The Crowd

Born on July 4, 1900, John Sims has a bright future – or at least so his father believes at the time. But in fact, John leads a very average life working in a vast bullpen office in New York. He meets Mary, they marry, and they have two children – a boy and a girl. But while people around him are climbing the ladder, John is stalled in place. When fate strikes and his young daughter has a fatal accident, John breaks down completely … The interest in the “simple man” that King Vidor evinced so compellingly in The Big Parade is directed in this, his second great masterpiece, at survival in civilian life. At the whims of the Molochian metropolis, the protagonist finds peace only in nature. Represented in Bardelys the Magnificent by a rowboat ride, and in La Bohème by a picnic at a pond, in this film it is Niagara Falls that represents a world far from the norms of assembly-line offices and the requisite 2.5 children. In one especially famous shot, the camera moves up the façade of a skyscraper, with a near-seamless fade into the oversized office where John works. With footage of New York’s urban canyons shot with a hidden camera, The Crowd anticipates the neo-realism of the 1940s.