The Crowd

John Sims is born in 1900 and his father tells him he will be a great man. At twenty-one he arrives in New York, takes a desk at an insurance company, marries and has two children. Then there is an accident. Then he loses his job. The subject is not failure but ordinariness itself. John believes he is special and nothing in the film confirms it; nobody treats him badly, nobody notices him. The form rests on two shots. In the first, the camera climbs the face of a skyscraper, enters through a window and finds John at one of hundreds of identical desks. In the second, at the end, it pulls slowly back from a laughing theatre audience and the family disappears into the crowd. King Vidor made it for MGM and the studio found the ending too bleak; several endings were shot and different versions were sent to cinemas. The closing known today is the one he preferred. James Murray, in the lead, was not a professional actor; Vidor found him among extras on the studio lot. His later years went to drink and he died in the Hudson River in 1936. Eleanor Boardman plays his wife. Who it is for: viewers who like silent cinema and narratives built on daily life. Who it is not for: anyone looking for hope; the film resolves nothing and does it on purpose.