LYCOS RETRIEVER 
King Vidor: Crowd
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Thalberg was alarmed at the bleak vision Vidor presented to him. The film was delayed for a year, and released to respectful reviews but little profit. Vidor went straight on to two Marion Davies comedies for William Randolph Hearst's Cosmopolitan Pictures, then based on the MGM lot. It was not until An American Romance that he had a chance to deal with the larger quasi-political issues he addressed in The Crowd, and by then the moment had passed.
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Vidor's story was too truthful and unsentimental for the escapist crowd. It combined what the people of the time valued - their goals, ambitions, and way of life - with what they were actually able to achieve. It's not the American dream gone awry; it's that the American dream is only truly attainable for the minutest percentage of the population. So the sadness of the film largely stems from the dream entailing fame and fortune, which means the vast majority are doomed to fail.
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The movie itself as an artistic film still holds up well, though it may not reach the heights of some other great Vidor films such as The Crowd. Gary Cooper actually does well in his role, though some might find him a bit miscast. The real problems of the movie are its prejudiced portrayal of traditional architecture and the flawed idea that creativity must be somehow new...Much of what is creative is not new.
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Always attracted by expressionism and stylisation, Vidor exercised his penchant for both in The Crowd. Characters seem swallowed by their environment; the office building where John works (actually a model) is one of thousands in the city, and the camera zooms in through a window, apparently at random, to choose him, just another wage slave in an office of identical desks reaching in forced perspective to infinity. Earlier in the film, when John hears of his father's death, Vidor creates a vision of his threatened status by placing the boy on a staircase constructed against a distorted impression of a corridor actually painted on the back wall of the set. John, sustained by a relative, seems to hover between the inquisitive crowd huddled around the doorway and a threatening, unknown future.
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