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King Vidor: Director King Vidor
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Director King Vidor would always take the slightest excuse to champion the common man (or woman), and that he does with this slight little film. Country girl Dorothy Perkins (Florence Vidor, the director's wife) goes to the big city and lands young millionaire Monte Rhodes (Charles Meredith). Monte is quite fond of his family tree, so he is horrified when Dorothy's relatives, with their homespun ways, come to visit. When he gives his wife a hard time about being "common," she promptly leaves him and goes home, where she is warmly welcomed. While she is gone, Monte comes to appreciate her simple ways and asks her forgiveness. ~ Janiss Garza, All Movie Guide
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King Vidor, a former local resident, holds the record in the Guiness Book of World Records for the longest career as a film director: beginning in 1913 with Hurricane in Galveston and ending in 1980 with a documentary called The Metaphor. In the course of his career, he directed sixty-four films, including War and Peace, The Fountainhead, and second-unit work on The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind.
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Vidor's remaining movies are often bewildering primitive melodramas that increasingly focus on the plight of women. Pearl Chavez (Jennifer Jones) is a mixed race beauty trapped in a racist world in Duel in the Sun, and she's ... trapped by the obsessive attentions of the film's producer, David Selznick. The movie is more Selznick than Vidor, who finally walked off the set in frustration at the impresario's compulsive suggestions, but the attention to lurid colour and Pearl's famous final crawl over the rocks feels like this director's handiwork. A later collaboration with Jones, Ruby Gentry, works much better because Vidor had full control of the movie. It's pure and stark in black and white, and a few moments of wrangling between Jones' Ruby and Charlton Heston's withholding Boake is sexier than all of Duel's heavy breathing.
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In 1967, Vidor researched the unsolved 1922 murder of fellow director William Desmond Taylor for a possible screenplay. Vidor never published or wrote of this research during his lifetime, but biographer Sidney D. Kirkpatrick posthumously examined Vidor's notes. He alleged in his 1986 book Cast of Killers that Vidor had solved the sensational crime but kept his conclusions private to protect individuals still living at the time. The widely cited newsletter Taylorology later noted over 100 factual errors in Cast of Killers and strongly disputes Kirkpatrick's conclusions but credits the book with renewing popular interest in the crime.
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Like so many directors before him, Texas-born Vidor began in Hollywood filling a number of roles, first as an extra, then as a script-clerk and then as a writer in the story department at Universal. When his mentor, George Brown, left Universal to start his own company, Vidor was brought on as a director for his Brentwood Company. His first feature was The Turn in the Road (1919) inspired by the teachings of Christian Science, a harbinger of the director’s lifelong interest in films with a social message and metaphysical content.
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The first all-black film produced by a major studio, Hallelujah garnered an Oscar nomination for director King Vidor. Sharecropper Zeke (Daniel Haynes) falls for sexy Chick (Nina Mae McKinney), who sets him up for a rigged craps game. Zeke loses the money earned from his family's cotton crop, and in the ensuing fight, his brother is killed. Grief-stricken, Zeke turns to God -- but when Chick returns, the reformed man faces temptation once again.
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Director King Vidor