenced decades of less-than-inspiring depictions of black characters in Hollywood… but that should not be held against a film that’s still more impressive for what it does than for what it doesn’t.

  • H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941)

    H. M. Pulham, Esq. (1941)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2021) I have now seen just enough of King Vidor’s movies to expect more than the usual Hollywood formula from him, and in this regard H. M. Pulham, Esq. does not disappoint: The story of a middle-aged businessman trying to reconnect with a former flame, it’s a film that defies the usual conventions of romance, settling for wistful drama instead. While Robert Young is a rock in the lead role, there’s perhaps more to appreciate in the performance of Van Heflin as a friend, and especially Hedy Lamarr as the former flame of the protagonist, a free-spirited woman who offers an alluring distraction from his conservative lifestyle. Lamarr has more to do here than in many of her other movies, and she delivers an interesting character in the middle of an unusual story. As with other romances in which the characters recognize that they cannot have a happy ending together, it’s a film that plays in minor chords — interesting but not spectacular, quiet rather than bombastic. Even the ending, giving some solace to the main character, is a small victory rather than an outright triumph. It makes sense that H. M. Pulham, Esq. may be fondly remembered among the connoisseurs but a bit too esoteric to be a crowd favourite — it’s in this area that Vidor excelled, rather than trying to make outright crowd-pleasers.

  • Solomon and Sheba (1959)

    Solomon and Sheba (1959)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, November 2020) A film can do everything according to the rules and still fall flat, and that’s the way I feel about King Vidor’s Solomon and Sheba, a historical epic that clearly plays by all of the rules of 1950s epic movies yet fails to make a strong impression. Oh, it does have its qualities—Yul Brynner with hair (as Solomon), George Sanders in a minor role, and the incomparably named Gina Lollobrigida (as the queen of Sheba), huge armies clashing in the desert, and a scene with the well-known judgment of Solomon, and the rest of what audiences expected from movie epics over what they could see on household TVs. But compared to other epics, Solomon and Sheba feels somewhat generic—compressing decades of filmmaking in one all-available present, this film appears without much distinction nor grandeur beyond Brynner playing a king. Things get somewhat more interesting once you start reading about the film’s production—the newness of shooting a historical epic in Spain (rather than the more common choice of Italy at the time) pales in comparison to the behind-the-scenes drama that surrounded Tyrone Power‘s sudden death two-third of the way through, and his replacement by Brynner. Very little (if any) of this backstage turmoil shows up on the screen, though, and the result, unfortunately enough, is Yet Another Epic rather than something distinctive in its own right.

  • Show People (1928)

    Show People (1928)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, October 2020) I have a sharp interest in Hollywood movies about Hollywood, and it turns out that there were many of them –even in the early days of Hollywood! Many of them are not so good, but Show People does have a few things going for it. For one thing, it’s directed by King Vidor, a capable director who clearly knew what he’s doing. For another, and perhaps more visibly, this is a film that actually gives us a behind-the-scenes glimpse at the way a silent film studio operated. The story itself is archetypical but holds up—an ingenue from the Midwest goes to California to become a movie star, and is dismayed to succeed first in slapstick comedy (getting hit in the face with seltzer water), but loses her way when she turns to prestige drama. There are many cameos—notably Vidor and lead actress Marion Davies as herself—but you’re going to need a good working knowledge of late-silent era Hollywood to know who they are. Show People is a fascinating piece of archival history of Hollywood’s silent era, and the emphasis on comedy means that it’s remarkably easier to watch than many other dramas of the time.

  • The Citadel (1938)

    The Citadel (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2020) King Vidor was one of the major directors of the silent age but while his star dimmed significantly when the movies started talking, he still managed to create a few great sound movies. One of them is The Citadel, an adaptation of a then-red-hot novel railing against the medical establishment (plus ça change…). Here, a very likable Robert Donat takes on the role of a medical student who enters the workforce and finds out that the profession isn’t quite as idealistically satisfying as what he’d expected. Part drama, part coming-of-age, part medical thriller, part romance, part courtroom theatrics, The Citadel is a rather enjoyable blend of different subgenres in its story of a heroic doctor in a small mining town who diagnoses tuberculosis at a very inconvenient time for the mine. The plot clearly doesn’t stop there, but that’s the fun of it—Vidor’s surprising instincts leading him naturally to a novel-length story with twists, turns and significant changes for its protagonist. It’s hardly perfect (notably too long in its second half before reality comes back) but Rosalind Russel is there and Vidor demonstrates his touch for character-based drama. For classic cinephiles, The Citadel does fit right in with the other medical dramas of the 1930s.

  • The Champ (1931)

    The Champ (1931)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, February 2020) I’m slowly but surely discovering my appreciation for King Vidor, an early filmmaker whose successes remain impressive. After familiarizing myself with silent-era movies such as The Big Parade and The Crowd, here is The Champ—a film whose profile remains heightened due to its 1979 remake. The remake, which I don’t recall seeing but probably did, probably accounts for the familiar nature of the premise—an aging boxer trying to take care of his son despite self-destructive bouts of alcoholism and gambling. The ending can be felt coming from a mile away, but it remains heartbreaking. While there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done afterward, the film does feel hard-hitting by 1931 standards—noticeably willing to confront issues related to debilitating alcoholism, for one thing, and with an ending that does everything necessary to make audiences cry. The Champ is not exactly my cup of tea, but it’s well done in its genre.

  • The Crowd (1928)

    The Crowd (1928)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (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.

  • The Big Parade (1925)

    The Big Parade (1925)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, June 2019) The history of anti-war movies is longer than is often acknowledged, and we can point to films such as 1925’s The Big Parade as an influential statement that would inspire many. Coming from the horrors of WW1, it takes the decision to depict war honestly, paving the way for more forceful statements such as All Quiet on the Western Front. It does have the drawbacks of many silent movies: At 151 minutes, even a skilled director such as King Vidor takes forever to make his points and advance the action. More than half the film happens before the soldiers even see combat, and those pre-combat scenes during which they romance a French farm girl are easily the most forgettable of the film. Still, The Big Parade doesn’t hold back its punches in its last hour, with a harrowing forest march in which rows of soldiers are picked off by hidden snipers, and then on to the more familiar scenes of trench warfare. None of the soldiers make it whole through the film. While the film is far too long and repetitive for modern audiences, it’s still a powerful statement, and an effective recreation of war sequences, barely seven years after the end of WW1. You can compare and contrast with other WW1 movies completed before WW2, including comedies such as Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms and Keaton’s Doughboys.