King Vidor Biocritical-filmograhy

King Wallis Vidor, born February 8, 1894, Galveston, Texas.[1] Died November 1, 1982. Vidor was a third-generation Texan; his father’s father had emigrated from Hungary and married a Floridan of Scot-English descent; his mother’s family had long been American.

“My luck was my father not striking oil. He was there in Texas at just the right time for it. And he was just the person to do it. He was kind of a business speculator—not exactly a gambler, but always looking for something, always finding some fortune-making scheme…, things like certain trees in the Dominican Republic for the wood, but something always went wrong. If he’d stayed closer to home, he might have struck oil, and we’d have been rich. I’d never have set out for Hollywood with my camera, and I’d have had a lot less interesting life.” [chan]

“In 1900, at the age of six, I went through a flood and hurricane in which the island was completely inundated with ten feet of water. Out of a population of twenty-nine thousand, ten thousand were either drowned or killed. The streets were piled high with dead people. I saw that the bay was filled with dead bodies, horses, animals, people, everything.” [dga]

He went to grade school at the Peacock Military Academy in San Antonio. “I detested that military school, I ran away. Nonetheless I did learn a bit of technique. Enough so that when I shot my first films I didn’t need an adviser. Now I’m no longer the same individual as at thirteen or fourteen. I can’t remember any longer if it was my father who sent me to that school or if I was the one why wanted to go there.” [pos] He ran away, too, from a private high school in Maryland, three time. He went once to New York where he haunted film studios, spent his money seeing movies and slept under a bridge. At 16 he dropped out of school and got a job in a storefront nickelodeon in Galveston selling tickets and sometimes projecting.

“The first movie I saw was A Trip to the Moon. It was shown in the Grand Opera House in Galveston when I was about fifteen. I did not know that the movie had been made in Paris, by Georges Méliès, seven or eight years earlier. I sat with two other boys, and our discussion centered on the question of how moving pictures were made. I claimed it was done by photography, at which the other two vigorously stood me down, the older boy claiming that all images were painted on the film, frame by frame.

“I saw the two-reel Ben Hur, made in Italy, twenty-one times each day or one hundred and forty-seven times in its week’s run.…At one showing I would concentrate on the actors’ pantomime as expressed by their arms and hands; at the next I would decide to study only their facial expressions; at another I would watch the thought expressed solely by the attitudes of their bodies.” [tree]

“I tried selling used cars in east Texas. It didn’t last long. I guess that was my good luck too, that I didn’t show more promise at it, or I might have been an automobile dealer in Texas. But I don’t really think so. More and more, I believe each one of us has something he’s meant to do. You know, the movies and I were born about the same time. I’ve always felt it was my destiny. I couldn’t have escaped it. You have a destiny in life, and luck is finding that destiny. Some people are unlucky and don’t find their destiny.” [chan]

•1909. [Footage of hurricane in Galveston.] Prod.-Ph.: King Vidor, Roy Clough.

“I wrote to the New York office of Mutual Weekly (nesreels were theen called ‘weeklies’) and requested that I be made their cameraman in the state of Texas. I immediately received the following telegram:

longest march of massed troops in this history of the united states army will be undertaken beginning next week. over eleven thousand officers and men will march the hundred miles to houston and return. we will pay sixty cents per foot for all usable film. you are hereby appointed our representative for texas.” [tree]

•1914. [10,000 Army troops parade in Houston.] Footage for Mutual Weekly. Prods: King Vidor, John Boggs. Dir.-Ph.: Vidor.

Cited in La Revue du Cinéma, June 1930, as the first of a number of little comedies that Vidor shot with $600 earned from shooting newsreels; not cited by any subsequent source.

Dir.-Sc.: King Vidor. Prods.: Vidor, John Boggs. Ph.: Boggs. With King Vidor (Carson, a race driver; and comic role), Pansy Buchanan (Helen), D.Y. Cole (Abie).

With Edward Sedgwick, also from Galveston and later Buster Keaton’s director at MGM, Vidor formed the Hotex Film Manufacturing Company, and tried to attract investors.

“They cost no more than the stock and lab costs, about ten cents a foot: approximately two or three hundred dollars each. [hgm] I met a girl who had ambitions, a beautiful, lovely girl who wanted to be an actress in films.” [schic]

In October 1914 Vidor married Florence Arto. The same day they left for New York and contracted with Sawyer, Inc., to distribute Hotex’s films. Sawyer failed a few days later and was taken over by The Colossus Feature Film Company, which accepted Hotex’s negatives, distributed them nationwide and never paid a cent in royalties.

“By that time we had a camera of our own mounted on a surveyor’s tripod and costing no more than a hundred and twenty-five dollars and finally we put together a laboratory. Our open stage consisted of some telephone poles with cloth stretched over the top. At that time, I didn’t know if I was going to be an actor, a cameraman, a writer, or what. There was no planning; it was a hand-to-mouth existence, whatever you could scrounge.” [hgm]

•1915. [Simulated car theft in Fort Worth.] Sent to Ford Motor Company; never shown.

“We bought a Ford automobile with a $25 down payment and I figured out that if I could shoot enough footage for the Ford Motor Company to use in their films, we could make sixty cents per foot and be able to finance the trip. We ran out of money long before the trip was over.[dga] There were three of us: myself, my wife Florence Vidor, who later became a star, and a boy from Texas [Clifford Vick] who didn’t stay on.” [hgm]

Kevin Brownlow: There were virtually no good roads outside the East, and their journey had all the drama of a covered-wagon trek. It was still necessary to wait patiently while cowboys drove great herds of cattle past. On a railroad embankment in New Mexico, the Vidors encountered a line of covered wagons. [brown war]

“They were gipsies, the men with knives in their belts, the women with wild, flowing skirts. The embankment was so narrow that we couldn't get by if they didn't pull over a bit. We stopped, and suddenly the women were all over us, taking whatever they could, putting their hands into pockets of clothes in the car. We had stuff tied all over the car, food, buckets, guns. One of them reached over and turned off the ignition switch. I kicked it back with my foot just before the engine died—otherwise it meant getting out and using the crank. The car started off with all these women hanging on the running board. I started going faster and faster and two or three of them got frightened and jumped off, but some of them stayed on. We could still hear the men laughing and yelling, the women were still trying to grab stuff out of our pockets and claw our faces—so we pushed them off, prising open their fingers and pushing them in the face, and they went whirling through the air, skirts flying, hitting the dirt. That's how we got away. Soon afterwards, we met three fellows in a car with guns—a sheriff and two deputies. They asked us if we'd seen a band of gipsies. We told them our story and they said they had gone into a restaurant in Raton, New Mexico, and cleaned out all the shelves. [brown war]

“At the end of that trip we stopped in San Francisco. We were absolutely broke with twenty cents between us. The Birth of a Nation was showing then, and reserve seats were $2.50, and that was a tremendous price. When we sold the automobile we had enough money to go see The Birth of a Nation, with just enough money to get down to Los Angeles by boat.” [dga]

Corinne Griffith, an old flame from Texas who was just starting her career, helped Florence find steady work acting at Vitagraph. King took every odd job he could find, including a few days as an extra in Griffith’s Intolerance.

“I would do anything just to get inside a studio and watch directors working. [hgm]

“I really developed out of watching and studying Griffith films a thing I call silent music, which was to see how I could put into a silent film tempo and rhythm and crescendo and so forth, as in a musical composition. And, of course, in the Griffith films he would have an orchestra playing with the films and he would use recurrent themes in Hearts of the World, Birth of a Nation and so forth. All were worked out musically. This inspired me to carry this idea on—to more study and more experimentation.” [schic]

With Mary Anderson (Sue Monroe), Reggie Morris (Bobby), Otto Lederer (Mr. Monroe), Anne Schaefer (Aunt Susan).

With Lenore Ulrich (countess), Cecil Van Auker (hero), Howard Davies (villain), Florence Vidor (countess’s maid), Paul Weigel, King Vidor (chauffeur).

With Henry Murdock (Henry), Mildred Davis (Flossie), Milt Uhl (dealer), Edwin K. Baker.

A comedy. An artist attempts various forms of suicide after mistaking Flossie’s theatrical rehearsal for infidelity.

With Mattie Commont (Idaho Ida), Henry Murdock (Texas Tommy), Edwin Baker (Montana Joe).

A western. Dancehall girl with six-gun protects Texas Tommy, who in turn saves her from Montana Joe.

With Dave Morris (Sultan), Harry Mann (Harmon Naigs), Gladys Tennyson (Lily White).

Apparently released under another title. Listed here under Vidor’s original title.

“Finally I got one as a writer in the story department at Universal. There I met a man named George Brown who was making a series of half-hour films. Although I hadn’t directed, I told him I had, so he sent me out as a cameraman for two or three days on one of his projects. I did know how to operate a camera, however, and had in fact sold one of my short two-reel comedies of the Vitagraph Company for thirty dollars.

“Soon after that, George Brown left Universal, founded his own company and hired me as a director. I must have made about fifteen or twenty half-hour films for him, mainly stories concerning juvenile delinquency.” [hgm]

Kevin Brownlow. Judge Willis Brown established “Boy Cities” in Charlevoix, Michigan, and Gary, Indiana, in the 1900s on the lines of Father Flanagan’s Boys Town. (Selig made a one-reeler about these operations.) Brown then presided over the juvenile court of Salt Lake City. [Challenged by an editor, the judge wrote and] directed a five-reeler about an immigrant lad who benefited from “Boy City,” A Boy and the Law (1914). For his later films, he hired the young King Vidor first to write, then to direct his scipts. Brown rented a group of buildings in Culver City, California, where he hoped to establish a studio-cum-“Boy City.” He called it the Boy City Film Corporation. Vidor described how he would pick up newsboys to play in these pictures, offering them a two-dollar cash advance. [brown mas]

“The films invariably started with a group of boys seated around a large conference table with Judge Brown. The parents of some unruly boy would present a seemingly insoluble problem of an erring son. Judge Brown would always prescribe some unorthodox but deeply human remedy. The main film story would concern itself with the manner in which these intensely human problems worked themselves out. I deeply believed in these films and I put my heart and soul into making them.” [tree.]

Kevin Brownlow. When he first began making pictures, King Vidor told his wife that he intended to become a second D.W. Griffith. “He said this without conceit. It was just a simple statement,” said Florence Vidor. [brown war]

“From one film to another, as with the canvases of a painter, it is indispensable that a director be recognizable by his style. My ambition was always that people would recognize a Vidor the way they do a Renoir or a Monet.” [legu]

1918. BUD’S RECRUIT. Boy City Film Corp.—General Film Corp. 2 reels. Jan. 19.

With Wallis Brennan (Bud), Robert Gordon (Reggie), Ruth Hampton (Reggie’s fiancée).

Kevin Brownlow. One of the first propaganda objectives [when America entered World War I] was directing public opinion against men who evaded the draft. Children were used to shame their fathers and brothers into enlisting. One of these, Bud’s Recruit, featured a boy nmed Bud (Wallis Brennan), who organizes his pals into a military unit and drills them regularly. Bud’s elder brother Reggie (Robert Gordon) is a slacker who attends pacifist meetings with his mother, much to Bud’s disgust. Bud disguises himself in a mustache and goes down to the recruiting station, where he fills in an application in Reggie’s name. “This,” [wrote Moving Picture World]. “results in an awakening of Reggie’s manhood and also raises him in his sweetheart’s estimation.” [brown war]

•1918. THE CHOCOLATE OF THE GANG. Boy City Film Corp.—General Film Corp. 2 reels. Jan. 26.

•1918. THE LOST LIE. Boy City Film Corp.—General Film Corp. 2 reels. Mar. 2.

With William Vaugh, Mike O’Rourke (two boys), Ruth Hampton (Mike’s sister), Judge Willis Brown.

•1918. TAD’S SWIMMING HOLE. Boy City Film Corp.—General Film Corp. 2 reels. Feb. 20.

With Ernest Butterworth (Tad), Ruth Hampton (rescued girl), Judge Willis Brown, Guy Hayman.\

•1918. MARRYING OFF DAD. Boy City Film Corp.—General Film Corp. 2 reels. Mar. 16.

With Wallis Brennan, Ernest Thompson (two brothers), Sadie Clayton (housekeeper/wife), Ruth Hampton (girl next door), Judge Willis Brown.

•1918. THE PREACHER’S SON. Boy City Film Corp.—General Film Corp. 2 reels. Mar. 30.

With Guy Hayman (Charles), Wharton Jones (his father), Ernest Thompson, William DuVaull, Charles Force, Judge Willis Brown.

•1918. THIEF OR ANGEL. Boy City Film Corp.—General Film Corp. 2 reels. Mar. 30.

With Ruth Hampton (Antonetta/Tony), Charles Richards (doctor), W.T. Horn (judge), Helen Muir, Ernest Thompson, Grace Marvin, Judge Willis Brown.

•1918. THE ACCUSING TOE. Boy City Film Corp.—General Film Corp. 2 reels. Mar. 3.

With Dale Fath (Steve), Wharton Jones (miller), Judge Willis Brown, Sadie Clayton.

•1918. THE REBELLION. Boy City Film Corp.—General Film Corp. 2 reels. Apr. 27.

With Doug Lansing, Robert Planett, Martin Pendleton (three boys), William White, Wharton Jones, J.G.Underhill, Sadie Clayton, Hugh Saxon, Judge Willis Brown.

•1918. I’M A MAN. Boy City Film Corp.—General Film Corp. 2 reels. Apr. 21.

With Martin Pendleton (Frank Eisel), Wharton Jones (Jules de Courcey), Ruth Hampton (Ruth Eisel), Lloyd Hughes (David Smith), William Davenport (Simon Eisel), Judge Willis Brown.

•1919. THE TURN IN THE ROAD. Brentwood/Robertson-Cole—Exhibitors Mutual. 5 reels. March 8.

With Helen Jerome Eddy (June Barker), Lloyd Hughes (Paul Perry), George Nichols (Hamilton Perry), Ben Alexander (Bob), Winter Hall (Rev. Matthew Barker), Pauline Curley (Evelyn Barker), Charles Arling.

“I realized that in order to get a job as a full-length feature director, I had to write my own story, and make it good enough for someone to buy it. I would only sell it if I could direct it. I went to a play called The Light of Asia at the Kratona Institute. It was the story of the Buddha’s search for the truth. During the performance I thought, Why not have a young American search for the truth? I went home and wrote the whole story that night.

“The Turn of the Road was a metaphysical, more or less religious type of film, inspired by the teachings of Christian Science. It was about a man whose wife dies in childbirth. This tragedy makes him run away from his home, his friends, and his family, and wander the world in search of truth.

“We didn’t have enough money to shoot abroad—in India, for example—but we did show his return home. Thrown off a freight train, he sleeps in a barn and there meets his young son, who teaches him that truth is within us. [hgm] The little opened a window in the barn loft and said, ‘The darkness is only the absence of light.’ Just to be conscious is a miracle in itself, just as life and the awareness of consciousness of living is itself harmonious and good. All the fear and suffering could be dissolved just like the darkness by opening the windows of our minds.

“I went to the doctors who put up the money for the boys films and I sold them the idea of making this feature. We formed the Brentwood Film Company. They belonged to the Brentwood Country Club and we played some golf there. There were nine active doctors who each put up a thousand dollars. [dga]

“There was a general feeling of antagonism between doctors and Christian Scientists. [dga] One of them, the president of the company, said, ‘Isn’t this a little Christian Science?’ I said, ‘No, not particularly.’ And they wanted me to change something and I said no. So they made the film. [schic]

“We only had enough money for one print, and one of the [doctors] wanted to take it to New York and get a big distribution company. They had to pull it out of the theatre in the eleventh week, with standing-room-only crowds going around the block. I got an offer from every star and every company to direct films. It was great after having such difficulty.

“When I wrote the next picture the president of the company said, ‘There is no Christian Science in it. We want you to put some in!’ We finally compromised with the agreement that I would put some in the [third] picture, The Other Half. [dga]

Unsigned. New York Times. Mar. 30, 1919. Mr. Vidor shows that he has a grasp upon the fundamentals of pictorial composition and the techniques of making pictures dramatic and meaningful. Yet he does not depend upon pictures to tell his story. He relies upon uninspired subtitles at points where the full force of moving pictures is essential for the strength. Beccause he sometimes uses pictures so effectively one is disappointed when he leans on the broken crutch of words. The production is frankly a preachment but the picture has dramatic appeal that is not likely to be destroyed by the sermonizing. Apparently Mr. Vidor was anxious to make The Turn of the Road proclaim his belief that God is Love and Light.

Unsigned. Variety, Mar. 31, 1919. Intensely human…Comedy and tragedy are about equally divided and there is a big thought back of the whole thing. The settings are handsome and there are many picturesque scenes …The direction under the guidance of the author is excellent, none of the smaller details being overlooked.

“All the big stars and companies made me offers, but out of loyalty I stuck with the Brentwood Company for a year. We had no budget to buy stories so I wrote my own, drawing on things that had happened to me and things I’d seen. [hgm]

“Christian Science is really a science, the science of what is real. Doctors have little by little discovered that the fundamental material is the spirit, the conscience. It’s something one has realised little by little.…My mother was interested in Christian Science. I remember that, thanks to what she had told me about Christian Science, I was able to establish what the real connections were between what was going on in me and the world outside. As a child, I had been sick. I had been stricken by a nerve disease. I had seen a lot of doctors whose diagnoses had been quite uncertain and it’s from this point that I became interested in Christian Science.…In brief, nothing exists beyond the conscience. And what is the conscience? It’s the universal spirit. I believe that there is a single spirit, as there is a single ocean, a single world, a single atmosphere, and that we all use this spirit. The question, then, is this: Do two powers exist, God and Evil? If you imagine that God exists, that he is infinite, you don’t need to oppose him with a force like the Devil or Evil. So there is only a single cause. And it is this cause that you have to use against difficulties, illness, poverty, war.…The theme of love that conquers all was already present in my first film, The Turn in the Road, and in plenty of the others. And I think that if your spirit is strong enough to concentrate on something, well, it is possible to solve everything.” [pos]

•1919. BETTER TIMES. Brentwood/Robertson-Cole—Exhibitors Mutual. 5 reels. June 22.

With ZaSu Pitts (Nancy Scroogs), David Butler (Peter), Jack MacDonald (Ezra Scroogs), William DuVaull (S. Whittaker), Hugh Fay (Jack Ransom), George Hackathorne (Tony).

“I had discovered ZaSu Pitts on a bus, and I wrote this story around her.” [dga]

Unsigned. Variety, Mar. 3, 1919. King W. Vidor is both author and director. On the whole his work is well done, though it is this reviewer’s opinion that the production would have been better with less farce and more straight and appealing comedy.

1919. THE OTHER HALF. Brentwood/Robertson-Cole—Exhibitors Mutual. 5 reels. August 18.

With Florence Vidor (Katherine Boone), Charles Meredith (Donald Trent), ZaSu Pitts (The Jazz Kid), David Butler (Corporal Jimmy), Thomas Jefferson (Caleb Fairman), Alfred Allen (J. Martin Trent), Frances Raymond (Mrs. Boone), Hugh Saxon (James Bradley), Arthur Redden (reporter).

1919. POOR RELATIONS. Brentwood/Robertson-Cole—Exhibitors Mutual. 5 reels. October 26.

With Florence Vidor (Dorothy Perkins), William DuVault (Pa Perkins), ZaSu Pitts (Daisy Perkins), Charles Meredith (Monte Rhodes), Lillian Leighton (Ma Perkins), Roscoe Karns (country yokel).

Fred. Variety, Oct. 31, 1919. …just a ‘small time’ feature that gets by with its little comedy touches.

Exhibitors’ Trade Review, Oct. 25, 1919. The slender, fragile story has just about all it can do to make its way through the new-mown hay atmosphere.

Vidor signed a three-picture deal with First National, a distribution company formed by theater owners. He was now an independent producer. With their advance money, he built a studio, “Vidor Village,” on fifteen acres. His father helped him; King had brought him to Los Angeles after the lumber company’s fortunes had declined.

A Creed and a Pledge—

I believe in the motion picture that carries a message to humanity.

I believe in the picture that will help humanity to free itself from the shackles of fear and suffering that have so long bound it with iron chains.

I will not knowingly produce a picture that contains anything I do not believe to be absolutely true to human nature, anything that could injure anyone, nor anything unclean in thought or action.

Nor will i deliberately portray anything to cause fright, suggest fear, glorify mischief, condone cruelty or extenuate malice.

I will never picture evil or wrong, except to prove the fallacy of its lure.

So long as i direct pictures, I will make only those founded upon the principle of right and I will endeavor to draw upon the inexhaustible source of Good for my stories, my guidance, and my inspiration.

[signed] King Vidor.

“I believe [in 1971] that to restrict yourself in the work that you do will only limit yourself as a person. I might have been stupid enough in my first few pictures to put out a creed that I wouldn’t make pictures with violence or sex. Adela Rogers St. John probably wrote it, and I signed it. It was an advertisement, you know. It said that I wouldn’t have anything to do with violence, and that I wouldn’t have any emphasis on sex. Right after it came out in the paper I got arrested for playing dirty poker in a sixty-cent poker game. The headlines were pretty awful. It didn’t go with this idealistic statement.” [dga]

Dir.-Prod.: King W. Vidor. Sc.: William First Parker, from a story by John Booth Harrower. Ph.: Ira H. Morgan.

With Florence Vidor (Beverly Tucker), Roscoe Karns (Dal Tucker), Ben Alexander (Little Ben Tucker), Charles Meredith (Merle Curran), George Nichols (Mayor Curran), John P. Lockney (Felix), Willis Marks (Dobbs), Harold Goodwin (grocery boy).

1920. THE JACK-KNIFE MAN. King Vidor Prods.—First National. 5 reels. August 8.

Dir.-Prod. : King Vidor. Sc.: William Parker, King Vidor, from the novel (1913) by Ellis Parker Butler.

With Fred Turner (Peter Lane), Florence Vidor (Mrs. Montgomery), Harry Todd (Booge), Claire McDowell (Liz Merdin), Bobby Kelso (Buddy), Willis Marks (Rev. Briggles), Lillian Leighton (Mrs. Potter), James Corrigan (George Rapp), Charles Arling (doctor).

“I must have seemed a rebel at the time. I was under contract to First National and I had shot The Jack-Knife Man for them. I hadn’t used all the money they had allocated me [$75,000] and I had returned what was left [$10,000]. But my film didn’t fit into the norms of the time: I hadn’t used stars in beautiful costumes and lovely settings. My situation was not very good. But I had done what I wanted, what I felt, what interested me. And I am very surprised that I did this so early in my career, instead of accepting what was usual. I realised that by doing what I truly felt, the public could feel the same things. And my work was much better on a film that interested me than on a film that left me indifferent. [pos]

“[The reason] you see many scenes in pictures [of this era] of someone arriving in a carriage, getting out, walking through the gate to the front door, knocking, and when the door is opened, going into the house. Well, eventually we forgot the carriage and the automobile, and we even forgot about going up the path. You just go inside and they are there. That was a series of developments that took audience acceptance. That’s why titles all appear superfluous now. At that time they seemed necessary to explain the action.” [dga]

Unsigned. New York Times, Aug. 2, 1920. The photoplay gives the impression that Mr. Vidor said, before starting it, “Now I will be wholesome and optimistic” and kept his declaration in mind in the making of every scene.…Spectators do not want to be aware of the missionary intent of what they go to enjoy, and in many scenes of The Jack-Knife Man they are aware if little else.

Jolo. Variety, Aug. 6, 1920. One of those tales that you take extreme delight in reading, but which, somehow, isn’t quite the same when visualized.…It is admirably done by a clever cast in which each individual player stood out in his or her particular role. [After surveying ten or so viewers] the consensus of opinion was, “It’s very nice, but--oh, I don’t know.” In other words it failed to satisfy.

As James Card notes, films were not respectable in the twenties, and insightful criticism was usually in the fan magazines rather than in publications like The Literary Digest, Theatre Arts—or The New York Times. Card cites Frederick James Smith, below, as one of the best critics of his era. Where more respectable reviewers saw clichéd plots and picturesque photography, Smith saw Vidor already in 1920s in terms that, a quarter century later, would be reserved for Rossellini and De Sica:

Frederick James Smith. Motion Picture Classic, September 1920. King Vidor has proved himself again. Mr. Vidor it was who startled the celluloid world somewhat over a year ago with his Turn in the Road which revealed its producer as possessing a singularly human touch. Being sure of his ability, we have waited for Mr. Vidor to do something bigger. The bigger thing has occurred—Ellis Parker Butler’s The Jack-Knife Man. Here is a gently drawn little genre study, finely conceived and done with admirable workmanship and an excellently restrained sympathy.…The Jack-Knife Man is worthy of your attention for it belongs to the photoplay school of tomorrow. No pasteboard melodramatic characters, no machine made plot development, no trite methods of screen telling are here. For Mr. Vidor—we are sure of it now—is just finding himself and before long he is going to turn out a big and human celluloid document.

James Card. The rural, outdoor setting of barns, stables, country roads, buggies, country stores and snowy village streets doesn’t simply bring authenticity to the film, but with the passing of years, those actualities have made the picture a precious document of a kind of countryside lost to us forever.…With wry humor, [Vidor] keeps his people honestly human—a skill that marked Vidor’s best work throughout the whole time of his predialogue period. This film, devoid of sentimentality, is the earliest example we have of Vidor’s greatest strength—his ability to use professional players, strip them of their standard theatrical-behavior specialities and allow them to perform with the naturalism that Vittorio De Sica achieved from his auto-worker star of The Bicycle Thief.

1921. THE SKY PILOT. Cathrine Curtis Corp.—Associated First National. 7 reels. 6305 ft. April 30.

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Cathrine Curtis. Sc.: John McDermott. Adapt.: Faith Green, from the novel (1899) by Ralph Connor (aka Charles William Gordon). Ph.: Gus Peterson.

With John Bowers (The Sky Pilot), Colleen Moore (Gwen), David Butler (Bill Hendricks), Harry Todd (The Old Timer), Kathleen Kirkham (Lady Charlotte), James Corrigan (Hon. Ashley), Donald MacDonald (duke).

Independent production was impossible financially and Vidor Village failed, exacerbated by problems with The Sky Pilot, Vidor’s infatuation with his star, Colleen Moore, and snow.

“I do not believe The Sky Pilot is about Christian Science. There is a miracle in the film, or something close to one. But in fact Christian Science maintains there are no miracles.” [pos]

Unsigned. New York Times, Apr. 18, 1921. …despite…an overdone ending, it is a corking melodrama. Pictorially it is exceptional. Mr. Vidor’s chief talent seems to be for making magically lighted, atmospheric moving pictures which convey meanings to spectators, though he seems to take special pride himself in his moral earnestness.

Jolo. Variety, Apr. 22, 1921. A really remarkable screening of a round-up is depicted, showing the hero standing over the prostrate body of the heroine and “shooing” the cattle to either side …The steers are shown running apparently into the very eye of the camera, making the scene as vivid as is possible to photography.

Motion Picture News: A Western way above the ordinary. Vidor actually shows a roundup and stampede of steers which is about the most blood-curdling thing imaginable. Strange that such a stunt has not been used before.

1921. LOVE NEVER DIES. King W. Vidor/Thomas Ince—Associated Exhibitors. 7 reels. 6751 ft. November 14.

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Thomas Ince. Sc.: King Vidor, from The Cottage of Delight (1918) by William Nathaniel Harben. Ph.: Max Dupont.

With Lloyd Hughes (John Trott), Madge Bellamy (Tilly Whaley), Joe Bennett (Joel Eperson), Lillian Leighton (Mrs. Cavanaugh), Fred Gambold (Sam Cavanaugh), Julia Brown (Dora Boyles), Frank Brownlee (Ezekiel Whaley), Winifred Greenwood (Jane Holder), Claire McDowell (Liz Trott).

“No doubt there is still influence from Griffith. But in certain films by Ince there were also train accidents. At this time I had my own studio, but I didn’t have a lot of money to make the film. So I shot the train accident scenes first, with some specialists and a small budget. And then I showed this sequence to Ince. That was how I was able to complete the film. Anyway, part of the accident was shot with miniature cars. I knew a great specialist for this kind of scene. We had no need of stars. The story itself was in effect influenced by Griffith, especially the love scenes, obviously. The ending too, when the two heroes chase each other on the river, I owe to Way Down East.” [pos]

Florence Vidor had become a leading player at Paramount, and a four-picture was arranged, but toward the end their marriage broke up.

•1922. WOMAN, WAKE UP! Florence Vidor Productions—Associated Exhibitors. 6 reels. 5241 ft. March 25.

Dir.: King Vidor. Sc: C.B. Manly, from a story by Ben Moore Clay. Ph.: George Barnes.

With Florence Vidor (Anne), Charles Meredith (Henry Mortimer), Louis Calhern (Monte Collins).

Vidor lists this among his films in A Tree Is a Tree. Variety and the American Film Institute Catalog credit direction to Marcus Harrison. Positif 163, however, states that Vidor told them: “The information published on page 295 of the American edition of A Tree Is a Tree concerning Woman, Wake Up! was correct. The attribution to Marcus Harrison was absolutely erroneous.” Vidor also claimed Woman, Wake Up! in his interview with Charles Higham.

1922. THE REAL ADVENTURE. Florence Vidor Prods./Cameo Pictures—Associated Exhibitors. 5 reels. 4932 ft. JMay 28.

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Arthur S. Kane. Sc.: Mildred Considine, from The Real Adventure (1915) by Henry Kitchell Webster. Ph.: George Barnes.

With Florence Vidor (Rose Stanton), Clyde Fillmore (Rodney Aldrich), Nellie Peck Saunders (Mrs. Stanton), Lilyan McCarthy (Portia), Philip Ryder (John Walbraith).

•1922. DUSK TO DAWN. Florence Vidor Prods.—Associated Exhibitors. 6 reels. 5200 ft. September 2.

Dir.: King Vidor. Sc: Frank Howard Clark, from The Shuttle Soul by Katherine Hill. Ph.: George Barnes.

With Florence Vidor (Marjorie Latham and Aziza), Jack Mulhall (Philip Randall), Truman Van Dyke (Ralph Latham), James Neill (John Latham), Lydia Knott (Mrs. Latham), Herbert Fortier (Mark Randall), Norris Johnson (Babette), Nellie Anderson (Marua), Sidney Franklin (Nadar Gungi), Peter Burke (Rajah Nyhal Singh).

“[Love Never Dies] was followed by a group of romantic melodramas starring my late wife, Florence Vidor. They included Conquering the Woman, an Admirable Crichton-type of yarn about a woman sent off to an island with a man; Woman, Wake Up; The Real Adventure, about a woman in business; and Dusk to Dawn, which was a dual-personality fantasy about the soul of a girl in India transmigrating into an American girl: when the latter went to sleep, the other girl woke up in India. Florence Vidor played both parts.” [hgm]

Motion Picture News: This feature has one of the finest mountings of any seen this year. The opening scenes showing the receiving of election returns and their broadcasting by radio are unusually well done. The shots of India are artistic gems…Beautiful photography and lighting.

With Florence Vidor, King Vidor, Douglas MacLean, Babe Ruth, Eva Novak, Ben Turpin, Hope Hampton, Anita Stewart, Richard Barthelmess, Edward Earle, Mary Carr, George Walsh, Grace Darmond, Zene Keefe, Mae Murray, May Allison, Billie Dove.

1922. CONQUERING THE WOMAN. King. W. Vidor Prods.—Associated Exhibitors. 6 reels. 5887 ft. Dec. 10.

Dir.-Prod.: King Vidor. Sc.: Frank Howard Clark, from Kidnapping Coline (1913) by Henry Cottrell Rowland (serialized in Everybody’s, September 1913—January 1914). Ph.: George Barnes.

With Florence Vidor (Judith Stafford), Bert Sprotte (Tobias Stafford), Mathilde Brundage (Aunt Sophia), David Butler (Larry Saunders), Roscoe Karns (Shorty Thompson), Peter Burke (Count Henri), Harry Todd (Sandy MacTavish).

Motion Picture News, Dec. 30, 1922. The picture, while directed by King Vidor, who when given a chance can show something in the way of imaginative ideas, does not leave its orthodox groove.

•1922. Alice Adams. Encore—Associated Exhibitors. 6 reels. 6361 ft. April, 1923.

Dir.: Rowland V. Lee. Prod.: King Vidor. Sc.: Lee, from the novel (1921) by Booth Tarkington. Ph.: Goerge Barnes.

“I had been such a Booth Tarkington fan, I thought that everything he wrote should be made into film. We somehow got the money to make [this one], but at the same time I had a chance to make Peg o’ My Heart. I decided to take the job and perhaps use the money to keep my studio going. We got Rowland V. Lee to direct Alice Adams. I had a few conferences with Rowland and perhaps put more time in on the script than supervising the direction.” [dga]

Dir.: King Vidor. Superv.: J. Hartley Manners. Sc.: Mary O'Hara, from play Peg o’ My Heart (1912) by J. Hartley Manners. Ph.: George Barnes.

With Laurette Taylor (Margaret O'Connell - Peg), Marion Hamilton (Sir Gerald Adair: Jerry), Russell Simpson (Jim O'Connell), Ethel Grey Terry (Ethel Chichester), Nigel Barrie (Christian Brent), Lionel Belmore (Hawks), Vera Lewis (Mrs. Chichester), Sidna Beth Ivins (Mrs. Jim O'Connell), D.R.O. Hatwell (Alaric Chichester), Aileen O'Malley (Margaret, child), Fred Huntly (headwaiter), the dog Michael.

Ephraim Katz. Laurette Taylor , the famous Broadway star who was the toast of New York in the 1910s and 1920s, appeared in only three films. [katz]

Unsigned. New York Times, Jan. 22, 1923. [Laurette Taylor had played the part on stage with tremendous success.] The picture is full of spoken subtitles, taken from the stage dialogue, and upon these the photoplay largely depends for its humor and its human interest. So it is not a distinctly cinematographic piece that has come out from the adaptation. The screen version is rather a transliteration than a translation of the play.…The true and pointed pantomime of Miss [Laurette] Taylor…make[s] the photoplay momentarily a genuine motion picture.

“We used Miss Taylor in it, and although she was then forty-five years old, we had her playing an eighteen- or nineteen-year-old girl: miraculously, we made her look quite convincing.” [hgm]

“She got D.W. Griffith’s cameraman, Billy Bitzer, and they made a photographic test of her. They sent the test out to me, and I gasped. I thought it was just impossible. You could not make a picture with a woman who looked as old as she did in the test trying to play an eighteen-year-old. It was frightening. She had on this terrible wig. I just thought we couldn’t do it. Soon after that, they decided to come out and make the test in the studio. When I saw her again, my hopes fell. She had done quite a bit of drinking in her time, and I didn’t know how she could do it.

“I had the lucky remembrance that in Love Never Dies the stills had looked excellent. I thought, Why couldn’t we use the lens on the eight-by-ten still camera? George Barnes, the cameraman on Peg o’ My Heart, said we could. We had to set up the camera lenses in front of the motion picture cameras, but there was such a long telephoto lens on the still camera that for a big close-up, Laurette Taylor was all the way across the stage. However, Barnes worked out a type of rifle lighting. He used a key light that he put sights on, just like a gun. Wherever she went, the electrician followed her with those sights. [The light] was at such a height that it threw a false shadow around her chin. This eliminated the wrinkles around her throat. It made her face into a round, pear-shaped face. In this trick lens it was distorted just enough to make her face more round than long. The distortion wasn’t supposed to be apparent, it just happened. The result was that after several days of tests, we finally accomplished a test where she looked very young and very lovely. We took the wig off, and she had beautiful hair of her own. In running the film today I noticed that her long blonde hair was just beautiful, and made all the difference in the world. When she was in a good mood, when she was laughing or smiling, her face was up and right and round, and when she was sunk, her whole face and expression would go down. Every scene was shot by kidding and laughing and making jokes and doing all kinds of things to keep her amused.

“She fell in love with me as a result of this. She ran the film over and over for the rest of her life. She would screen it for me whenever I came over to visit, and she’d sit and hold my hand because I had made her look eighteen. She had a print of it in New York and she used to call people up just to show it. I remember what Ethel Barrymore said when Laurette asked her to dinner. She said, ‘I’ll come over to dinner if we don’t have to sit through Peg o’ My Heart again afterwards.’” [dga]

James Card. Laurette Taylor’s whole acting career had been limited to live theatre. Peg represented the peak of her theatrical success, and stardom in living theatre was then accounted—by theatre people—to be a far greater achievement than renown in the movies. Like every successful stage star, Taylor was a perfectionist, cherishing the technique that had brought her to the top of her profession. She was not ready to modify her acting for the benefit of the motion picture camera. In the past, comparable stubbornness on the part of theatre actors proved to be disastrous if their film directors, cowed by the stage performers’ prestige, were unable to persuade them that film acting required quite different techniques. To his great credit, King Vidor was not willing to be directed by Laurette Taylor. The first weeks of work…produced a continuing battle between stage and film director that presaged the impossibility of bringing in a film version of Peg with Laurette in her famous role. At last Vidor resorted to the device of shooting several scenes just as she wanted them. He had her look at the tests, and, luckily for cinema, she readily recognized that her stage mannerisms were just too extravagant for the intimate eye of the motion picture camera. [card]

•1923. THE WOMAN OF BRONZE. Samuel Zierler Photoplay Corp.—Metro Pictures. 8 reels. 5643 ft. Feb. 23.

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Harry Garsons. Sc.: Hope Loring, Louis Duryea Lighton, from the play La Rivale by Henry Kistemaeckens (U.S. premiere, 1920), translated by Paul Kester (1920). Ph.: William O’Connell. Art dir.: Joseph Wright.

With Clara Kimball Young (Vivian Hunt), John Bowers (Paddy Miles), Kathryn McGuire (Sylvia Morton), Edwin Stevens (Reggie Morton), Lloyd Whitlock (Leonard Hunt), Edward Kimball (Papa Bonelli).

“It was out of my line. I still had the studio, but by this time we had fired our lawyer who was also the only one who knew where all of our accounts were. He got a sheriff’s detachment to lock up the gates of the studio. My father was with me and he was able to take the brunt of managing the studio while I worked on the outside. I remember the sheriff even took our automobiles. We were living on Selma Avenue then, and I think I had somebody pick me up, and I got a job directing Clara Kimball Young.

“We made a settlement with our old attorney and we opened up the studio again, but we didn’t make any films, and it was very soon after that that I sold the studio to Sol Lesser, I think for $125,000. The real estate had gone up and made up for the loss we had incurred in running our own studio.” [dga]

Vidor appears beside several celebrities (including Florence Vidor) whom a small-town girl (Eleanor Boardman) encounters while trying to get a job in Hollywood.

1924. Vidor separates from Florence Vidor, with whom he has had a daughter, Suzanne.

Dir.: King Vidor. Sc.: Vidor, June Mathis. Adapt.: John McDermott, James O'Hanlon, from the play (1919) by Austin Strong and Winchell Smith. Ph.: Charles Van Enger.

With Claude Gillingwater (Theodore Findley), Eleanor Boardman (Rena Fairchild and Sidney Fairchild), William H. Crane (Hon. James Trumbull), Alec B. Francis (Dr. Richard Gaunt), John Sainpolis (John Crawshay), Brinsley Shaw (Benny, the Duck), Fred Esmelton (Gray), William Haines (Gordon Schuyler), Lucien Littlefield (Douglas), ZaSu Pitts (Mickey), Martha Mattox (Saunders), Fred J. Butler (Poole), Charles Hickman (Clancy), Craig Biddle, Jr. (Findley, young man), Creighton Hale (Trumbull, as boy), Raymond Hatton (Gaunt, as boy).

“Eleanor Boardman, one of [Goldwyn’s] rising young contract players, was to star in the picture. They were trying to develop her into a star. I had never met her, but the play was over at the Pasadena Playhouse, and I asked her if she would go with me to see it. It wasn’t very long before I was separated from Florence, and I fell in love with Eleanor. I had actually fallen in love with her from a big advertisement for the Eastman Kodak Company. They had a picture of a girl on top of a hill in a wheat field, with a striped dress on which was being blown by the wind. She had posed for it. So it was a fast romance from then on.

“I’d been hired for [Goldwyn] by a man named Major Bowes, then a studio executive and later host of radio’s Comedy Hour, an amateur talent programme. I was trying to get an option on a story called Three Wise Fools when he offered to buy it for the studio and let me direct it for them. I accepted, and subsequently spent twenty years at MGM. I never signed long-term contracts, only for terms of two or three years; that’s why I missed out on MGM’s pension plan.

“I was very enthusiastic about Three Wise Fools, a story of three older men and a young girl, released in 1923. It gave me a chance to explore these people’s deeply human feelings, a theme which I’ve been told runs through all my pictures, although I haven’t been too aware of it myself. I’ve only been conscious of what stories interested me, of the kind of stories I like.” [hgm]

Unsigned. New York Times, Jul. 23, 1923 While Miss [Eleanor] Boardman is a captivating Sidney the interest of this photoplay naturally centres around the three old bachelors, and it is their sincere portrayal of their respective parts which makes for the success of this production.

Moving Picture World, Jul 14, 1923. King Vidor has reproduced the atmosphere, comedy and romance [of the stageplay] with great success, and elaborated considerably on the suspense angle.

“I was so much aware of Griffith’s handling of mounting excitement, I was trying to get the same sort of an effect, and that’s how I ran into speeding up each scene. I felt that the most important thing about motion picture directing was tempo. In order to have an exact diagram of speeding up the end of a film to reach an exciting climax, I worked out the metronome idea. I simply made each scene progressively faster, according to the beat of the metronome. There was nobody walking and keeping exact time to the metronome, but it gave me a basis. If I said, ‘Camera, action, fast!’ that meant the actors would all move faster.

“My voice didn’t carry too much, and I had a theory that if you talked too much you would distract the actors. We used a sort of shorthand by saying, ‘That’s good,’ or ‘Enough,’ or you might say, ‘More,’ or ‘More of that,’ and try to say it quickly and unobtrusively so that it wouldn’t distract, wouldn’t pull the actors always. In fact, with Gilbert I developed almost a type of telepathy. We knew each other well. It was also partly by gesture. Maybe he’d see a gesture of mine outside the corner of his eye, as a person in an orchestra sees a small gesture the conductor makes. He claimed he knew what I was thinking.

“Some directors did lots of talking, and lots of acting. I would try to make it very clear to the actors exactly what it was that I wanted from them, but if something were to develop during a scene, which often happened, I would keep the camera going. This is particularly true of comedy. We’d keep the camera going and the actors would know that we had run onto something and I would say, ‘Don’t stop now, that’s great!’ I gave them encouragement. That was very important.

“I felt that those actors who had been on the stage were like children and they missed the applause of the audience. The director had to take the place of the audience. The director is like a psychiatrist. The women stars are always falling in love with the director because he gives the whole reaction of whether they are good or bad, and I don’t think anyone who has ever been an actress isn’t precarious about her performance.

“The rehearsal was to know exactly where they should go, where they should stand, just to get the blocking straight. I always felt there was one take that would be the right one, and from there they would all go downhill. I would try to set everything to photograph the good take so it wouldn’t get stale. I never did indulge in too many takes because I thought the actors would get mechanical. I always tried to capture some spontaneous quality in the acting.

“What you can do is tell the actors exactly what you want, not from the acting standpoint, but what idea it is that you want communicated. I avoided giving them a performance as an example. That is getting in and acting and expecting them to copy you, which is what Griffith did. I wanted it to come from them so that each person would have a different individuality, rather than just copying my performance. All of the Griffith people looked alike. He had been an actor at one time himself.

“We had a portable organ and a violin [on the set]. In the case of Marion Davies, she had a quartet which included a cello, bass fiddle, and two violins. It was marvelous, just beautiful. It was surprising how much you could control by the music you selected. John Gilbert liked ‘Moonlight and Roses.’ In The Crowd we used a phonograph and a record of Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony. If you had any king of emotion going on, the stars would say, ‘Where’s the music?’” [dga]

1924. WILD ORANGES. Goldwyn-Cosmopolitan Distributing Corp. 7 reels. 6837 ft. January 20.

Dir.: King Vidor. Sc.: Vidor, from the novel (1919) by Joseph Hergesheimer. Ph.: John W. Boyle. Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons. Cost.: Sophie Wachner. Editor: June Mathis. Titles: Tom Miranda.

With Virginia Valli (Nellie Stope), Frank Mayo [and in some exteriors, James Kirkwood] (John Woolfolk), Ford Sterling (Paul Halvard), Nigel De Brulier (Lichfield Stope), Charles A. Post (Iscah Nicholas).

“We next went all the way to Florida to capture the intense atmosphere of Joseph Hergesheimer’s book Wild Oranges: one of the first films I know of for which a company travelled that far. Strange as it may seem today, when we shoot movies all around the world, nobody thought in those terms then. If you talked atmosphere, if you talked of the importance of a film’s ambience, they’d say: ‘Why do you want to go all the way across the country? What’s wrong with Griffith Park?’ That’s what the title of my book is about: ‘A tree is a tree, a rock is a rock: shoot it in Griffith Park.’

“Hergesheimer’s book described such things as Florida’s oppressive heat, the moss on the trees, the tropical foliage, things like that. We went all over Florida trying to capture this atmosphere, and that’s what made the picture so successful. Reviewers hailed the break-away from the studio which Wild Oranges represented as a milestone in the art of motion pictures. [hgm]

“James Kirkwood had been scheduled to play the lead in the picture and actually did in Florida, but the day we got back to California he was thrown by his horse and fractured his skull. We were faced with returning to Florida and redoing the picture, but we found an actor, Frank Mayo, who looked and walked like Kirkwood and wore his clothes without the slightest alternation. We simply re-did the close-ups against simulated backgrounds (this was before the day of the photographed process background) and used the longer shots of Kirkwood.” [tree]

Unsigned. New York Times, Mar. 3, 1924. Fear is a dominant factor in this rather sketchy story, from which King Vidor, as the diretor, has obtained some really excellent results.…Entertaining and thrilling…The story itself does not contain much in the way of detail and its strength lies in the way in which it is told upon the screen. If Vidor had had a more fluent and plausible vehicle this picture would have been even better than it is. Some of the last sequences of Wild Oranges are strong enough to impress themselves upon one for some time.

Skig. Variety, Mar. 5, 1924. The major share of the credit must go to Vidor, who has done so well with a script which might so easily have been grossly exaggerated. The photography meets all requirements to roundout Wild Oranges as a convincing argument against those who believe there is little or no merit connected with the art of celluloid story telling, and it certainly has been well made.

James Card. The…violence and terror are enough to nearly satisfy Stallone and Schwarzenegger fans of current cinema, but the style of King Vidor in developing the tale is far more elegant than encountered in the Golan and Globus Michael Winner bloodlettings. [card]

Dir.-Prod.: King Vidor. Sc.: J. Hartley Manners from his one-act play (1914). Ph.: Chester A. Lyons. Technical dir.: John J. Hughes. Titles: Jack W. Robson.

With Laurette Taylor (Jenny Wreay), Pat O'Malley (Fermoy MacDonough), Hedda Hopper (Mrs. Crystal Pole), Cyril Chadwick (Philip Chandos), Edith Yorke (Mrs. Wreay), Patterson Dial (Sallie Perkins), Joan Standing (other Jenny), Lawrence Grant (Mr. Rosselstein), Charlotte Mineau (head saleslady).

“As a result of Peg o’ My Heart, Laurette Taylor and the Metro Company were a big success. By now I was very much in love with Eleanor and I did not want to be away too long. I didn’t feel at the time that I had concentrated enough and dedicated myself enough to get everything there was to get out of this picture, but I was wrong. Looking at it today, maybe it was a good idea that I didn’t take it too seriously. I sort of light-heartedly went through it. Well, there was a love affair going on between Laurette Taylor and me, and there was a wonderful rapport and spirit between us. It seemed to show up in the film, because there was a sort of delighted expression on her face all the time, and she moved with the freedom I liked to see actresses and actors move with, a certain unexpected freedom. Most of the gags were probably mine [not things she had done in the play].” [dga]

Unsigned. New York Times, Mar. 11, 1924. Laurette Taylor saves the film from being a most ordinary picture.…Judging from the handling of some scenes in this picture, one surmises that Miss Taylor did part of her own directing.

Fred. Variety, Mar. 12, 1924. Seemingly Miss [Laurette] Taylor is not going to permit anyone but herself to be seen in the screen versions of any of the plays she has been in on the stage.…[She] seems a little too mature to take an errand girl on the screen. In trying to get over the impression she is a youngster, it forced kittenish stuff that didn’t register.…King Vidor in directing overlooked many little touches of detail; one particularly was the death scene of the mother. She was still breathing after supposed to have passed out.

James Card. Once again King Vidor showed that his special forte was keeping his shadow players magically human—even when some of them, by long movie habit, fought hard against it. [As in Peg] Laurette Taylor was cast as a teenager. She was a woman in her middle thirties, and the vast discrepancy between the characters’ age and her own threatened the most willing suspension of disbelief on the art of film audiences [and] had to be offset by a personality…bubbling with appeal.…In Happiness, both her performance and Vidor’s sensitive handling of so great a hazard overwhelmed the problem. It was an achievement of major proportions for both star and director.…Happiness is an irresistible film. In almost the same way that Cher shed years and a long-established mystique in Moonstruck, Laurette Taylor was able to charm film fans…to accept [her] as an exception—a nonmovie queen worthy of their warm response. [card]

Dir.-Prod.: King Vidor. Presented by Louis B. Mayer. Sc.: Carey Wilson from the play Mary the Third (c. 1923) by Rachel Crothers. Ph.: John J. Mescall. Art dir.: Charles L. Cadwallader. Asst. dir.: Davld Howard.

With: Episode of 1870: Eleanor Boardman (Mary), James Morrison (Clinton), Johnnie Walker (William). Episode of 1897: Eleanor Boardman (Mary), Niles Welch (John [“Robert” in credits]), Creighton Hale (Richard). Modern Story: Eleanor Boardman (Mary), Ben Lyon (Lynn), William Haines (Hal), William Collier, Jr. (Max), Pauline Garon (Tish Eulalie Jensen (mother), E.J. Ratcliffe (father), Gertrude Claire (grandmother), Robert Agnew (Bobby), Lucille Hutton (Anne), Virginia Lee Corbin, Gloria Heller (flappers), Sidney De Grey (doctor).

James Card. Wine of Youth…strikes positive resonance with today’s youthful viewers far more than most silent films. Women’s liberation has provided a perpetual theme in novels, dramas and films. A concomitant of course is sexual liberation.…In Wine of Youth, the way of life that has become standard in the 1990s was presented with King Vidor’s firmly developed style of breathing believable life into his players. Led by Eleanor Boardman, an actress exuding intelligence and integrity rather than movie glamor (the Merryl Steep of the silents), the young people challenge the hypocrisy of their parents. [card]

Unsigned. New York Times, Aug. 11, 1924 It is not bad as a warm weather show, but as usual in such efforts the doings of the young people are exaggerated. No such picture would be considered properly finished without a number of scenes depicting the shaking up and drinking of cocktails and their resulting effect on those who partake of them.

Skig. Variety, Aug. 13, 1924. A first rate picture that is at once serious, sardonic, humorous and instructive in more than a subtle way.

1924. HIS HOUR. Louis B. Mayer Prods/Metro-Goldwyn Dlstributing Corp. 7 reels. 6300 ft. September 29.

Dir.: King Vidor. Superv.: Elinor Glyn. Sc.: Elinor Glyn from her story (1910). Titles: King Vidor, Maude Fulton. Ph.: John Mescall. Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons. Asst. dir.: David Howard. Dresses: Sophie Wachner.

With Aileen Pringle (Tamara Loraine), John Gilbert (Gritzko), Emily Fitzroy (Princesse Ardacheff), Lawrence Grant (Stephen Strong), Dale Fuller (Olga Gleboff), Marlo Carillo (Count Valonne), Jacquelin Gadsdon (Tatiane Shebanoff), George Waggoner (Shasha Basmanoff), Carrie Clark Ward (Princess Murieska), Bertram Grassby (Boris Varishkine), Jill Reties (Sonia Zalesklie), Wilfred Gough (Lord Courtney: Jack), Frederick Vroom (British minister), Mathilde Comont (fat courtlsan), E. Eliazaroff (Khedive), David Mir (Serge Grekoff), Bert Sprone (Ivan).

“His Hour[was] a sex story wntten by Elinor Glyn, author of Three Weeks and inventor of the term ‘it,’ meaning sex appeal. Miss Glyn, who was present throughout the making of His Hour, was quite weird, probably the weirdest person I’ve ever come across. Her dress, her talk and her appearance were altogether strange. She had false gums that startled you by turning purple under the copper-hued vapour lights whenever she smiled, and she was overly interested in tiny details that made no difference to the film.

“She worried, for example, whether the seating arrangements for the story’s aristocrat characters were correct according to protocol, because it was set in Czarist Russia which she had known and still remembered. They were just extras as far as we were concerned, but to her they were real princes and princesses, counts and grand dukes and she would fuss over details of dress or furnishings that were not being photographed. We humored her, however, because it did no harm and maintained her interest in the picture.

“In those days we’d put a lot of effort into films that would come to town and play for only a few days and then be forgotten. There weren’t any neighbourhood theatres all over the city as there are now, and films would just play briefly in one Los Angeles theatre and then vanish for ever. [hgm]

“John Gilbert and I got along very well. He was a dashing type of fellow. I remember thinking up pieces of business to play love scenes that he would like. Gilbert was a great lover and we got along very well. We seemed to become good friends right away. In fact, I had one of the first houses in the hills in back of Beverly Hills, and he moved in with me. We played tennis together and were part of a group that included Joe Cohen, the studio manager, Donald Ogden Stewart, the writer, myself, and Laurence Stallings. John built a house right next to mine.…

“We were all called up to the projection room by Mr. [Louis B.] Mayer. He started to run about a thousand feet of film for all the directors at MGM. They were all clips from our pictures, and he was illustrating why they had emploed Will Hays and why they were setting up the Hays Office. I remember it started out with a couple of hundred feet from His Hour, with John Gilbert kissing Aileen Pringle. His arm was under her robe, and there was just a tremendous amount of energy while he was working her over. This was lifted out as one of the scenes that illustrated why they had to have the Hays Office.” [dga]

•1924. WIFE OF THE CENTAUR. Metro-Goldwyn Plctures. 7 reels. 6535 ft. December 1.

Dir.: King Vidor. Presented by Louis B. Mayer. Sc.: Douqlas Z. Doty, from novel (1923) by Cyril Hume. Ph.: John Arnold. Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons. Ed.: Hugh Wynn. Asst. dir.: David Howard. Cost.: Sophie Wachner.

With Eleanor Boardman (Joan Converse), John Gilbert (Jeffrey Dwyer), Aileen Pringle (Inez Martin), Kate Lester (Mrs. Converse), William Haines (Edward Converse), Kate Price (Mattie), Jacquelin Gadsdon (Hope Larrimore), Bruce Covington (Mr. Larrimore), Philo McCullough (Harry Todd), Lincoln Stedman (Chuck), William Orlamond (Uncle Roger).

“It was probably a triangle affair, a man between two women, which is the basis of many of my pictures. I think he was married, and he had a mistress on the side. I suppose it was the same situation as you would see in The Crowd when she says, ‘I think I understand you.’ The basis is probably the wife accepting Gilbert having some love inetrest other than herself. Eleanor was certainly more the wife type than Aileen Pringle.” [dga]

Mordaunt Hall. New York Times, Jan. 7, 1925. Doubtless this film will please many persons who want a light, frothy entertainment which never taxes the imagination.

Skig. Variety, Jan. 7, 1925. For 73 minutes Sunday afternoon there wasn’t a stir in this house, which seats 5300, until Aileen Pringle, in a somewhat vampish role, threw on a transparent negligee. That drew a titter. The tenseness which those present manifested was an achievement few films in the Broadway program theatres have been able to accomplish.…Vidor’s treatment of a house party, a cafe scene and a swimming party have caught the collegiate atmosphere (interspersed with comedy) to a greater extent than most of his contemporaries have ever done.

Motion Picture News, Jan. 17, 1925. [John Gilbert’s performance is “masterly” but “neurotic” and likely to arouse “disgust.”]

Dir.: King Vidor. Presented by Louis B. Mayer. Sc.: Harry Behn, Agnes Christine Johnstone from novel (1924) by Lawrence Rising. Ph.: John Arnold. Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons, James Basevi. Cost.: Ethel P. Chaffin. Ed.: Hugh Wynn. Asst. dir: David Howard.

With Eleanor Boardman (Fernanda), Pat O'Malley (Pat O'Malley), Harrison Ford (Don Jamie), Trixie Friganza (Mrs. McKee), William J. Kelly (Mr. McKee), Rosita Marstini (Vicente), Sojin (Wong), Evelyn Sherman (Spanish aunt), George Nichols (Spanish uncle), Margaret Seddon (Mrs. O'Malley), Lillian Elliott (Mrs. Casey), Priscilla Bonner (San Francisco girl), Joan Crawford (girl at party).

Mordaunt Hall. New York Times, Apr. 14, 1925. Handled most adrotily and is filled with original ideas.…Miss [Eleanor] Boardman is charming…she is alert and convincing in her acting and never at a loss for a winning expression.

Skig. Variety, Apr. 15, 1925. Some of the comedy touches are so lightly and finely drawn that it’s doubtful if any audience habituating less than the middle class theatres will give this film its due…Vidor has injected any number of subtleties that more than lift this picture above the average.

1925. THE BIG PARADE. M.G.M Pictures. 12 reels. 11,519 ft. (originally: 13 reels. 12,550 ft.). November 19.

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Irving Thalberg. 2nd unit: George Hill. Sc.: Harry Behn, from a story by Laurence Stalllngs. Titles: Joseph W. Farnham. Ph.: John Arnold (some Technicolor sequences). Mus.: William Axt, Davld Mendoza. Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons, James Basevi. Ed.: Hugh Wynn. Cost.: Ethel P. Chaffin. Asst. dirs.: David Howard, George W. Hill. Asst. dir. war scenes: Robert Florey.

With John Gilbert (James Apperson), Renée Adorée (Mélisande), Hobart Bosworth (Mr. Apperson), Claire McDowell (Mrs. Apperson), Claire Adams (Justyn Reed), Robert Ober (Harry Apperson), Tom O'Brien (Bull O'Hara), Karl Dane (Slim), Rosita Marstini (French mother), George K. Arthur (George).

“I wanted to make films like D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation that ran longer. [hgm] I went to Thalberg and said, ‘I would like to make a film that runs longer than just one week. I would like for a lot of people to see it.’ So he said, ‘Have you got something in mind?’ I said, ‘Wheat, steel, or war.’ He said, ‘Well, you better start looking for stories.’ Right away I started on a war story. [dga] Meanwhile, Thalberg had seen Laurence Stallings’s play What Price Glory? in New York, and wired me that he’d spoken to the author who was available to write a picture for me if I wanted him. I accepted immediately, and Stallings, who’d lost a leg in France in World War I, arrived here shortly afterwards with a five-page story. I spent about a week discussing it with him, then accompanied him back to New York to work out the plot. [hgm]

“Up until that time, all the war pictures had been glamorous—fellows with shiny boots and epaulettes and medals and beautiful costumes. And there never had been one about a G.I. Just the ordinary guy. And at that time I was playing with the idea [that] the man caused nothing in this film—he only reacted. He only went through the war and observed it. And he was…neither a patriot nor a pacifist. He wasn’t a hero—he was just a guy that went along. And he [Stallings] went for this in a big way and came up with these five pages, which I still have. [schic]

“Chaplin was a big item at that time and his films were tremendous when he used pantomime. What I remember very distinctly was how wonderful it was to have a girl who could not speak English, and a man who could not speak French—there was the excuse for all of the pantomime that you could want. I thought at this time that I was going to have people in all of my pictures who couldn’t speak the same language. The scene with the American soldier introducing gum to the French girl was improvized right there. It was all done in one set-up. To let a shot run three hundred feet was an absolute innovation in motion picture making then.

“I was looking at Signal Corps footage and on came a scene with soldiers marching at a tempo that looked like death. It was a funeral and then I thought I would do the whole walk through the woods in this tempo. We had a big bass drum [and] we hit this drum to keep the proper tempo. If you got hit, you had to wait until the next beat of the drum. Everybody was instructed that no matter what they did, they must do it in time to the beat. It’s all so relentless. [In theaters] I wanted to cut out all of the music. In the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood I was able to have just a muffled bass drum beat. It was very effective, so much more so than any type of msuic. I tried to get it done in New York [but they] thought they knew better. [dga]

“I sent a second unit down to Texas. See, we used to do a lot of drawing beforehand on some important shots—[to] design them. I wanted a straight line of—what was it, four hundred trucks, four thousand men? And they went down there and the Army talked them out of the straight line. [They said we should] have a zigzag line [because] that’s the way it was in France. And after all this film came back, I went down and said, ‘We’re going to find a straight line’ and went out and got the straight line. We also used some of the zigzag later. But I did get the straight line, which meant more than broken crooked lines because it just went into infinity. You know, it just suggested the endless amount of the machines and men that we poured in—were poured in by the Allies. So my life was, and my thoughts were, filled with imagery. That’s the way you went to bed at night, thinking about images. [schic]

“There was 12,800 feet in the cut when it opened in the Egyptian Theatre. They wanted to take out 800 feet so that they could get in another show every day. They had given [Joseph] Farnham, the title writer, the job of shortening it when I was working on La Bohème. He had cut out laughs and very important scenes. I had to go down to the trash and pull out all the piece he had cut out. I put up a big complaint and Thalberg told me, ‘All right, you can put that material back in, but I wish you would cut 800 feet somewhere.’ I went through the film carefully and took a foot and a half before and after each splice.

“The film opened up in New York at the Astor Theatre on Broadway. There was a big sign up on the front of the theatre and it played to standing room only crowds for two years. It took in a million dollars at the one theatre. Eighteen men would stand backstage with bugles and little wagons with iron in them making noise like real battle sounds. They also had tremendous ten-foot metal drums to give the sound effects for the big explosions. The theatre would shake, and the pit of your stomach would go in. [dga]

“The Big Parade…was not originally planned as a big film, but that was what I really had in mind. I brought it in at $205,000 and then, when I was on another picture they increased it by getting a director named George Hill to shoot some additional night battlescenes which didn’t involve any cast members.”

John Gilbert. No love has ever enthralled me as did the making of this picture. No achievement will ever excite me so much.…No reward will ever be so great as having been a part of The Big Parade. It was the high point of my career. All that followed is balderdash.…The chewing gum episode with little Renée Adorée. Only a suggestion was offered in the script, and no one really knew what would happen. Cameras started and away we went. Minute after minute; impromptu; inspired; both Renée and me, guided by some unseen power, expressing beauty. And when the film was exhaused, old Pop Vidor, age 30, murmuring ‘I’ll be damned if I ever saw a scene as good as that.’

Mordaunt Hall. New York Times, Jan. 10, 1926. The top-notch photoplay [of 1925] was without doubt The Big Parade.…There are many producers who would not have dared to insert some of the action contained in this photoplay, because it is the common idea that a hero must always be heroic and that he should be immaculate no matter what he is doing. …There is a good deal of subtlety in obtaining in the pictorial scenic effects an expression on [Renée Adorée’s] countenance that hails from the land of Joan of Arc.…There is tense drama in this glorious tale, and sequence after sequence builds up the thrilling interest in the battle scenes, themselves pictured differently from any others put on the screen.

Robert E. Sherwood. Life, Dec. 10, 1925. A marvelous picture, a picture that can be ranked among the few genuinely great achievements of the screen. The initial credit must go to [writer Laurence] Stallings, but the final honors belong to King Vidor, who thus substantially justifies all the loud salutes that, I am happy to say, have been fired in his behalf in this department. He proves here what he indicated in Wild Oranges: that he is a director of intelligence and imagination. He has made war scenes that possess infintely more than the usual spectacular thrill; he has made war scenes that actually resemble war.

Herbert Howe. Photoplay, June 1926. Speaking of great directors, where are they? King Vidor stands unchallenged in the lists today, save possibly by Lubitsch. D.W. Griffith has gone stale. Cecil B. DeMille is wandering some place in the dark ages with his flash-backs. Von Stroheim is uncertain.

Matthew Josephson. Motion Picture Classic, August 1926. In the modern period of the movies, the films of Messrs. Lubitsch, Chaplin, Stroheim, Vidor, Cruze, have developed a complete character of their own as an art, instead of being a mawkish rendering of cheap successes in photos.

The eye is struck first by the immense improvement in the quality of the camera work, the cleanness of line, the absence of waste detail. All of them manipulate their groups, their sets, as well as the light they spill over the scene, to get a balance, a form that keeps your eye unswervingly on the things that count most.

Not only have they learned to paint with the camera, but also to suggest, by the interplay of sequences, by the terrific power of concentration in a close-up, by the shrewd angles they catch, almost a new understanding of life. The modern film, in short, becomes an instrument fit for artists to express the highest flights of their imaginations, their most delicate and subtle fancies. [These paragraphs begin a review of Murnau’s The Last Laugh.]

Matthew Josephson. Motion Picture Classic, September 1926. Dudley Murphy thinks that the chef character of the film is motion, the rhythm of things in motion. I must stop and tell something about Dudley Murphy. He is one of the figures in the art-film movement. His revolutionary Ballet of the Machine [Ballet mécanique] was booed and hissed and laughed at.…He is home talent which has absorbed the ideas about modern art that are current in Europe.…“King Vidor is probably our greatest director right now,” [he said]. “The first half of The Big Parade had some of the finest motion picture technique ever done. The ‘business’ between Gilbert and Renée Adorée was marvelously carried out and conceived. Vidor has a miraculous sense of timing.”

Alexander Woollcott, New York World, March 1926. Millions of good people in this land will really learn for the first time just what manner of hell on earth it was to which they gallantly sent their able-bodied youth.

Boston Transcript, March 1926. To watch it unroll is to realize anew all the shallow bombast, all the flatulency and all the saccharinity with which previous picture-makers have encumbered the trade of war.

London Sunday Express, 1926. Hollywood’s deliberate exclusion of the Allies from this war film makes the production one which the American Ambassador to London, in the interests of his country, should ask the owners to retire from Great Britain.

New York World, 1925. [In London] the entire press condemns the film as arrogant and presumptuous.…But Bernard Shaw calls it “a fine pacifist study of war,” and recognizing it as “an American film,” asks, “If we produce a British picture, would we put American soldiers in it?”

Montreal Star (Canada), 1926. The house rocked with laughter or sat tense with thrills or shaken by emotional memories.

B.G. Braver-Mann. If The Big Parade had been a report of the war…, it would have sent spectators home with a hatred of militarism and of the forces that inveigled us into the war. But Vidor centered his comment upon the war in an absurd love affair between a French peasant girl and an American doughboy while men were being blown to bits. He omitted entirely any reference to the financiers and dollar-a-year men who were amassing fortunes. The Big Parade followed the beat of drums, and wove a halo around flag-waving and woman-hunting instead of bredding a great hatred of war and a profound pity for the millions of war’s victims. No wonder that Eisenstein pronounced The Big Parade as war propaganda. [Experimental Cinema, 1931]

Kevin Brownlow. In retrospect, Vidor achieved his aim [to become a second Griffith]. In the last years of the silent film, he directed an almost unbroken series of superlative pictures. But had The Big Parade been his sole contribution to the art of the cinema, his place among the screen’s greatest artists would still be secure. [brown war]

“The famous scene in which the girl, played by Renée Adorée, clings to the back of the truck was done not with one but with three trucks, which we kept circling around the camera; we shot it in Griffith Park near GIendale. Renée Adorée was wonderful. I was mad about her. She was actually French—not at that time a star, perhaps a minor young MGM contract player—and because of her background there was never any argument against using her.

“John Gilbert, on the other hand, was a star, and, in order to get him to appear in The Big Parade, they had sold it to exhibitors among a series of his “star films.” I won’t say I didn’t object to him, but using him was part of the deal. When the picture was finished and became a smash hit, they had to go around and cancel and buy out those contracts in which it had been included as just another John Gilbert starring vehicle. It became a big “special” film, sort of put MGM on the map.

The Big Parade was by far the top-grossing film of the 1920s. Final cost was $382,000. Earnings were $3,485,000.

“I lost a fortune by selling the percentage that I had. They did all kinds of things to get it away from me and they succeeded. I was making La Bohème and it was turned over to a lawyer to handle it for me. Later on I heard that the lawyer had accepted a big bonus for selling me out. It even got into Congress, and they tried to prevent me from talking about it by paying me off again. I didn’t talk too much about it. I didn’t want to ruin my life, but my twenty-five percent interest would have really been a fortune.” [dga]

Dir.: King Vidor. Sc.: Ray Doyle, Harry Behn. Story: Fred De Grasse, from Scènes de la Vie de Bohème (1851) by Henri Murger. Titles: William Counselman, Ruth Cummings. Ph.: Hendrik Sartov. Mus.: William Axt. Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons, Arnold Gillespie. Ed.: Hugh Wynn. Asst. dir.: Robert Florey.

With Lillian Gish (Mimi), John Gilbert (Rodolphe), Renée Adorée (Musette), George Hassell (Schaunard), Roy D'Arcy (Vicomte Paul), Edward Everett Horton (Colline), Karl Dane (Benoit), Frank Currier (theater manager), Mathilde Comont (Mme Benoit), Gino Corrado (Marcel), Gene Pouyet (Bernard), David Mir (Alexis), Catherine Vidor [King Vidor’s sister](Louise), Valentina Zimina (Phémie), Blanche Payson (factory director).

“Lillian’s theory of a love story was that they shouldn’t kiss or touch at all. She thought that would make it more exciting and we ended up doing it her way. When we showed the whole picture to Louis Mayer, he said, ‘I was expecting a great love story, and they never even kissed in the picture!’ Well, after that we went back and spent a couple of days putting in love scenes in which they touched and kised.” [dga]

Phyllis Moir. Both King Vidor and John Gilbert fell in love with Lillian [Gish]. For two or three days, when they rehearsed love scenes, Lillian would say with a sigh, “Oh, dear, I’ve got to go through another day of kissing John Gilbert.” Gilbert soon went from fantasy to reality. He fell in love with Lillian. He started writing her love letters and quarrelling with King Vidor. Lillian wouldn’t go out in public with Gilbert. She did not want it to get into the papers.” [gish]

Mordaunt Hall. New York Times, Feb. 25, 1926. A photoplay of exquisite beauty, an effort that constantly stirs the emotions… Miss Gish is marvelously clever in her portrayal of Mimi.…Mr. Gilbert shows throughout his portrayal that he is thinking the part. You can detect it in his eyes, and the same earnest effort is made by Miss Gish.…Here is a picture in which Mr. Vidor demonstrates that in length there is strength—that is in the length of the scenes. It is a production which is virtually flawless and one that will do its share to bring the screen to a higher plane.

Charles Affron. Gish, impressed with Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925) and its star John Gilbert, requested and obtained both for her first effort [at M.G.M.], La Bohème.…

Lillian Gish’s whole body renders the essence of a particular gesture or situation.…When [she] warms herself near Gilbert’s stove it is not just her hands or her nose, but the whole of herself, turning around, exploiting the opportunity…, the hands, the nose, and the body ceaselessly redefine the space and the object—stove.

The first extended love scene demonstrates the actress/director relationship. The teasing stand-offishness of Mimi is Gish’s invention….The sequence’s energy and movement, that headlong quality, are characteristic of the director who, from The Big Parade to Duel in the Sun (1947), and Ruby Gentry (1952) keeps his lovers on the go. The combination is irresistible, and John Gilbert’s participation is far from negligible.…

Gish’s Mimi animates the [picnic] scene, clapping her hands, darting about in a variation on her Griffith little-girl joy served up here with maturer ecstasy. Until this point in the film she has avoided the physical advances of Gilbert; her Mimi is a cloying and almost unbearable tease. (One wonders how the film would have turned out if, as intended, she had never kissed Gilbert.) The silliness and unpleasantness of this attitude has a purpose. She dances off into the woods, pursued by Gilbert. Averted kiss becomes yet another dance. Love is best expressed through distance—through the correlatives of the dance, the chase, the forest.…Because of Vidor, the frame is worthy of Gish’s pattern, which is to answer energy with energy.…

One of Vidor’s key obsessions—the heroine dragged or crawling—finds perhaps it most apt exponent in Lillian Gish, hanging onto the back of a cart and, in an unfaked shot, being pulled over the cobblestones. Renée Adorée in The Big Parade, Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun and Ruby Gentry, and Bette Davis in Beyond the Forest all grovel and stretch, but their sufferings are incidental to their careers; Gish was bred to the manner of pain. [aff]

Lillian Gish. Actually, the most trying sequence was the one in which Mimi runs through the streets of Paris trying to reach Rodolphe’s room. Jostled by the crowds, Mimi grabs a chain on a cart and is dragged on the cobblestones. Finally she jumps on the back step of a bus drawn by horses. At the end I was scratched and bruised and dirty, and a moment after the scene was completed the rear wheel of the vehicle broke away. Had I still been sitting there, my legs would have been crushed. [The Movies…]

Vidor: “The death scene she wanted to know [about] three or four days ahead so she could get all the saliva out of her mouth, and her checks began to look sunken, her eyes began to be sunken and it began to show in the physical makeup. When we shot the scene, it was so realistic I thought she had died—because she also had controlled her breathing to such a point that I was looking at her breast and I didn’t see it moving. [schic].

“I didn’t know the opera at the time. I saw it much later. [pos] They couldn’t buy the rights to it.” [dga]

Robert Florey. Vidor was the clamest man in the world. He would arrive, sit lazily in his chair, study the script and not speak to anyone. Then abruptly order a scene.…Vidor never opened his mouth but suddenly, interested by a gesture, would say it was fine and give the order to shoot. The scene would be redone several times, then photographed from every possible angle. Vidor never screamed, never lost his calm. To tell the truth, he gave the impression of not doing anything, yet not a single detail escaped him of what was happening under his eyes. [Hollywood d’hier et d’aujourd’hui (Paris: Prisma, 1948)]

1926, September. Vidor marries Eleanor Boardman at Marion Davies’ Beverly Hills house, as part of a “surprise” double wedding involving John Gilbert and Greta Garbo, which did not occur but led to a famous fistfight between Gilbert and Louis B. Mayer.

Dir.: King Vidor. Sc.: Dorothy Farnum from novel (1905) by Rafael Sabatini. Ph.: William Daniels. Sets.: Cedric Gibbons, James Basevi, Richard Day. Cost.: Andriani, Lucia Coulter. Asst. dir.: Robert Florey

With John Gilbert (Bardelys), Eleanor Boardman (Roxalanne de Lavedan), Roy D'Arcy (Chatellerault), Lionel Bellmore (Vicomte de Lavedan), Emily Fitzroy (Vicomtesse de Lavedan), George K. Arthur (St. Eustache), Arthur Lubin (Louis XIII), Theodore von Eltz (Lesperon), Karl Dane (Rodenard), Edward Connelly (Cardinal Richelieu), Fred Malatesta (Castelroux), John T. Murray (Lafosse), Joseph Marba (innkeeper), Daniel G. Tomlinson (sergent of dragoons), Emile Chautard (Anatol), Max Barwyn (Cozelatt).

Unsigned. Comoedia, Feb. 20, 1928. The great plumed hats, the velvet jerkins, the lace collars and the unsheathed swords forms an ensemble that adapts very well to the screen and when the stage manager …is a master of his art as is King Vidor…the result is both surely animated and graceful.” [Comuz., 35].

Moving Picture World, Nov. 13, 1926. Not intended to be taken seriously but it should provide genuine pleasure for all who go to the movies looking solely for entertainment.

“I didn’t much like Bardelys the Magnificent, a Rafael Sabatini story that attempted to establish John Gilbert as a Douglas Fairbanks-type swashbuckler. I was a little ashamed of it, and it wasn’t very successful.” [hgm]

1926. October 17. In an article in the New York Herald, Vidor remarks, “Personally, among my favorites and among those I consider the great works of the screen are the International Newsreel and “Felix the Cat.” Why? Because I can always look at them and be entertained, also instructed.”

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Irvlng Thalberg. Sc.: Kinq Vidor, John V.A. Weaver, Harry Behn, from story by King Vidor. Titles: Joseph W. Farnham. Ph.: Henry Sharp. Sets.: Cedric Gibbons, Arnold Gillespie. Ed.: Hugh Wynn.

With Eleanor Boardman (Mary), James Murray (John), Bert Roach (Bert), Estelle Clark (Jane), Daniel G. Tomlinson (Jim), Dell Henderson (Dick), Lucy Beaumont (Mary’s mother), Freddle Burke Frederick (the son), Alice Mildred Puter (daughter), Philippe de Lacey (John at 12).

According to Vidor, seven different endings were previewed and the film was distributed (but virtually never projected) with an alternate, happy ending: John and Mary celebrating Christmas in the mansion John’s successful advertising slogans have earned, and Mary saying, “Honest, Johnny, way down deep in my heart, I never lost faith in your for a minute.” Yet another ending had John and Mary in old age—as can be seen from a still reproduced in [brown war], p. 296.

“[MGM] had wonderful departments—art department and special-effects department—they were great. And they had the money. When they said go, you didn’t have to do any promotion. I’m not a good promoter at all, and that’s really what happened to my career. I didn’t like to spend so much time promoting, packaging things, [so] I sort of lost interest [after 1959]. But then at M-G-M [you could make something like The Crowd just on the basis of an idea. Well, a few years later it was ‘Let’s see the script; let’s see the play; let’s see what stars you’ve got’—and you had to package a thing more. And I found that not so suited to my taste. So big studios, to me, were a big help. And you had enough competition right in the studio itself. [schic]

Kevin Brownlow. “MGM was pretty liberal about letting me do the film” said Vidor. But it was only because of his amazing commercial success [with The Big Parade] that the company looked indulgently on the idea. Said the head of production, Irving Thalberg, “I can certainly afford a few experimental projects.”…Vidor made a list of important things that happen to the average man: birth, school, job, girl, marriage, baby…[And he] felt that a famous name in the lead would make it impossible for the audience to believe in an ordinary man losing his identity in the crowd.…One day a group of extras passed by…

James Murray was twenty-six; he had been a dishwasher, art student, florist, model, clerk, and even a hobo.…En route to New York to shoot locations, Murray pointed out railroad stations along the way; he had washed dishes at one, shoveled coal at another. “In The Crowd,” said Vidor, “we had a story that tells of life as I know it. The things that I was asked to do were things that I knew were real. There were many, I don’t know how many scenes in it that left me absolutely washed out and trembling at their finish. But without that preliminary batting around looking for something to hang on to I couldn’t have tackled it at all. I just couldn’t have known what it was all about.” Murray gave such an outstanding performance that he was cast by MGM in other pictures. Unhappily, like the character he played, he was already hooked on alcohol.…

When the boy’s father dies…the trigger for the scene came from Vidor’s own childhood: “I went back to my home town,” he said, “and went to the house where I was born, went up the stairs and looked down—and there was the stairway, the door and the automobile out in front at the curb. The whole thing was right there.”…

For] shots snatched in the streets of New York…, Vidor and cameraman Henry Sharp designed a rubber-tire pushcart, filled with packing cases. Inside was the camera.…

Although the film has gained a reputation as a financial failure, it actually made a profit of $69,000. [brown mas]

“Expressionism was going on at the time. We were thinking about it, we were greatly influenced by the German films. The Last Laugh, Variety, Metropolis, those were the three. They were arriving from UFA here and they were influencing us. They were beginning to use perambulators and boom shots. I was very much aware of forced perspective. We have a lot of it through the film. We also had sets built to the camera angle. The hospital corridors are built this way, and the hospital beds are in forced perspective, and even the doors in the hospital corridors got smaller and we used smaller men in the back. I can’t see it in the film, but I remember there was a discussion about getting midgets to work near the small doors in the back: we did use smaller men in the back. I was very aware—it was a time of the German Expressionist paintings, and the Picasso paintings were all with table tops tilted toward the painter, the viewer. [schic]

We actually made seven endings and tried them out. Seven different previews—and I finally came up with the ending where he’s lost again in the crowd. But they still didn’t want to buy that semi-cyclical ending and they made me send the picture out with a hppy ending also. The exhibitor had the right to choose one or the other. But I never heard of it being shown. [brown mas]

Eleanor Boardman. Suddenly I was cast in this downtrodden Mary-Doe-meets-John-Doe type of story—a boy and girl going through life with no education, no money, no knowledge of what they were doing. It was a job I had to do. I didn’t like to be so drab and unattractive. My hair was hanging down, there was no make-up…I didn’t object to it. I mean inwardly I did, but I made no objection about it. I had confidence in Vidor. He knew what he was doing. [brown mas]

Alan Hynd. Dave Howard [Vidor’s asssitant director] saves the director all sorts of trouble, for Vidor is nototious for not explaining himself, due to the fact that he thinks and talkes in the abstract. By that I mean that he has big ideas. [Motion Picture, Sep. 19, 1927]

Mordaunt Hall. New York Times, Feb. 20, 1928. a substantial and worthy pictorial feature that has the distinction of having been handled by King Vidor, producer of The Big Parade.…A powerful analysis of a young couple’s struggle for existence in this city. Throughout this subject Mr. Vidor shrewdly avoids the stereotyped conception of setting forth scenes, and in more than one case he uses his camera in an inspired fashion.

Richard Watts, jr. New York Herald Tribune. One of the most distinguished and exciting moving pictures ever made.

Welford Beaton. The Film Spectator, Apr. 14, 1928. The Crowd…is so full of thought that it will not be a box office success, in spite of the fact that it is one of the finest and most worthy motion pictures ever made.

Variety, Feb. 22, 1928. A drab, actionless story of ungodly length and apparently telling nothing.

Photoplay, December 1927. No picture is perfect but this comes as near to reproducing reality as anything you have ever witnessed.

Gilbert Seldes, The New Republic, March 7, 1928. The picture is extremely important because it breaks completely with the stereotype of the feature film. There is virtually no plot; there is no exploitation of sex in the love interest; there is no physical climax, no fight, no scheduled thrill. The characters, all commonplace people, act singularly unlike moving picture characters and singularly like human beings; there is no villain, no villainy, no success. The Crowd is absorbingly interesting, at moments charged with tremendous emotional excitement, exceptionally intelligent and satisfactory.…Here is a man who knows how to take moving pictures—an excessively rare thing in the moving picture industry. He takes them so that they have movement, so that they have beauty, and, rarest of all, so that they have meaning. A little boy comes up a flight of stairs to discover what has happened to his father: the stairs, the walls, the ceiling, form a long tapering rectangular box through which we look upon the little figure; by the time he is three-quarters of the way up, the father has died for us, although we have seen nothing of him, and Mr. Vidor breaks the movement by having another figure come down to meet the boy.

B.G. Braver-Mann. Everything in The Crowd dealt with externals already obvious and familiar to every film spectator. Externals predominated because Vidor is, after all, a groping, shallow-minded reporter instead of an artist, a film-poet, an interpreter of experience. That is why he gave us only the surface aspects of the crowd in its Coney Island mood, its shopping expeditions, its gulping of sandwiches and pop, its deadly uniformity. Vidor neglected to show to the spectator in the film-house that as a mass the crowd might exercise the collective will to shape its own destiny. The Crowd left the spectator in the film house resigned to the acceptance of defeat and futility. It offered no catharsis—no emotional release to the spectator in terms of experience. [Experimental Cinema, 1931.]

Roger Blin, La Revue du Cinéma, June 1930. [Vidor] has a wonderful and joyous contempt for all the intellectual precedents. He follows orders from his inner voices almost blindly, but only because he knows they are linked to the world. The mystery is how he makes them happen. What can be said about King Vidor’s work is this: An extraordinary sensibility allows him to get onto the screen details of life whose flesh would seem to defy visual transposition. These scenes, so little “directed,” conducted with all the humor of “the first time,” have led to King Vidor being called “Mark Twain writing with a camera.”…But since we were accustomed to seeing him as only an amiable or capable do-it-all, the surprise was immense when this man showed he was carrying a world inside of him. What’s extraordinary is not that he is carrying a world (Stroheim and Sternberg carry one too) but that this “world” has none of the character of other “worlds,” that it is not a crystalization or stylization of any sort. The stylization of King Vidor is an absence of stylization; it is a supplement of the concrete. How can a sensibility be recognized when it is dispersed through a hard carnal block, when the modes of expression and choice of details are the same before and after? How can we believe that films as one-sided and unintellectual as The Crowd and Hallelujah belong to an inner world? Do we need to search back into his poor and headstrong youth for the sources of one film, and to his childhood in Galveston for the other? True, these are two love stories. But where does this muscular genius come from which leads the characters infallibly to their destiny across a bedazzling series of details without a reference point like Sternberg’s romantic pity or Stroheim’s stubborn hate, which leads the young woman of The Crowd to a confession that is the cruelest and most naked one has had to hear, and Zeke Johnson [in Hallelujah] to peace of soul, after the three murders for which he has had to take responsibility?…

For the discovery of human mystery, Chaplin and the Russians are small boys next to King Vidor.…There is a scene in The Crowd, audaciously long, which is absolutely devastating: the young woman, after her husband departs, after the morning quarrel, discovers she is pregnant. No one has any doubt, yet she had made no big gesture. Everything is delicate, noble, and poignant.

Ugo Casiraghi. L’Unità, Feb. 24, 1982. Certainly alienation, in its Marxist sense, is a concept completely ignored by the very honorable Mr. Vidor, a Texas.” [comu]

John Grierson. It failed commercially, because people were too accustomed to the usual halcyon treatment of human life to stand it.…It cut across Hollywood’s world audiences like a whip. It hurt them. [Grierson on Documentary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966)].

Roberto Rossellini. Hallelujah and The Crowd made an unforgettable impression on me. In The Crowd, do you remember, when they marry without their families’ knowing, and he shaves to look nice and clean to meet the family, and then the in-laws arrive unexpectedly, and he goes out and has forgotten to wipe off a bit of soap still on his ear-lobe, you know? Things like that really struck me and perhaps put me on the road toward truth, toward reality. [Francis Koval, “Interview with Rossellini,” Sight and Sound, February, 1951. Pio Baldelli, Roberto Rossellini]

Mario Monicelli. [For] my episode in Boccaccio ‘70, “Renzo e Luciana,” I was distantly inspired by that masterwork of King Vidor’s, The Crowd, and I fought with De Laurentiis for two non-professional actors, because he wanted two American stars. [L’avventurosa storia, II]

Vittorio De Sica. Vidor: “I went to Italy last year [1969] and De Sica threw his arms around me and said, ‘Oh, The Crowd, The Crowd! That was what inspired me for Bicycle Thief.’ ” [dga]

James Card. After seeing The Crowd, who could forget the scene where that born loser, intent on suicide, is dissuaded from the act by his small son? As they walk along the bridge over the railroad tracks, the father weeping, the little kid reaches up and takes his dad’s hand. Vittorio De Sica did that moment again at the end of the Bicycle Thief. Certainly the Vidor scenes had impressed the Italian directors. Roberto Rossellini in Open City remembered Mélisande in The Big Parade trying to hold back the truck that was rushing Jim to the front, when he had Anna Magnani in the same sort of desperate protest. [card]

Vidor. “I was trying for a certain mood. I think that is why the Italians picked up neo-realism. It is realistic, and yet it is affected by an artistic feeling so that the realism never completely takes over. It has an artistic feeling as a far as precision goes, and yet it uses realism as a catalyst.” [dga]

Dir.: King Vidor. Sc.: Agnes Christine Johnstone, from play (1925) by Barry Connors. Titles: Ralph Spence. Ph.: John Seltz. Sets.: Cedric Gibbons. Editor: Hugh Wynn. Cost.: Gilbert Clark.

With Marion Davies (Patricia Harrington), Orville Caldwell (Tony Anderson), Marie Dressler (Mrs. Harrington), Dell Henderson (Mr. Harrington), Lawrence Gray (Billy), Jane Winton (Grace Harrington).

Georges Sadoul declares that in [the three pictures with Marion Davies] King Vidor resigned himself “to playing the role of Susan Alexander’s singing master in Citizen Kane,” thus to subordinating himself to Hearst, who sought to promote Davies the way Hearst-Kane to force his wife on the public as a singer. [comu]

Molly Haskell. [Marion Davies] was probably more hampered than helped by her lover-benefactor W.R. Hearst, who planted himself on the set and refused to let his darling’s hair be mussed. A hell-raiser who was adored by everyone, she was apparently forced into a more romantic mold than the one to which her inclinations, briefly sustained by Vidor [in three films], would have led her. Her thirties’ films, which were probably the only ones seen by Herman Mankiewicz and Welles before they did Citizen Kane, were terrible. Thus the portrait of Hearst/Kane’s protégé, the opera singer Susan Alexander, that is suppoedly based on Davies has more to do with Hearst’s promotion of her than with her real talent. But it has stood as the official estimation of her work for years, until revivals of the two [sic] Vidor comedies finally placed her in the rank of talented twenties’ comediennes where she rightfully belongs. [From Reverence to Rape (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1974), p. 65.]

Vidor. “William Randolph Hearst was a tremendous influence at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He had an association with them, and they were dependent upon the Hearst press. Now, when The Big Parade was such a big success, naturally he wanted to get me to do a film with Marion Davies. And I didn’t want to do one of the films as she had been doing them—they were all costume pictures, which I had no interest in whatsoever. [But] in trying to get me to do a film he worked on Mayer, and Mayer worked on me, and so we [went] to San Simeon, the Hearst ranch, and there I noticed that Marion Davies was a darn good comedienne. She used to entertain people and do imitations of people, and she had a great sense of comedy. So Laurence Stallings [and I] started discussing the possibilities of Marion as a good comedienne. I don’t know whether she had ever done comedy before, but certainly not imitations and clowning the way I had her in the pictures I made. [schic]

Mordaunt Hall. New York Times, Apr. 23, 1928. Of all the varied Cinderellas who have from time to time graced the screen, Marion Davies…not only holds her own in the matter of vivacity and appearance, but she also elicits more fun than one would suppose could be generated from even a modern conception of the undying rôle. She is ably assisted by the adroit direction of King Vidor.

Dir.: King Vidor. Story: Agnes Christine Johnstone, Laurence Stallings. Sc.: Wanda Tuchock. Titles: Ralph Spence. Ph.: John Arnold. Sets.: Cedric Gibbons. Cost.: Henrietta Frazer. Ed.: Hugh Wynn. Music [synchronized] and song, “Crossroads”: William Axt, David Mendoza.

With Marion Davles (Peggy Pepper), William Haines (Billy Boone), Dell Henderson (Colonel Pepper), Paul Ralli (André D’ Bergerac), Tenen Holz (casting director), Harry Gribbon (comedy director), Sidney Bracy (drama director), Polly Moran (maid), Albert Conti (producer), King Vidor, John Gilbert, Charles Chaplin, Lew Cody, Elinor Glyn, Douglas Fairbanks, George K. Arthur, William S. Hart, Rod La Rocgue, Mae Murray, Renée Adoree, Karl Dane, Leatrice Joy, Louella Parsons, Aileen Pringle, Dorothy Sebastian, Norma Talmadge, Estelle Taylor, Claire Windsor, Robert Z. Leonard (themselves), Rolfe Sedan.

“I’d already done a Marion Davies comedy called The Patsy, and the Hearst press was sufficiently powerful to compel MGM and me to make another. [hgm] Of my films, this last is one of the ones I enjoy most seeing again. [legu] Humor played a big part in our early lives. We were not making the films for immortality, we were making them somewhat for ourselves. We were thinking of giving the poeple we knew an inside joke. When [John Gilbert] saw the film he said, ‘You son-of-a-bitch!’ Douglas Fairbanks did these things at the dinner table. I went around and talked to each one, and asked the others what they would like to do. [Rod Golden was my] assistant on this film and he was playing the part of the assistant in the film also. [One] director chews the end of a handkerchief. This was patterned after John Ford. Years later Ford said to me, ‘You son-of-a-bitch! That was me!’ Then there is the director who is making the screen test. When he starts to have difficulties, he takes the back of his hand and hits his ear. This was a mannerism from Jack Conway. That was an actual casting office at MGM.…[The cops were actually Keystone cops.] You can’t actually get people and teach them those kinds of gags. The Sennett comedians had already finished their work quite a few years before. The Sennett studio was almost completely vacant. When we rented it out there were sets still standing, and the pool was one of them. [The Harry Gribbon character was based on] directors like McCarey, Capra, and the Keystone directors. The way they told storis was the way they spoke, and they all spoke in broad pantomime. They had everything down in gestures. They talked differently from the dramatic directors. I worked on some of those Sennett comedies as an assistant, and that was where I started to see some of those things.

Chaplin and Marion were very good friends. I remember we all used to drive out to the [Hearst] ranch together and have parties. There was not much convincing to do. [dga] Hearst had at least two hundred newspapers. It wasn’t possible to say no. If I had refused, he would banned my name.. I don’t know if he would have gone so far with Chaplin, but with me certainly, and Marie Dressler as well. He had immense power and showed up everywhere. [pos] Chaplin remained very independent, however, especially in his relationship with Marion, I think Hearst got a little jealous of him at times. She was very thoughtful, very kind, and very generous. She had no [pretentions] at all. She was always kidding herself, and even those around her. [dga]

Mordaunt Hall. New York Times, Nov. 12, 1928. A hardy satire on Hollywood life, directed by King Vidor, the versatile producer of The Big Parade. But he is not alone responsible for the gaiety in this motion picture, for Marion Davies shares honors with him through her unusually clever acting. Mr. Vidor, who more than once has proved himself a wizard in handling players, has accomplished here the seemingly impossible--by eliciting a restrained performance from William Haines.

1928. Vidor sails to Paris to present The Crowd. Eleanor Boardman and Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald accompany him. In Paris he meets Hemingway and Joyce, and spends two months there working with André Chamson on an adaptation of his novel Les Hommes de la route.

André Chamson. Confident, with some slowness, he appears as essentially attentive. This attention, sensible in his bearing, in his eyes and words, is neither flashy nor brutal, but continual and, for that reason no doubt, never tired. King Vidor does not display strokes of genius for you. He lets you come to him and shares many things with you. During our first encounters, I judged him asleep; seeing him again I realised that his apparent detachment was only the deep and continued apprehension due the object.…“The Friends of Spartacus” were then giving a private presentation of Russian films forbidden by the censorship.…King Vidor watched in silence, sunk in his chair, losing nothing, and I sensed him imagining around the work being projected all the labor of its creation.…More than the absence of stars, the players’ perfect ensemble struck him stringly. “We should let people from the street act.” [La Revue du Cinéma, Juin 1930.]

1929. HALLELUJAH. M.G.M. 12 reels. 108 min. 9711 ft. [silent version 6759 ft.]. August 20.

Dir.-Prod.: King Vidor. Sc.: Wanda Tuchock. Dialog.: Ransom Rideout. Treatment: Richard Schayer, from story by Vidor. Titles (silent version): Marian Ainslee. Ph.: Gordon Avil. Songs, “Waiting at the End of the Road,” “Swanee Shuffle,” by Irving Berlin. Musical supervision: Eva Jessye. Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons. Cost.: Henrietta Frazer. Ed.: Hugh Wynn, Anson Stevenson. Sound: Douglas Shearer. Asst dirs.: Robert A. Golden, [Lionel Barrymore, Harold Garrison].

With Daniel L. Haynes (Zeke), Nina Mae McKinney (Chick), William E. Fountaine (Hot Shot), Harry Gray (parson [Pappy]), Fannie Belle DeKnight (Mammy), Everett McGarrity (Spunk), Victoria Spivey (Missy Rose), Milton Dickerson, Robert Couch, Walter Tait (Johnson children), Dixie Jubilee Singers, Evelyn Pope Burwell (singer), William Allen Garrison (Dur).

“Everything in Hallelujah I saw when I was a child. All I had to do was simply to repeat things I had seen when I was young. I remember there was a black woman in our family. I made this movie for her. I should have dedicated it to her. I think that when a director is young, he puts in his films the things of his life, the things he has lived. He does it when he writes his own stories. Today, it should be the same thing. [pos]

“I was very impressed with [the blacks’] music, their feelings, their attitude toward life, their feelings about religion, and their feelings about sex and humor. As long as I can remember I wanted to make a film about them. I listed all of these things that I remembered, things that were marvelous to photograph and make into a film, but the studio kept turning the idea down. They didn’t want to make a film with all blacks in the cast. I went to Europe in 1928 with The Crowd, and in Paris I read in Variety magazine that sound was taking over the motion picture business. I took an early boat home and stopped in New York and visited Schenck, who was the president of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures Corp. I told him all of the things I wanted to do, and brought along a lost of scenes. They still were skeptical and didn’t want to go for it. Finally on the second day I came back and said, ‘You know you have to pay me. I have a contract for each picture, but I’ll draw no salary, and throw my own money in with yours.’

“Their first estimate for the budget at that time was around $350,000, and I had a contract for $100,000 per film. I alone would be putting up around a third of the budget. His reply was, ‘Well, if you think like that, I’ll let you make a picture about whores.’…

“I went to Chicago and New York to find the cast, and then from New York I went on to Memphis. It was difficult there because the blacks weren’t allowed in the dining rooms of the hotel. We had to rent a special hotel to do all the casting work. In Chicago we went to the Negro Baptist churches, listening to the choirs and talking to the people.…We also went to Negro nightclubs, always looking for people to cast. I saw a man standing on a street corner in Chicago and thought he was fine type for the minister father. Then we moved on to New York, rented a hall, and sent out word that we were looking for Negro people from the stage and choruses.

“We found Nina Mae McKinney there, the girl who played the lead. She was third from the right in the chorus in the play Blackbirds of 1929. Once we found her, it didn’t take very long to decide she was the one for the part. She just had it, whatever you wanted. Whatever you visualized, she could do it. If you have bad actors, you work like the devil to get an acceptable performance out of them. If you have a very good actor, you start where the bad actor leaves off. The same amount of time and effort is spent in just improving what a good actor can do, or adding to it. That’s the difference between an interesting performance and a dull performance. In the case of the father, when he’s looking up at the sky, we had big cue cards with his lines written on them.

“I had Paul Robeson in mind to play the lead, and when it came time to make the film, he was not available. Daniel Haynes was [his] understudy in Show Boat, so we got him. For the three young boys, when I was still searching, we saw these three boys come in [the hotel] and dance on the floor for contributions of dimes and quarters. We signed them up and put them in the picture.

“We shot a month or so in Memphis and then did the swamp scene in Arkansas. About half of [the film was shot on location]. We decided to make it a sound film, but we didn’t have any sound equipment on location. So, I had this terrible problem. If you shot a scene over two or three days, you had to remember the exact speed that the actors were singing at so that you could duplicate your shots from take to take. There was no portable sound equipment then. [dga] Post-synching Hallelujah was a madhouse. They had no equipment for doing it—movieolas or things of that kind. We had to run the thing in a projection-room equipped with a buzzer which, when pressed, flashed a light which acted as a signal to the operator to put a grease-pencil mark on the film. Of course, by the time you’d pressed the button and the shot had flashed on he’d put the pencll mark four or five feet away from where you’d intended. It was maddening. We did a lot of closeups back at the studio because of that.” [hgm]

Vidor watched a berserk cutter hurl a reel against the unspliced strips hanging against the wall like a beaded curtain, and fall sobbing in the tangles of weeks of work. [Slow Fade]

“I played the guitar and sang spirituals as far back as I can remember. In my home town of Galveston you could hear them down on the docks, pushing cotton bales around and singing songs, or even a melody without any words, just made up as they went along. I had the idea that we could express the feelings with a melody instead of dialogue. Melody is not quite the right word, but it was a sort of wailing type of thing. I planned scenes where we would write the music out of the mood of the scene, out of what we were trying to say.

“We always had a group of singers standing by on the sidelines to assist, and I had a Negro woman who was a musical director working for us. Her name was Eva Jessye, and within ten or fifteeen minutes she could work out a musical arrangement with her people so that we could say exactly what we wanted to say in each scene with the music. We did that about half a dozen times. They’d just come back, and one would start to wail, and the others would pick up at that point. Then the girl would say something like, ‘Deke is gone,’ and by the time you got the word, ‘gone’ out, the others would come right in and start to wail, ‘Oh, poor Deke, he’s never going to come back,’ or something like that. From that you go right into a song, a musical expression of what they’re feeling. The others pick it up, and you’re on your way.

“I had gone to preachings in the South, and to implement [the idea for Daniel’s ‘Express to Hell’ sermon], they did a lot of black recordings on discs for me to listen to. I had recordings of the best black preachers in the South. The shooting of that scene was done on the MGM lot. I remember distinctly the cutter going absolutely mad as he was trying to synchronize the soundtrack and the picture. The sermon was designed from our knowledge of the ministers and their style and form. [As for the baptism sequence,] I had attended the same thing when I was only ten or twelve years old. You can imagine the impression that the baptism had on me. There’d been about three or four of us white people there just inside the doorway watching all this going on. The people would go into hysterics and have to be escorted out. This was just something I could never forget. I saved the close shots until then, the big close-ups, where I thought they would really mean something at the time.

“Did you notice the tempo dropped down when the girl came back? This was to try to reach the point of ecstasy. The whole idea of the scene was to build to a point where he’d forget he was a preacher and just give in to the girl again. It’s the sex and religion theme going through the whole thing. The ecstasy arrived at such a high pitch with the lack of inhibition. This was all part of that religious expression and it fit in with being seduced by the girl. He left forever, just ran out the door and that was it. He left everything, career, family, and the rest of his home life. These scenes really are the heart of the Negro character, and we tried to preserve the purity of the ethnic quality of the Negro without interference from the vaudeville stage, or Tin Pan Alley, or even Broadway.

“The first budget that we started out with was around $120,000. Irving Thalberg took three or four months to look it over after I finished it. Then he flew in actors and actresses from all over the country, with all expenses paid, while he did post-production on the film. He added [Irving] Berlin’s songs then [‘The End of the Road’ and ‘Swanee Shuffle’].…I was against [them] because [they] seemed to have a Tin Pan Alley popular Broadway sound to [them] that I didn’t want. To this day it disturbs me. This resulted in the picture costing nearly $500,000. That money was wasted.” [dga]

Mordaunt Hall. New York Times, Aug. 21, 1929. That Texan, King Vidor, producer of The Big Parade and other outstanding cinematic achievements, is responsible for Hallelujah, a most impressive audible film with a negro cast.…So soon as Mr. Vidor strikes his stride he spins his tale with gradually growing emphasis…Throughout this talking and spasmatically singing study one appreciates that Mr. Vidor knows his subject, and it seems as though he permits some periods to drag just to add strength by contrast to his stirring episodes. Perhaps a few of the passages are a trifle dull, but in portraying the peculiarly typical religious hysteria of the darkies and their gullibility, Mr. Vidor atones for any sloth in preceding scenes.

Mordaunt Hall. New York Times, Jan. 5, 1930. Ten-best films of 1929. King Vidor’s negro production, Hallelujah, is an emphatically fine piece of artistry, a vivid, trenchant study of the darky. [Third, after Lubitsch’s Love Parade and George Arliss’s Disraeli. Dreyer’s Joan of Arc was fourth.]

Variety, Aug. 28, 1929. Owing to the uncertainty of universal appeal in an all-collored talking picture of the character of “Hallelujah” Variety prints three reviews by different writers. One on its premiere at the Embassy, New York, Aug. 20, at $2, and another on its reception at the Lafayette, all-colored theatre of Harlem, where the film is simultaneously appearing. The third review here is by a girl staff writer, and from the woman’s angle.

It is scarcely to be expected a trade paper reviewer could pass a casual opinion as to this universal appeal, which means so much to the producer in the way of a profitable return. Both of Variety’s male reviewers appear to think “Hallelujah” will mostly appeal in the sticks. It may be that “Hallelujah” will attract more strongly at $2 than in the pop price houses.

With “Hallelujah” the decision can only arrive with the returns. If the colored race can appeal on the shadowy screen to all, in other than colored comedy, the Negro dramatic and musical comedy actor may find a place in the studios.

Any other all-negro picture of the past is disregarded in favor of “Hallelujah” as the example for general picture fan favor here and abroad.

—Mark. In his herculean attempt to take comedy, romance and tragedy and blend them into a big, gripping, all-colored (Negro) talker, King Vidor has turned out an unusual picture from a theme that is almost as ancient as the sun in his “Hallelujah.” It is Vidor all over the screen. He wrote the story and directed it. It’s 100 to 1 shot that wherever it is shown in the white man’s theatres it will hold high tension and reel off whole entertainment. Vidor’s strict adherence to realism is so effective at times it is stark and uncanny.…

Where Vidor has achieved his greatest here is the taking of inexperienced players of both sexes from a race that hasn’t had all the progressive chances in the film world to get very far and established themselves as capable, willing actors, who by voice and action make impressionistic standouts of their respective parts. That is a big, worthwhile accomplishment.

Nina Mae McKinney as the dynamic, vivacious girl of the colored underworld, who lives by her wits and enmeshes the males by her personality, sex appeal and dancing feet, never had a day’s work before a picture camera.…She comes closest to being the Clara Bow of her race, so far seen on the screen.

—Land. King Vidor’s all-negro picture may be regarded as the climax and the popularization of that increasing body of sentiment which in recent years has found expression through such channels as the American Mercury and The Nation. It has tended to glorify the primitive negro life of the south and the emerging race consciousness and intellectual vigor of the colored people.…Simple emotions, primitive situations of love, lust, jealousy and remorese, a son who falls upon evil, accidentally kills his brother and in an agony of repentance, receives grace and turns preacher.

—Ruth Morris. It is generally believed that if a film cannot be called a “woman’s picture,” it won’t be a hit; this one isn’t, yet it should be a shamshing success. For many reasons.

One is that it rings true, even when good, old-fashioned hoke is injected. It’s a smooth piece of cloth with comedy threads interwoven where they belong.

Only femme dumb-bells will be bored with the fact that it has no hey-hey night club scene, no handsome white hero and no sparkling gowns which usually set the pace for what should not be worn. The thinking woman spectator will realize from the first few sequences that a fine intelligence is in back of the telling of the simple story, that a real feeling for artistic composition is in back of the photography, that the dialog in itself is a musical accompaniment and that a masterpiece is unfolding on the screen.…

Welford Beaton. The Film Spectator, Nov. 2, 1929. Not even superlatives can do it credit. It is a gorgeous poem of the South.…There is one sequence in it which I think is the finest thing ever done by an American director.…The villain flees in terror through a swamp…Behind him comes the relentless pursuer. The villain runs, stumbles, and sometimes falls, but the pace of the hero is always the same, a deliberate, deadly, menacing advance.

Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film, 1939. [Vidor] declared at this time in many interviews with the press that he intended to record noises into patterns and formalize the sound background. An admirer of the animated cartoons, he believed much was to be learned from them. At the same time Vidor expressed the desire to adapt for the screen the views and manifestations featured in the work of modern artists such as Leger, Picasso, Matisse, and Chirico. He pointed out that painters got extraordinary effects by distortion and that the same could be done in the movies, adding that the way Hollywood was making pictures was not necessarily the only way

Roger Blin, La Revue du Cinéma, June 1930. Hallelujah’s most sublime scene for me is the fat mother waking up in tears, knowing, having seen it, miles away, that Spunk is dead. The mystic grandeur of this premonition is barely supportable. What, in comparison, is that other mother in Pudovkin’s nonetheless admirable movie, if not an entity?…Hallelujah is one of those works capable of changing life, impossible to be relegated to the field of Art.…The director’s great quality is that he does not place himself above the Negroes whom he presents. If he judged them, he doe not let it be seen. He does not show it.

Hallelujah is saturated with sweat and blood. There are no problems, there are simply people and between them runs the flesh of words, such that one cannot follow one without being grabbed by the next, which was already dimly beginning. There is Parson Johnson, the noble father who trembles while praying. Mammy, the slow, heavy, drooping mother who says virgin graces and sings with a small thin voice. Zekiel, virile and a bit theatrical, as serious as his mission. Spunk, the little brother who wears a felt hat with a lace border. Chick the prostitute whose dress has a white heart on it. There are the children who dance the charleston coming into the world, already so voluptuous that they plunge with delight into the slumber songs. There are the anonymous long-limbed neighbors whose words are unnerving and carnal because they come too clearly from the inner throat. There is the plantation crowd, the poets of the maternal nights, there is the dog on the farm. One would say there is only the black race in the world.…

It is because God is mixed up in all their actions, present from one end of the film to the other. In Hallelujah God is immediately off frame. In the clearing, near the swamp in the strange chapel, everyone prays to God and conjures the devil. They pray savagely: it is a total offering of eyes, nostrils, stomachs. Their only talent is the languge of love, and they use it.

J. Bernard Brunius, La Revue du Cinéma, June 1930. Anyone whose senses are so obliterated that they can resist something as spellbinding as this is, in my consideration, pitiable and defrocked.

Jean Cassou, La Revue du Cinéma, June 1930. Hallelujah allows us to measure the immense superiority of the Negroes in the United States over the whites who inhabit that same country.

Louis Chavance, La Revue du Cinéma, June 1930. I think the film’s adversaries are mostly people who have not been touched to the extraordinary musicality that envelopes its wonderful savagery.

André Gide, La Revue du Cinéma, June 1930. I was expecting a lot. Nonetheless my satisfaction surpassed my hope. It seems to me to address both the masses and the happy few, as every work of art ought to do.…

In art, the more passion is excessive and absurd, the more it escapes banality, and the more it is important that it be presented reasonably, in a manner that makes it plausible. Completely soaked in lyricism, and prodigiously expressive, each shift is achieved by King Vidor with majesterial ingenuity and subtle psychological comprehension, so ably motivated that it seems as natural as necessary.…One cannot imagine this film without its musical side, which makes Hallelujah a sort of symphony with allegros, andantes and largos, and presto agitatos where word itself is not mixed in except as a rhythmic element. And when the human voices are quiet, in the long scene of the chase through the flooded forest, there is nothing more impressionable that the simple lapping of the stagnant water; this whisper of eternal nature, which replaces the passing human plaint in time, seems the voice itself of a somber fatalness.

Darius Milhaud, La Revue du Cinéma, June 1930. It is perfectly in focus and it is rigorously true.

G. Ribemont-Dessaignes, La Revue du Cinéma, June 1930. This is a date in the history of cinema that one can mark with a white cross: humanity is on trial.…And yet, in Hallelujah, there is nothing but cinema in its last form, that is, a succession of images and sounds.…Nothing moves me more than these gestures and songs which revela, with such sharpness, the solitude of people in the middle of the mysteries they forge for themselves.

Francesco Savio. True, Vidor accepted the conventional image of the American Negro, but only because this allowed him to situate poetically its contradictions and real torments. [Visione privata (Roma: Bulzoni, 1972), p. 134.

Thomas Cripps. Halelujah…neatly caught the piety and enthusiasm of rural religion, while only occasionally lapsing into sterotyped gamblers and mammies. The film did well even in New Orleans; and in Memphis, Baltimore, and other Southern towns it ran without comment.…[It] followed Hearts of Dixie [Paul Sloane, Fox, 1929] and outdid it in deep-felt sensitivity for Negro life. By looking deeper into American racial arrangements, including the process or urban migration, it also exposed greater tension and hostility.…

Vidor knew enough of Southern black life to realize his ignorance. So in addition to the MGM writer Wanda Tuchock, who new nothing of blacks, he also took on Harold Garrison, a black employee of the studio who was given the title of “assistant directo,” at least in the releases to the Negro press. With Garrison in town, even if their lines of observation of Negro life curved from different approaches, they were at least tangential. Together they would tell the rich story of the pristine Southern Negro rather than “the Negro who apes the white man.” And in so doing they would go into the country and shoot its beauty and place the black man in it. Only then could Vidor reach into the contrasts of the black city where Hearts in Dixie had averted its eyes. Only there would they find the deep sources of conflict in the black soul under the layers of white man’s civilization…

Black performers…fought each other for the good roles in the brief season of Northern tryouts. After Vidor’s press releases, in which he cast himself as a sympathetic Southern observer who had “a great feeling for the black people,” Negroes hurried from New York and Chicago nightclubs, from the ranks of black workers, and from “on the street” to audition. “Film fame beckons and harlem is agog,” the Times reported.…Daniel Haynes, the male lead, had earned a diploma from an élite Negro college, but the press flacks reported only his ability to register primitive religious ecstasy.…To Hearst’s Louella Parsons [the cast] were: “Dusky belles, tall young black-skinned boys, plump mamies and pickaninnies…swarming about the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer lot, giving it the appearance of a California Harlem, or a real ‘down south’ plantation.” [Slow Fade to Black (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977)]

Vidor. “The exhibitors’ problem in selling it was to try to avoid attracting a large percentage of Negro patrons into the theatre, and I had to go around personally and endeavour to upset that.

“The big Chicago theatre-owners refused to show the film, so a fellow in a small side-street theatre booked it, gave a dinner-and-black-tie opening, and after that the theatre was constantly sold out. Only then did Balaban and Katz, operators of the large movie-houses, agree to show Hallelujah We always had to break the barrier like that.

“The same thing happened in the South. I’d make a bet with an exhibitor that the film would do as well as his current attraction, and it did; but the trouble again was that they were afraid that the theatre would be filled with Negroes and they didn’t want that. It didn’t necessarily mean that it would attract only Negroes, but that was their problem.

“It was an artificial problem, too, because people in the South were genuinely interested in the Negroes and in their life; certainly there were no racialist objections to the film at all. The Negroes themselves loved it. Whether they would today is, of course, another matter.” [hgm]

Thomas Cripps. Critics everywhere, black and white, echoed praise while urban blacks showed vague unease. In New York Richard Watts found it “one of the most distinguished and exciting motion pictures ever made,” and others agreed. The Post called it “truly great”; the World, “a daring departure from its timid predecessors.” Elsewhere effusive praise was joined by occasional patronizing comments. Edwin Schallert of The Los Angeles Times thought it “barbaric, weird, fantastic” and “oddly fascinating and sometimes oddly repellent.” Hearst’s paper in Los Angeles printed [Louella] Parsons’s estimate that it was no more than a faithful recording of “the colored folk, who were curiously susceptible to religion.” Pasadena, Detroit, Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Portland—wherever it played critics grew hyperbolic. In Baltimore the reviewer in the staid Baltimore Sun chided local bookers for delaying its opening and running it at a tiny arthouse. Elsewhere in the South exhibitors outdid themselves in selling the picture. In Salisbury, North Carolina, Negro preachers and academics previewed it. Savannah showed it to civic leaders so as to disarm their hostility. Other towns used publicity stunts to insure its running without incident. The Louisville Courier-Journal asked readers to admire both the “natural” Negro and Haynes’s “welltrained” voice. At its worst, white newspaper criticism focused on “the primitiveness of Africa and the comparative civilization of negro life along the Mississippi” or “the keen insight into the character of the old time plantation negro.” The fan magazines Screenland, Motion Picture Classic, Screen Secrets, and Photoplay weighed in with friendly feature stories. The middle-brow Literary Digest summed up the favorable criticism with an unpatronizing white recognition of Negro cultural uniqueness that was itself unique. Not only was Vidor’s film “something new under the sun,” but also a positive statement that “the Negro is as different from the rest of us as we are from the Russians, the Germans, or the French.”

…Only on the political wings did hostility run strong. The Marxist critic Harry Alan Potamkin found it a cheap gesture at evading black bourgeois criticism by maligning only the “lowly.” And in England, where no American reader intruded, the conservative James Agate merely huffed in contempt. “Personally, I don’t care if it took Mr. Vidor ten years to train these niggers; all I know is that ten minutes is all I can stand of nigger ecstasy,” he wrote. “I am completely tired of expositions of the negro by whites.”

Negroes, on the other hand, were torn by the ambiguous social significance of Hallelujah. They knew too much.…The broad central stream of black opinion took its lead from Congressman DePriest’s approval of the picture as a sign of liberal progress.…The NAACP [National Association for the Advancement of Colored People] organ, the Crisis, joined in the praise, focusing on the drama and the use of expressive hands to capture the mood of black religion.…W.E.B. DuBois…, the most prestigious brain in Negro circles…, found it an important contribution to American life, false only in the absence of oppressive whites who caused black malaise.…As to those black “numbskulls” who found fault with the picture, the Amsterdam News, fearful of scaring Hollywood into retreat from its black cycle, warned them that they sang in unison with the racist Southern exhibitors who had passed a resolution condemning Negro movies.…The Whip, despite its grudging admiration for parts of the picture, summed up the dissenters’ cavil: “A subtle vehicle of race prejudice, it is a diabolical insinuation upon the religious integrity of the Baptist church, it is a contemptible portrayal of the weaknesses and misfortunes of a lowly people…and holds up colored people of our country to disgust, jeers and disrespect.” [Slow Fade to Black]

Pare Lorentz. Judge, Sep. 21, 1929. After tearing my collar off and yelling myself hoarse over Hallelujah, I thought I had better go back and see it again,just to make sure. Besides, I read a review in Time that annoyed me. Said the anonymous critic of Time: ‘Before the end of this picture you get the idea that King Vidor…does not know much about Negroes but that he has guessed and reasoned out a lot.”…The revival scenes in Hallelujah are not typical revival scenes, but they were not created out of fantasy either. I have seen a hundred Negro services, and the only two that resembled the movie ceremonies were Holy Roller camp meetings in the Southwest. They were, however, the most exciting and primitive orgies I had ever seen. If you think Vidor “guessed” his movie scenes, then Conrad guessed at the characters of seamen. [ Lorentz on Film (New York: Hopkinson & Blake, 1975), p. 33.]

Alexander Walker. For the long tracking shots…through the Arkansas swamplands, Vidor deliberately overlaid the visuals with heightened and impressionistic sound effects—the cracking of sticks sounding like broken bones, the sucking of the swamp like a greedy quicksand, birds crying savagely and louder than nature intended.…

[There were] two concurrent New York premières, one at the Embassy Theater in downtown Manhattan, the other at the Lafayette, Harlem.…The reaction of the up-town whites was, perhaps predictably, self-consciously appreciative. The black reaction was more complex [but] gives the contemporary lie to many later accusations by guilty liberals that the film was exploitatively condescending to a Negro unreality. [ Shattered Silents (New York: Morrow, 1979), pp. 189, 190.]

Unsigned. Cinema [UK], January 1930. [When Zeke returns home with his brother’s body, the dialogue is] incoherent, yet Mammy’s shrill soprano wailing, the children’s whimpering treble, Missy Rose’s passionate contralto, and Massa’s grief-stricken bass all combine to make a magnificent speaking chord of purest music. [Quoted by Walker, p. 189]

1930. NOT SO DUMB. M.G.M. Pictures. 85 min. 9 reels. 7650 ft. [silent version: 6875 ft.] January.

Dir.: King Vidor. Prods.: Marion Davies, Vidor. Sc.: Wanda Tuchock, from play Dulcy (1921) by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly. Dialog: Edwin Justus Mayer. Titles (silent version): Lucille Newmark. Ph.: Oliver Marsh. Ed.: Blanche Sewell. Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons. Gowns: Adrian.

With Marion Davies (Dulcy), Elliott Nugent (Gordon), Raymond Hackett (Bill), Franklin Pangborn (Leach), Julia Faye (Mrs. Forbes), William Holden (Mr. Forbes), Donald Ogden Stewart (Van Dyke), Sally Starr (Angela), George Davis (Perkins), Rufe Lafayette (grandmother).

“I didn’t want to make too many of this type of picture.…At that time you were put into different categories if you made certain types of films.…I wanted to be considered a director of unusual or important films.” [dga]

Mordaunt Hall. New York Times, Feb. 8, 1930. Marion Davis, who is always her best under the direction of King Vidor, shines… The lion’s share of the credit, however, must go to Mr. Vidor for his fine direction.

1930. BILLY THE KID. M.G.M. Pictures. 98 min. 11 reels. 8808 ft. Distributed in 70mm and 35mm versions. October 17.

Dir.: King Vidor. Sc.: Wanda Tuchock, from The Saga of Billy the Kid, by Walter Noble Burns (1926). Dial.: Laurence Stallings. Additional dial.: Charles MacArthur. Ph.: Gordon Avil (Realife. 70 mm). Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons. Editor: Hugh Wynn. Cost: David Cox.

With Johnny Mack Brown (Billy the Kid), Wallace Beery (Garrett), Kay Johnson (Claire), Wyndham Standing (Tunston), Karl Dane (Swenson), Russell Simpson (McSween), Blanche Frederici (Mrs. McSween), Roscoe Ates (Old Stuff), Warner P. Richmond (Ballinger), James Marcus (Donoven), Nelson McDowell (Hatfield), Jack Carlyle (Brewer), John Beck (Butterworth), Christopher Martin (Santiago), Marguerita Padula (Nicky Whoosiz), Aggie Herring (Mrs. Hatfield), King Vidor (man at bar).

“I became interested in the character because of the tie-in between the gentleness and destructive anger that co-existed within this man. The combination was a new character for films. It appealed to me very much. I tried for three or four years to get an approval for this story.

“Finally Thalberg told me if I would use Johnny Mack Brown, I could do the film. I didn’t think that Brown had the violent look of a killer. Cagney was quite young and I thought about using him. However, I was alaways trying to pick a face out of the crowd, someone who had not been established yet. Alan Ladd had the gentle, frightened character who could turn into a violent killer in a flash. He did that in Shane. I would have rather discovered someone who thought in that manner. But I had to abandon all of those thoughts. [Similarly] the real character Pat Garrett would not come through as definitely and strongly as a man like Wallace Beery.

“Not only the [Lincoln] Counry Courthouse, but the entire street was built from photos we found of the town. The street was just the way those early photographs looked. We might have used our imagination for the Tunston House, and the bar, but everything else is very realistic. I had Stallings with me on the set in the studio. There was quite a bit of [improvised dialogue].

“The 70mm [version] had a feeling of depth and stereoscopic reality. Both cameras were right alongside each other when we filmed. In the rushes, we’d run the 70mm stuff first, and then the 35mm. The difference was tremendous. There was just no comparison. The 70mm film seemed to see around each object. This sold me forever on wide screen films. We had to make both versions because there were only twelve theatres in the country that could run the wide screen material.

“The great thing about the MGM system was that the negative was shot on 70mm, but it was then reduced to 35mm for the prints. The discovery was that if you reduced the film down to 35mm, it would then stand the enlargement just as if it were really 70. [dga] William Fox made a wide-screen revue-type film about the same time, but since the industry was still paying for sound equipment he and the MGM executives got together and withdrew the wide-screen system because of its extra expense.” [hgm]

Mordaunt Hall. New York Times, Oct. 19, 1930. This picture is chiefly noteworthy for this enlarged screen idea [Realife] for the story is only moderately entertaining and often unconvincing Western melodrama. The scenes in the open, however, are impressive…The enormous screen permits the director to unfurl his story with fewer close ups than would be employed in the standard-size screen, but Mr. Vidor still takes advantage occasionally of the close-ups to emphasize the expressions or actions of the characters.

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Samuel Goldwyn. Sc.: Elmer Rice, from his play (1929). Ph.: George Barnes. Ed.: Hugh Bennett. Art dir.: Richard Day. Mus.: Alfred Newman. Asst. dir.: Lucky (Bruce) Humberstone.

With Sylvia Sidney (Rose Maurrant), William Collier, Jr. (Sam Kaplan), Estelle Taylor (Anna Maurrant), Russell Hopton (Steve Shankey), David Landau (Frank Maurrant), Greta Granstedt (Mae Jones), Beulah Bondi (Emma Jones), Nora Cecil (Alice Simpson), Max Montor (Abe Kaplan), Louis Natheaux (Harry Easter), Matthew McHugh (Vincent Jones), John Qualen (Karl Olsen), Eleanor Wesselhoeft (Greta Fiorentino), T.H. Manning (George Jones), Anna Konstant (Shirley Kaplan), George Humbert (Filippo Fiorentino), Adele Watson (Olga Olsen), Allan Fox (Dick McGann), Lambert Rogers (Willie Maurrant), Virginia Davis (Mary Hildebrand), Helen Lovett (Laura Hildebrand), Kenneth Seiling (Charlie Hildebrand), Conway Washburne (Dan Buchanan), Howard Russell (Dr. John Wilson), Richard Powell (Officer Harry Murphy), Walter James (Marshall James Henry), Harry Wallace (Fred Cullen), Monti Carter, Jane Mercer, Margaret Robertson, Walter Miller.

“The Assignment to do Street Scene was quite a prize. It was a well-written, well-constructed play by Elmer Rice, certainly above the ordinary play in scope and meaning. [dga] I didn’t want to spoil the stage play by going into interiors or moving away from the front of the house, nor did I want to photograph it deadpan: that was the challenge. I wanted to preserve the play’s purity and still have what used to be called ‘action.’

“My solution was to do it by change of camera setups, by change of composition: the composition became the action. We had a street built on the Goldwyn lot and didn’t leave it at all except for one scene inside a taxi, from which the characters walk out into the front of the house; but that wasn’t really an interior scene in the strict sense.

“This was a pure experiment—I didn’t know if it could be done successfully. [hgm]

“Instead of building a whole New York block, we put the house at one end of a half-block, and then built another house, identical to the first at the other end of the street. This way, when we were shooting on one house, the other house could be prepared for the next shot.” [dga]

Mordaunt Hall. New York Times, Aug. 27, 1931. Judging by the throng outside the Rivoli lastnight, the mounted policemen adding to the general excitement by riding their horses on the sidewalk, on which was a police car, King Vidor’s pictorial conception of Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize play…is a film that has stirred up a great deal of interest.…It is a swiftly moving production…but one that in comparison with the play always seems to be more than slightly exaggerated. It is a good picture, but the acting lacks the naturalness of the original work and the lines are invariably overstressed.

Dir.-Prod.: King Vidor. Sc.: Leonard Praskins, from a story by Frances Marion. Additional dial.: Wanda Tuchock. Ph.: Gordon Avil. Ed.: Hugh Wynn. Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons. Sound: Douglas Shearer. Asst. dir.: Robert A. Golden.

With Wallace Beery (Andy Purcell, “The Champ”), Jackie Cooper (Dink), Irene Rich (Linda Carson), Roscoe Ates (Spunge), Edward Brophy (Tim), Hale Hamilton (Tony), Jesse Scott (Jonah), Marcia Mae Jones (Mary Lou), Lee Phelps (Louie, the barman), Frank Hagney

“When we got down to the end of the picture, [Jackie Cooper] had to have this very hysterical sobbing scene. I wanted to achieve something a little beyond fake acting. I wanted to really feel it. We did many things to get him to really feel the emotion. He and Red Golden were good friends, so I told Jackie that I was going to fire Red. We even told him that his mother was being taken to the hospital. I’m sure he didn’t believe these stories, but he was enough of an actor to understand what we were doing, and he went along with it. Pretty soon he swung into it and became hysterical, and started to throw a tantrum.

“I was seeing a lot of Chaplin, we usually had dinner at Musso and Frank’s and then we would walk the lenth of Hollywood Boulevard. I always timed it so that we would be walking past [Grauman’s Chinese Theatre] when The Champ was getting out. I would watch the people come out with their handkerchiefs in their hands, wiping their eyes. This was a great joy to me.

“Beery told me he would do the role if it didn’t require any fighting. He was supposed to just do the scenes where he would get up off the ground, and we were going to use doubles for the long shots. The day we were to shoot those scenes, I saw him standing around with several beautiful girls. I said to the assistant director, ‘See those girls? After he leaves them, get them to come over and sit on the set when he does the scene.’ They showed up for the scene, and when it was time to do the fight scene, I said, ‘All right, bring on the doubles.’ Beery stood up and said, “‘What do you mean? I do all my own fighting!’ [dga]

“I don’t know whether you remember Jackie Cooper walking up on a roof of a house and singing a song and sticking cigarettes in his pocket—well, this was Marion Davies’ [bungalow] on the MGM lot, but it was ad lib, off the cuff, because I was in the mood—‘I don’t have to worry, this story is so tight that I don’t have to concentrate on telling the story. It works anyway.’” [schic]

See Vidor’s comment on Stella Dallas (1937) for his contrast of it and The Champ.

Mordaunt Hall. New York Times, Nov. 10, 1931. Mr. Vidor…has tackled this venture in a restrained fashion, always permitting the performces of Master [Jackie] Cooper and Mr. [Wallace] Beery to hold up a sequence that mght have been banal and trite without them.…One wondered why Mr. Vidor had undertaken the direction of this picture and also why this type of screen chronicle had been selected to succeed that grand production The Guardsman [at The Astor Theatre].…Frances Marion, the author of this story, has written one of those tried and trusted affairs that were all very well in the days of old silent pictures, but something more novel and subtle is needed now.

Bige. Variety, Nov. 17, 1931. King Vidor nor anyone can direct a boy into playing this scene as this boy played it. It’s as though Jackie really feels [his father’s death], and because of this the audience feels it along with him.

John Grierson. Vidor is a good director who takes films seriously, his one fault being a tendency to equate seriousness with pessimism. This fallacy is very common in America: I leave the sociologists to guess why.…You must…endure the heart failure of the final episode as best you can. It means that Jackie can be taken at long last to a nice home, a good education and a fitting environment. The film tells you so, and presumably romance is thereby satisfied. There is one scene in The Champ where Beery arises after a dirty night and goes through the odd gestures of coming properly to life again. From the chorus of reminiscent chuckles around me, I was led to believe that Beery had made a masterpiece of it. The reminiscent chuckles are passed on for your consideration. [Grierson on Documentary, p. 87.]

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod : David 0. Selznick. Sc.: Wells Root, from play (1911) by Richard Watson Tully. Additional dial.: Leonard Praskins, Wanda Tuchock. Ph.: Clyde De Vinna. Art dir.: Carroll Clark. Mus.: Max Steiner. Song: Milia Rosa & Peter de Rose. Choreography: Busby Berkeley. Asst. dirs.: H.B. Humberstone, Fred Fleck.

With Dolores Del Rio (Luana), Joel McCrea (Johnny Baker), John Halliday (Mac), Creighton Hale [aka Lon Chaney, Jr.] (Thornton), Richard “Skeets” Gallagher (Chester), Bert Roach (Hector), Pukai (king), Agostino Borgato (medicine man), Sophie Ortego (old native), Wade Boteler (yacht captain).

“Miss Hill rode in my car to the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. ‘Where is the script?’ she asked. ‘There isn’t any,’ I said. ‘You mean we’re going to write tomorrow’s scenes this afternoon?’ ‘I hope so,’ I said. ‘This is an even crazier business than I thought it was,’ she said. ‘Why does the studio permit such nonsense?’ ‘They don’t know about it,’ I said. ‘Don’t know about it?’ It sounded like a threat. ‘Why bother them?’ I asked. She looked at me with disgust. [tree]

“When we first got [to Hawaii], there were no palm trees, so we had to have the telephone company move them down to where we were going to shoot. Then a tremendous storm blew all the leaves off the trees, The men had to crawl back up and nail them on. It also rained the entire time we were there. I think we had about three or four days the whole time. So, we finally came back to California and went to Catalina and shot the rest of the stuff there. I was very much in the romantic mood at the time. I figured that if we had enough exotic, romantic locations, that would be all we needed.” [dga]

Mordaunt Hall. New York Times, Sep. 10, 1932. A languid film with many beautifully photographed scenes …, the sort of things which F.W. Murnau did so much better in Tabu.… Mr. Vidor revels in sequences with sharks, a whirlpool and a volcano in eruption.

1932. While shooting in Hawaii, Vidor begins an affair with his script clerk, Elizabeth Hill. He divorces Eleanor Boardman in 1933; headline-making battles followed over custody of their two daughters, Belinda and Antonia.

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod: Samuel Goldwyn. Sc.: Frances Marion, Lynn Starling, from play Cynara (1930) by H.M. Harwood and Robert Gore-Brown, drawn from novel An Imperfect Lover by Gore-Brown. Ph.: Ray June. Ed.: Hugh Bennett. Art dir.: Richard Day. Mus.: Alfred Newman.

With Ronald Colman (Jim Warlock), Kay Francis (Clemency Warlock), Henry Stephenson (Hon. John Tring), Phyllis Barry (Doris Lea), Viva Tattersall (Milly Miles), Florine McKinney (Gorla), Clarissa Selwyn (Onslow), Paul Porcasi (Joseph), George Kirby (Mr. Boots), Donald Stuart (Henry), Wilson Benge (Merton), C. Montague Shaw (Constable).

“I see a reflection of my own character and attitude. Conditioned thinking tried to freeze everything like love and romance into a set category, with set responses. I know that my life work has been to upset this tradition. The guy is in love with his wife, but is he a dirty bastard for being in love with the other girl? Of course not. He’s attracted to her, and she fills a need. He respects the girl, likes her, and feels a certain amount of tenderness toward her. It’s a real theme of love being universal, and not being confined to one person.” [dga]

Mordaunt Hall. New York Times, Dec. 26, 1932. King Vidor…gives to his scenes effective and restrained guidance, with the result that the incidents move along at a pleasing pace. …There is a pleasing sincerity about [Ronald Colman’s] acting, which evidently has been helped by Mr. Vidor’s imaginative direction.

Dir.: King Vidor. Assoc. prod.: Lucien Hubbard. Sc. Brown Holmes, Phil Stong, from novel (1933) by Phil Stong. Ph.: William Daniels. Ed.: Dick Fantle. Art dir.: Frederic Hope. Interior dec.: Edwin B.Willis. Gowns: Adrian. Sound: Douglas Shearer.

With Lionel Barrymore (Grandpa Storr), Miriam Hopkins (Louise Storr), Franchot Tone (Guy Crane), Stuart Erwln (Simon), Irene Hervey (Nettie), Beulah Bondi (Beatrlce), Grant Mitchell (Allan Redfield), Ted Alexander (Widdle), Aileen Carlyle (Thelma Redfield).

Scott Eyman. Miriam Hopkins embarked on what she imagined to be a top-secret affair with King Vidor, who was directing her in The Stranger’s Return. Lubitsch wanted Hopkins for the female lead in his adaptation of Noël Coward’s Design for Living and sent her a script. One night, after a tryst, Hopkins asked Vidor to read the script with her. They were both enchanted, at least until they got to the last page. There they found a scribbled note in Ernst [Lubitsch]’s handwriting: “King—Any little changes you would like, I will be happy to make them. Ernst.” [Ernst Lubitsch (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993)]

Vidor. “I had been looking for a certain type of architecture, and I was inspired by several paintings by Grant Wood. We built some of the buildings out there in Chino. The farm has always been my favorite atmosphere. I used to be kidded a lot about some of the symbolism I used with the plow turning over the earth. It meant a new cycle of life, a new generation.”

There is a line at the end when Miriam Hopkins says: “Sometimes we are entitled to all we can get out of life.”

“Philosophically, the emphasis is all on duty and obligation, and nobody has the courage to say, ‘This is what I’d like to do.’ It is always the dichotomy of conflicting forces, the dichotomy of following something from a vague sense of duty, or else being honest and true with yourself. These things weren’t clear to me during this film, although I was going through psychoanalysis five or six times a week back in Los Angeles. I do not remember if I wrote that line or not. At least it is a thing that might show through in a number of my pictures. The romance I had with Miriam Hopkins broke me up and left me with a terrible torch.” [dga]

A.D.S. [Andre Sennwald]. New York Times, Jul. 28, 1933. Having a full appreciation for honest dramatic writing, King Vidor has staged the novel excellently.…The new film emerges as a shrewd, delightful and altogether effective entertainment, with a hearty and brilliant performance by Lionel Barrymore as the season’s liveliest octogenarian.

1934, August. Vidor sales for Europe to present Our Daily Bread in Paris and London.

Dir.-Prod.: King Vidor. Sc.: Elizabeth Hill, from a story by King Vidor. Additional dial.: Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Ph.: Robert Planck. Asst. ph.: Reggie Lanning. Ed.: Lloyd Nossler. Mus.: Alfred Newman. Sound: Russell Hanson, Vinton Vernon. Asst. dirs.: Ralph Slosser, Mortimer Offner, Lloyd Brierly.

With Karen Morley (Mary Sims), Tom Keene (John Sims), John T. Qualen (Chris), Barbara Pepper (Sally), Addison Richards (Louie), Harry Holman (Uncle Anthony), Blll Engel (Jew), Frank Minor (plumber), Henry Hall (carpenter), Lynton Brant (Dur), Ray Spiker (ex-convict), Harry Samuels (Italian), Alex Schumbert (violinist), Bud Ray (mason), Madame Bonelta (mother), Harold Berqulst (father), Marlon Ballow (old woman), Alma Ferns (Mrs. Larsen), three Misfield Children, Lionel Baccus (barber), Harris Gorden (cigar salesman), Frank Hammond (undertaker), Harry Bradley (professor), Captain Anderson (forger), Harrison Greene (Sheriff), Si Clogg (lawyer), Eddy Baker (Deputy Sheriff), Harry Barnard (chef), Doris Kemper, Florence Enrlght (Commbres), Sidney Miller (Jewish child), Reels Reeves (Annibal), Jack Baldwin (motocyclist), Nellie V. Nichols (Jewish wife), Ed Biel (electric company employee), Henry Burroughs (politician), Harry Brown (Little Harry), Sidney Bracey, King Vidor.

Tom Keene (John Sims) had debuted under his own name, George Duryea, then after Our Daily Bread used the name Richard Powers.

“I remember getting Thalberg to read it, and he liked it and said it was darned interesting, but he didn’t think he could approve it for the studio. At that time they were into the glamour cycle. I was very close to Chaplin at that time, and I told him about it. He said he could get me a release with United artists to do it. I tried various ways to get the money together, and I talked to a couple of banks. Finally, I had to take what stock and real estate I owned and borrow the money myself. It cost roughly $100,000 to make the film. I dismissed the sound truck during the last week of shooting so that I could finish the picture. [This] gave me an added budget of $100 per day. We put a metronome on a tripod so that it would support it in a level way, and then had an assistant stand by with a bass drum to beat out the four-four rhythm. One reason for doing this was for increasing the tempo gradually through each successive shot. If you shot without this pattern, and without the metronome, you wouldn’t know if the men were digging faster or slower than in any of the other shots. I wanted control, and I wanted each scene to speed up a little bit from the scene before it. We laid it out so that the picks came on beats one and three and the shovels came down on two and four. They were instructed to step sideways on the beat, and they conformed to that.

“The orchestra music, the sound effects, and all other sound cost me around $25,000. Actually, the picture cost $125,000. I got my money back to pay back the loan.

“[The story was] the same people [John and Mary Sims, as in The Crowd] under different economic conditions. I talked with [James Murray] in a Hollywood bar and told him that I had a story I would give him if he would lay off the booze for a while. He said, ‘Screw it, the hell with you.’…

“The only film that could have been an influence was a Russian film, Turksib or The Earth Thirsts. I saw it just a short while before I started production. I think it only had a flute and a bass fiddle for the music.

“[I wrote it with Elizabeth Hill’s help.] She was my wife, but she had been a writer on a lot of my scripts. [The only blacklisting after the film came] perhaps only from the direction of Hearst. Although I had made a few successful pictures with Marion Davies, they remained loyal to my former wife Eleanor and not to me.” [dga]

Andre Sennwald. New York Times, Oct. 3, 1934. King Vidor, who gave us The Crowd and Hallelujah, has plunged his camera boldly into vital American materials in Our Daily Bread… His new work, which he wrote, produced and financed himself, is a brilliant declaration of faith in the importance of the cinema as a social instrument. In richness of conception alone, Mr. Vidor’s attempt to dramatize the history of a subsistence farm for hungry and desperate men from the cities of America would deserve the attention and encouragement of intelligent film-goers. But Our Daily Bread is much more than an idea. Standing in the first rank of American film directors, Mr. Vidor has brought the full power of a fine technique and imagination to his theme. Our Daily Bread dips into profound and basic problems of our everyday life for its drama, and it emerges as a social document of amazing vitality and emotional impact.

The effect of the photoplay is to bring the cinema squarely into the modern stream of socially-minded art and to lay bare for the inquisitive cameras the same fundamental dramatic themes which the young proletarian novelists like Albert Halper, Robert Cantwell and William Rollins are exploring in the new American literature. For that reason alone it is impossible to overestimate the significance of the new work.…

He succeeds to an unusual degree in personalizing the dread as impersonable enemy [draught]. The feverish attempt of the men to build a two-mile irrigation ditch is pictured so skillfully as to exalt the spectator and, finally, to leave him exhausted and emotionally depleted. Mr. Vidor heightens the excitement of the scenes by his employment of visual rhythms…

The actors in Our Human Bread [sic] are submerged in Mr. Vidor’s theme, like the actors in the best products of the Russian cinema, which has obviously influenced this profoundly moving photoplay.

Ermanno Comuzio. Hearst’s newspapers define it as a leftwing film; the left defines it as rightwing. In the USSR it is presented at the Moscow festival and wins the second prize; some accuse it of capitalist propaganda; in Germany it is appreciated by the historical chiefs of Nazism. [comu]

Lewis Jacobs. [paraphrase] Vidor’s lack of clarity is demonstrated when his hero, his heroine and the camp workers get together to decide on a form of government. Democracy and socialist are put down, whereas desire for a single Head prevails. The need for a single Head, the segregation of the unsatisfied workers, had at that time a single meaning. But no one doubted Vidor’s democratic position. He had set out intending to treat a worldwide problem he was inept to solve. But he had shown proof of courage. [comu]

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Samuel Goldwyn. Sc.: Edith Fitzgerald, from story, “Broken Soil,” by Paul Green and Edwin Knopf. Ph.: Gregg Toland. Ed.: Stuart Heisler. Art dir.: Rlchard Day. Cost.: Omar Kiam. Mus.: Alfred Newman. Asst. dir.: Walter Mayo.

With Gary Cooper (Tony Barrett), Anna Sten (Manya Nowak), Ralph Bellamy (Frederik Sobieski), Helen Vinson (Dora Barrett), Siegfried “Sig” Rumann (Nowak), Esther Dale (Kaise Nowak), Leonid Snegoff (Sobleski), Eleanor Wesselhoeft (Mrs. Sobieski), Milla Davenport (grandmother), Agnes Anderson (Helena), Hilda Vaughn (Hezzie Jones), Walter Brennan (Bill Jenkins), Douglas Wood (Heywood), George Meeker (Gilly), Hedi Shope (Anna), Otto Yamaoka (Taka), Violet Axzelle (Frederica) Ed Ebele (Uncle) Robert Louis Stevenson II, Auguste Tollaire, Dave Wengren, George Magrille, Bernard Siegel, Harry Semels, Robert Bolder (doctor), Alphonse Martell (servant), Mimi Alvarez, Constance Howard, Jay Eaton, Jay Belasco (guests at party), Rlchard Powell (truck driver).

“It was set among Connecticut tobacco-farmers, despite the fact that tobacco-fields are usually thought to be all in the South. I’d never done a film about Connecticut before, and this was a chance to capture some of its atmosphere. [hgm]

“The picture, as far as marriage, romance, and all that is concerned, is full of my own beliefs and convictions. The writer, Edith Fitzgerald, spent a lot of time with me in preparing the script; I was able to slant and control certain treatments in the script.

“A lot of people say that you can’t photograph thought, but you certainly can if you have a Gary Cooper [whose character in the story is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald]. My knowing Scott Fitzgerald helped. Certainly I can see it in my direction of Gary Cooper. There’s a certain lightness, a certain smartness, cleverness, trying very often to say something unusual, trying to make the most out of life, yet still somewhat shy. Cooper reminded me of the way Scott used to ask surprisingly psychological questions about the person to whom he was talking. They were surprising because they penetrate beyond the usual conversation, a little deeper than polite conversation. He had the courage to ask what he wanted to know. Cooper did the same thing.”

In the beginning of your copy of Taps and Reveille there is a note from Fitzgerald saying that you were the model for one of the characters in “Crazy Sundays.”

“I was living on Tower Road then, and I was married to Eleanor, but we were quarreling and disagreeing about many things at that time. I had asked Scott to come up and spend Sunday with us, and he arrived at the house just before noon. Eleanor, having known him for a while, didn’t mind exposing what was going on and confided in him. She was outspoken. Eleanor talked to him all day long about our problems. Later on we all went to Thalberg’s house for dinner or something. Scott went back the following week and wrote ‘Crazy Sundays.’

“I went with Sheila Graham myself, and even anounced at one time that we were going to be married. I went with her for a month or so, just before she met Scott. That probably was a reason we didn’t see each other after that.” [dga]

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Crazy Sunday” (in Taps at Reveille. New York: Scribner’s, 1935)

Miles Calman’s [i.e., Vidor’s] house was built for great emotional moments—there was an air of listening, as if the far silences of its vistas hid an audience….He was the only American-born director with both an interesting temperament and an artistic conscience. Meshed in an industry, he had paid with his ruined nerves for having no resilience, no healthy cynicism, no refuge—only a pitiful and precarious escape.

“I have been for months. First I went for claustrophobia, now I’m trying to get my whole life cleared up. They say it’ll take over a year.”

…“The psychoanalyst told Miles that he had a mother complex. In his first marriage he transferred his mother complex to his wife, you see—and then his sex turned to me. But when we married the thing repeated itself—he transferred his mother complex to me and all his libido turned toward this other woman.…Miles is so jealous of me that he questions everything I do,” she cried scornfully. “When I was in New York I wrote him that I’d been to the theatre with Eddie Baker. Miles was so jealous he phoned me ten times in one day.”

“I was wild,” Miles snuffled sharply, a habit he had in times of stress. “The analyst couldn’t get any results for a week.”

Andre Sennwald. New York Times, Mar. 16, 1935 With the assistance of King Vidor, Hollywood steps out of its swaddling clothes in The Wedding Night…a satisfying compromise between Mr. Vidor, the realist, and Mr. Goldwyn, the romantic.

Otis Ferguson. The New Republic, Apr. 3, 1935. King Vidor’s new picture…is the firmest bit of drama to come from the picture studios for quite a while…, constantly fresh and right, [with] an air of truth we don’t usually expect in films.…It is heartening to see another token that pictures can have so healthy a basis in actual experience.

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Douglas MacLean. Sc.: Maxwell Anderson, Laurence Stalllngs, Edwln Justus Mayer, from novel (1934) by Stark Young. Ph.: Victor Milner. Ed.: Eda Warren. Mus.: W. Franke Harling. Art dir.: Hans Dreier, Ernst Fegte. Margaret Sullavan’s costumes: Travis Benton. [Asst. dir. Elizabeth Hill.]

With Margaret Sullavan (Vallette Bedford), Walter Connolly (Malcolm Bedford), Randolph Scott (Duncan Bedford), Janet Beecher (Sally Bedford), Elizabeth Patterson (Mary Cherry), Harry Ellerbe (Edward Bedford), Dickie Moore (Middleton Bedford), Robert Cummings (George Pendleton), Charles Starrett (George McGehee), Johnny Downs (young Yankee), Daniel Haynes (William Veal), Clarence Muse (Cato), James Burke (Major Rushton), Warner Richmond (Confederate sergeant), Alfred Delcambre (Charles Tolliver) Emma Reed (old black servant), David Newell (soldier), Edward Gargan (cavalry soldier), Alex Hill (Scipio), Luke Cosgrove (white prophet), Leroy Broomfield (black), Oscar Smlth (2nd black), Kid Herman (3rd black), John Larkin (Cato’s companion) Charles Morris (officer), Stephen Alden Chase (soldier), Billy McClain (black in the kitchen), E.H. Calvert (cavalry major), Stanley Andrews (calvary captain), Paul Parry, Baron Lichter, Hal Craig, Duke York (soldiers), Lloyd Ingraham (officer), Dick Allen (Confederate officer).

Andre Sennwald. New York Times, Nov. 28, 1935. Several scenes are in Mr. Vidor’s best style. There is the highly effective bit in which Randolph Scott goes off to war, walking into the camera with gradually increasing tempo until at last hysteria has gripped him and he is running madly. There is also the shrewdly emotional climax when the lovers, separated by a stream and a bridge, rush toward each other, a scene that is reminiscent of the reunion of the lovers in Mr. Vidor’s The Big Parade.

Impetus for forming Hollywood’s three major guilds stemmed from the Motion Picture Academy’s connivance in deep paycuts in 1933 that had hit the poorest workers hardest. Vidor said, of the Academy: “The feeling was very strong there that anyone who got up and objected to taking this cut was fired, that maybe he’d find himself without a job, any individual. A few fellows had courage enough to do it, to get up and talk. You could see the anger growing that these men were objecting to what they wanted to do. The realization was very strong that we must have an organziation to speak for us, and not the individual alone. After the meeting was over, about six or eight directors stood on the sidewalk on the street by the Hotel Roosevelt, and it was bluntly stated, ‘We must have a guild.’ We finally realized how the producers were using the Academy and us. What a lot of people didn’t know was the fact that many producers and executives were subtracting the cuts from their employees’ checks but not from their own.” [unpub. int. by Mitch Tuchman, 1977].

Vidor offered his house for a meeting to discuss the formation of the Guild of Directors, December 23, 1935. Present were Frank Borzage, Lloyd Corrigan, John Ford, William K.Howard, Gregory La Cava, Rowland V. Lee, Lewis Milestone, A. Edward Sutherland, Frank Tuttle, Richard Wallace, William Wellman. The Screen Directors Guild was incorporated in January 1936; the twenty-nine founding members elected Vidor president. Against the bitter opposition of Studio bosses and accusations of “Communism,” Vidor lobbied other directors to join the Guild, whose membership grew to about six hundred in the next two years, including virtually every active director and assistant director. In 1960, after including television directors, the Guild changed its name to Directors Guild of America. [cf. Joseph McBride, Frank Capra.]

Dir.-Prod.: King Vidor. Sc.: Louis Stevens, from story by King Vidor and Elizabeth Hill inspired by book The Texas Rangers: A Century of Frontier Defense (1934) by Walter Prescott Webb. Ph.: Edward Cronjager. Art dirs.: Hans Drier, Bernard Herzbrun. Mus.: Sam Coslow.

With Fred MacMurray (Jim Hawkins), Jack Oakie (Wahoo Jones), Jean Parker (Amanda), Lloyd Nolan (Sam McGee), Edward Ellis (Major Balley), Bennie Bartlett (David), Elena Martinez (Maria), Frank Shannon (Capt. Shafford), Frank Cordell (Ditson), Fred Kohler, Sr. (Higgins), Jed Prouty (Procuror), Richard Carle (Casper Johnson), George “Gabby” Hayes (Judge), Kathryn Bates (teacher), Rhea Mitchell (passenger), Lloyd A. Saunders, Homer Farra, Ray Burgess, Hank Bell, Jack Montgomery, Howard Joslin, Joe Dominguez, Joseph Rikson, Frank Ellis, Blll Gillis, Neal Hart, Cecil Kellogg, Joseph B. Kerrick (Rangers), Harrison Greene (Passenger), Frank Leyva (Mexican), Irving Bacon (David’s father), Spencer Charters (Sheriff), Charles Middleton (lawyer), Monty Vandegrift (messager), William Strauss (Jurb), Stanley Andrews (guard), Dell Henderson (citizen), Bobby Caldwell (boy in stage). John Beck (passenger), Frank Cordell (Ranger), Gayne Whltman (Announcer) .

Remake, Streets of Laredo (Leslie Fenton, 1949). Sequel: Texas Rangers Ride Again (James Hogan, 1940).

“We were writing it for Gary Cooper. We cast Jack Oakie for the part of Wahoo, but Cooper’s manager didn’t want Gary to work with Oakie, and pulled Cooper out. He thought Oakie had too many stunts, too many tricks of acting, and would dominate Cooper’s slow, easy manner.”

“Yes, I was completely surprised [seeing the film again]. We didn’t have any second unit directors, so I must have shot all of that.” [dga]

“Pare Lorentz to me was one of the first who firmly believed that motion picture film was the strongest medium of expression. When I went to England in 1938 to film The Citadel, I persuaded him to drop what he was doing and come along with me so that I could be stimulated by a running disussion of what filmmaking was all about, particularly as it related to the subject at hand. We went by ship to provide plenty of time for yakking, and if I ever lacked enthusiasm or inspiration these talks with Lorentz revived them in me.” [“Prolog,” to Pare Lorentz: Lorentz on Film (New York: Hopkinson & Blake, 1975)]

Basil Wright. Pare Lorentz was a fine film-maker, and his first film for the Federal Government created a sensation [The Plow that Broke the Plains].…He needed stock shots from Hollywood, but the door of every company was locked against him. It was only through King Vidor’s personal help that he got what he wanted. [The Long View (New York: Knopf, 1974)]

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Samuel Goldwyn. Sc.: Victor Heerman, Sarah Y. Mason, [Elizabeth Hill]], from play (1924) by Harry Wagstaffe Bribble and Gertrude Purcell, from novel (1923) by Olive Higgins Prouty. Ph.: Rudolph Mate. Ed.: Sherman Todd. Art dir.: Richard Day. Set dec.: Julia Heron. Cost.: Omar Kiam. Assoc. prod.: Merritt Hulburd. Mus.: Alfred Newman. Asst. dir.: Walter Mayo.

With Barbara Stanwyck (Stella Dallas), John Boles (Stephen Dallas), Anne Shirley (Laurel Dallas), Barbara O'Neil (Helen Morrison), Alan Hale (Ed Munn), Marjorie Main (Mrs. Martin), Edmund Elton (Mr. Martin), George Walcott (Charlie Martin), Gertrude Short (Carrie Jenkins), Tim Holt (Richard Grosvenor III), Dickle Jones (John), Anne Shoemaker (Miss Phillibrown), Nella Walker (Mrs. Grosvenor), Bruce Satterlee (Con), Jimmy Butler (Con, adult), Jack Egger (Lee), Laraine Day, Suzanne Vidor (in soda fountain).

“It is Goldwyn who chose the actors, sets and music. I tried to introduce a bit of romanticism. But it’s chiefly the music that didn’t work.…[At the end, the mother] is happy because finally her daughter has gotten everything she desired. The Champ, which I had show a few years before, has somewhat the same subject. But it is a film for which I was entirely responsable. Stella Dallas is Goldwyn. Of course, I did not produce The Champ with my own money, but I did what I wanted. The subject of that film is simple and it wasn’t a question of doing something unrealistic. I think what’s missing in Stella Dallas is the real, whereas we had it in The Champ. One critic, moreover, said of The Champ.: ‘I’ve been to Tijuana where the story takes place and I found exactly the same atmosphere of the film.’” [Pos]

Frank S. Nugent. New York Times, Aug. 6, 1937. No realist…can believe for a moment in its maternal heroine. Stella went out a decade or more ago. But even that realization is no insurance against a blow to the heart.

1937. Vidor marries Elizabeth Hill, following an announced engagement with Hollywood columnist Sheilah Graham. With Lewis Milestone, Gregory La Cava and Howard Hawks he attempts to set up a cooperative, Screen Directors, Inc. Despite start-up financing from RKO, the attempt at independence will fail.

Vidor sales for London, where with Charles Vidor (no relation but also Hungarian) and Karen Morley (Charles Vidor’s wife), he drives to Budapest.

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Victor Savllle. Superv.: Harold Boxall. Sc.: Ian Dalrymple, Frank Wead, Elizabeth Hill, from novel (1937) by A.J. Cronln. Additional dial.: Emlyn Williams. Ph.: Harry Stradling. Ed.: Charles Frend. Art dir.: Lazare Meerson, Alfred Junge. Mus.: Louis Levy. Sound: A.W.Watkins, C.C.Stevens. Asst. dir.: Pen Tennyson. Shot in England.

With Robert Donat (Andrew), Rosalind Russell (Christine), Ralph Richardson (Denny), Rex Harrison (Dr. Lawford), Emlyn Williams (Owen), Penelope Dudley Ward (Toppy Le Roy), Francis Sullivan (Ben Chenkin), Mary Clare (Mrs. Orlando), Cecil Parker (Charles Every), Nora Swinburne (Mrs. Thornton), Edward Chapman (Joe Morgan), Athene Seyler (Lady Raebank), Felix Aylmer (Mr. Boon), Joyce Bland (Nurse Sharp), Percy Parsons (Mr. Stillman), Dilys Davis (Mrs. Page), Basil Gill (Dr. Page), Joss Ambler (Dr. A.H. Llewellyn).

“I never was more pleased with anybody’s performance than I was with [Robert Donat’s]. [schic]

“This was an era in which we were very interested in montages. I would write my own. I didn’t do all the dissolves and trick stuff myself, but I would write them down and work on them myself. Since editing is so close to writing and directing a film, instead of leaving it all to the editor, I would go along on every bit of editing that was done. At least I could try to put the picture together the way I wanted it. I tried to cut with the camera, as Jack Ford used to do. I didn’t take a lot of extra shots. There weren’t a lot of ways to put the picture together. I would usually decide right there on the set what shot I was going to use, and I would not shoot the action for every scene in every type of shot—long shot, medium shot, and close shot.…

“I used to try to spend about half an hour at the end of the day rehearsing the next day’s scenes. That way you could let your actors think it over before returning to the set. The cameraman could then see where all the actors were going to stand, and we would all be prepared. I would tell an actor what to do as far as the camera movements were concerned and what to think about.” [dga]

“We always had the book on the set, always. Of course, I had read, and reread it. So had every one. Remember that opening page—about the little train puffing along? Well, that’s what we tried to catch. I underlined that. I underlined everything that caught my eye, that seemed pictorial. We kept going over those underlined sentences, and then trying to put them on the screen.” [in 1938]

Elizabeth Hill Vidor. [A.J. Cronin’s] dialogue is so short and so sharp, that often we could lift it right out of the book. We used it just as it was. Often.

E.C. The Citadel was the only film being made by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in England. That meant, the director explained, that it seemed more important to every one concerned than any picture could in Hollywood, with producer as well as the entire studio force concentrating on it. [1938 news item, signed E.C., in King Vidor clipping file, New York Public Library, Lincoln Center.]

Frank S. Nugent. New York Times, Nov. 4, 1938. One of the most satisfying screen dramas of the year. …It has the cinema’s advantage over the printed word in the living backgrounds it creates, the vivid characterizations it establishes, its shrewd utilization of only the telling scenes of the book.

Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film. When[Vidor] sailed for Europe after making Stella Dallas, he went not as the “white hope of the American film scene” but as a “has-been.” But when he returned from England with a picture he had made there, The Citadel (1938), he not only regained his old stature but topped it. Considered the best American film of 1938, The Citadel fulfilled the promise of The Crowd and Our Daily Bread and portended a new development in Vidor’s growth, thematically and cinematically.…[Many] sequences were as solid, as real, as Joris Ivens’ Borinage, or von Stroheim’s Greed. Here was evidenced Vidor’s penetrating social viewpoint, his keen observation and care in characterization, and sharp ear for pungent dialogue.…In technique, The Citadel revealed a feeling for documentary objectivity and dramatic understatement. It was not the cutting that mattered but the uncompromising tone of the content. This made for a persuasive and straightforward style as powerful and clean as a newsreel.

Basil Wright. It was not until right at the end of the Thirties that the real Britain, the Britain of the slump, of appeasement mentalities, of mass unemployment, malnutrition and other social injustices came to be discussed, however tentatively, on the screen. And this could hardly have happened had not MGM arrived in Britain with certain ambitions and a lot of dollars.…Today [The Citadel] may not seem all that revolutionary, but its impact at the time was considerable. Virtually the first studio film of social or civic tendency to be made in Britain, The Citadel set out to make a study of a specific section of the community, to anlyse its problems, to show its excellences and its failings and, like the [Paul] Muni biographies, to expound the integrity and the passion of a man of science in the battle against nature on the one hand and social conditions on the other.…Lewis Jacobs reckoned it to be King Vidor’s finest film. I now reckon that it still is. [The Long View.]

Vidor completed the film in about three weeks, shooting all the black-and-white material, plus some of the color—including “We’re Off to See the Wizard.”

• Oscar nominations: Best picture; Art direction; Cinematography; Special effects.

“In the case of The Wizard of Oz, Victor Fleming was wanted very badly by Clark Gable and David Selznick to take over Gone with the Wind. Cukor had been on the film and had some disagreement, so they stopped, and they wanted me. I spent the weekend studying the script. Came Monday, and I didn’t want to take the job on short notice, and so then they said, ‘Well, would you take over Wizard of Oz if Fleming comes over?’ And I said I would. Victor Fleming was a good friend, and he took me around to all the sets that had been built and went through the thing. He left that night, and I took over—it was, as I remember, about two and a half weeks, three weeks possibly. Which included the “Somewhere over the Rainbow.” It’s run all the time, and whenever I hear it, I get a tremendous kick out of knowing that I directed that scene. I always wanted to do a musical film. I wanted to keep the movement going, just as we had in silent pictures. And I was able to do that in that film, [in] my contribution to it. I did some of the cyclone scenes, and “We’re Off to See the Wizard”—working with Bert Lahr, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley and Judy Garland. But I did not want any credit, and as long as Victor was alive, I kept quiet about it.” [schic]

1940. NORTHWEST PASSAGE (Book I: Rogers’ Rangers). M.G.M. 126 min. February 7.

Dir.: King Vidor [final sequence: Jack Conway]. Prod.: Hunt Stromberg. Sc.: Laurence Stallings, Talbot Jennings, [Robert E.Sherwood, Jules Furthman, Sidney Howard, Richard Schayer, Frances Marion] from the novel (1937) by Kenneth Roberts. Ph. (Technicolor): Sidney Wagner, William V. Skall. Color consultant: Natalie Kalmus, Henri Jaffa. Ed.: Conrad A. Nervig. Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons, Malcolm Brown. Sets: Edwin B. Willis. Mus.: Herbert Stothart. Sound: Douglas Shearer. Asst. dir: Robert Golden.

With Spencer Tracy (Major Robert Rogers), Robert Young (Langdon Towne), Ruth Hussey (Elizabeth Browne), Walter Brennan (Hunk Marriner), Nat Pendleton (Cap Huff), Louis Hector (Rev. Browne), Robert Barrat (Humphrey Towne), Lumsden Hare (Lord Amherst), Donald MacBride (Sgt. McNott), Isabel Jewell (Jenny Coit), Douglas Walton (Lt. Avery), Addison Richards (Lt. Crofton), Hugh Sothern (Jesse Beacham), Regis Toomey (Webster), Montagu Love (Wiseman Claggett), Lester Matthews (Sam Livermore), Truman Bradley (Capt. Ogden), Andrew Pena (Konapot), Denis Green (Capt. Williams), Tom London, Eddie Parker (Rangers), Don Castle (Richard Towne), Rand Brooks (Eben Towne), Kent Rogers (Odiorne Towne), Verna Felton (Mrs. Towne), Richard Cramer (sheriff Packer), Ray Teal (Bradley McNeil), Edward Gargan (Capt. Butterfield), John John Merton (Lt. Dunbar), Gibson Gowland (MacPherson), Frank Hagney (Capt. Grant), Gwendolen Logan (Mrs. Brown), Addie McPhail (Jane Browne), Helen MacKellar (Sarah Hadden), Arthur Aylesworth (Flint, hotel keeper), Ted Oliver (Farrington), Lawrence Porter (Bill, the Indian), Tony Guerrero (Capt. Jacobs), Ferdinand Munier (Stoodley), George Eldredge (McMullen), Robert St. Angelo (Solomon), Peter George Lynn (Turner), Frederic Worlock (Sir William Johnson), Hank Worden (Ranger).

Vidor was originally to have shot the whole of Kenneth Robert’s novel. He began filming with an incomplete script that covered only its first half, then, while he was in New York, the studio decided not to do the second half, and had Jack Conway direct the present concluding sequence in order to end the film.

Stock shots were used in a 1957 MGM-produced tv series, Northwest Passage, 26 half-hour episodes. Eight of these episodes were directed by Jacques Tourneur.

“I was trying to make the uniforms for the picture blend into the scenery [so] they would not be so easily spotted by Indians. When we made the tests, the greens came out very vividly. I complained to the people at Technicolor and they said, ‘Well, that’s the green that Zanuck likes.’ It was a vivid Irish green, much greener than the costumes really were. Anyway, I persuaded them to mix up another shade of green for their dye transfer process.

“For years we thought in terms of black and white. Suddenly we moved into color, and my color sense had been neglected all those years. I had heard of cool colors and warm colors, but I had to learn what they meant because I didn’t want to depend on anybody to tell me all of that. I learned that greens, blues, reds, and a few other colors had a strong influence on the mood of a scene. I became interested in buying paintings and going to art galleires, but John Marquand gave me a set of paints and I sat down and started painting. That was where I learned the most. [dga] We began to use colors to help tell the story, help make sequences move.

“Northwest Passage was a peculiar thing—it’s a book in two parts. I made all the first part, which was the prologue: we were still supposed to do the second part of the book, and the producer, Hunt Stromberg, never could make up his mind about the second part. It would have been fun, because [in the first part] the man (Spencer Tracy) is built up to be a hero and the last part is his downfall. But they just couldn’t see it. For a while they held the actors, I think for a couple of weeks, and said, ‘We’ll have this fixed’—and I started shooting, believing they would send me the pages up there, and they never arrived. [schic] We even kept the actors on salary for a couple of weeks. But that was not to be, and someone else—Jack Conway, I think—shot the picture’s ending. That was in New York. The producer called me up and asked if it was all right. I was so disheartened about not being able to film the whole story that I reluctantly gave my consent.” [hgm]

Frank S. Nugent. New York Times, Mar. 8, 1940. Mr. Vidor’s film is scarcely more than a journal of the expedition, with barely time for a quick introduction of his characters, barely a pause to mention the Northwest Passage itself—that will o’ the wisp.…[Vidor] has told it that way, as straight narrative, as pure thriller, as sheer spectacle; and it is only the circumstances that the expedition actually progressed that way, which stifles an indignant protest that this is all too fantastic for words, too astonishing to be true or even a re-enactment of actuality.

1940. Vidor. “I have three daughters. During the war, in 1940, the last two daughters were living with their mother in Biarretz. I went over and took a room in a hotel. See, Eleanor and I were divorced in 1932. So I dodn’t want the daughters to stay there though the war. And when they were coming from school one day, I just took them and we fled, left everything, fled to Spain. And then to the United States afterwards.” [From soundtrack: Catherine Berge, King Vidor: A Tribute.]

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod: Gottfried Reinhardt. Sc.: Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, from story by Walter Reisch. Ph.: Joseph Ruttenberg. Special effects: Arnold Gillespie. Ed.: Harold F. Kress. Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons, Malcolm Brown. Sets: Edwin B.Willis. Gowns: Adrian. Men’s cost.: Gilies Steele. Maeup: Jack Dawn. Mus.: Bronislau Kaper. Sound: Douglas Shearer.

With Clark Gable (McKinley B. Thompson), Heddy Lamarr (Theodore), Felix Bressart (Vanya), Oscar Homolka (Vasiliev), Eve Arden (Jane Wilson), Sig Rumann (Emil von Hofer), Natasha Lytess (Olga), Vladimir Sokoloff (Michael Bastakoff), Edgar Barrier (Rubick), George Renavent (Laslo), Mikhail Rasumny (Russian officer), John Piccori (Laszlo).

Dir.: King Vidor. Sc.: Elizabeth Hill, King Vidor, from novel (1941) by J.P. Marquand. Ph.: Ray June. Ed.: Harold F. Kress. Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons, Malcolm Brown. Sets: Edwin B. Willis. Gowns.: Kalloch. Men’s cost.: Giles Steele. Makeup: Jack Dawn. Mus.: Bronislau Kaper, conducted by Lennie Hayton.

With Hedy Lamarr (Marvin Myles), Robert Young (Harry Pulham), Ruth Hussey (Kay Pulham), Charles Coburn (Pulham, Sr.), Van Heflin (Bill Kinq), Leif Erickson (Bo-Jo Brown), Fay Holden (Mrs. Pulham, mother), Bonita Granville (Mary Pulham), Douglas Wood (Mr. Bullard), Charles Halton (Walter Kaufman), Phll Brown (Joe Bingham), Davld Clyde (Hugh), Sara Haden (Miss Rollo) Byron Foulger (Businessman), Anne Revere (Secretary), Oliver Blake (designer), Connie Gilchrist (elevator operator).

“I think the film was hurt to some extent because of the languid, European quality of [Heddy Lamarr’s] beauty. [It] would have been better with a girl like Shirley MacLaine in that part, a girl who had drive, ambition and so forth. I wrote a short story that has never been published, on that same theme. That’s why I might have bought this book, because the idea of going back to an old, cold love and trying to revive it has always been a fascinating theme to me. I drew from an incident in my own life. It happened in my own life in a very sad way.

“When Harry Behn and I were writing the script for The Big Parade, I went back to Hot Springs, Arkansas to see a girl that I had known many years before in Texas. She was the daughter of a judge. There was such a dramatic change in her whole character when I saw her in Arknasas, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. She had gotten rough and crude, very common. She had just become an entirely different person. I sent a telegram to some of my friends saying, ‘Please send me a telegram signed by Louis B. Mayer saying I have to return to Hollywood at once.’ I had to get out, and she tried to follow me. This was a tragedy to me because I had dreamed of this girl for a long time, and I had promised myself that I would take the first opportunity to go back and see if I could revive our old romance. When I finally did, it all hit me right in the face. I used all of this for the film. The great tragic thing is that you can’t make it work. You don’t have to tell the story in bold strokes. It could be that they just couldn’t communicate any more. [dga]

“Marquand delineates his New England characters with such depth and penetration that I tried using some new experimental techniques in filming the novel. I used direct cutting, for example, and instead of the conventional insert of a letter, I used the letter-writer’s voice. I noticed in a recent film, Two for the Road, that the automobile bearing the two main characters would vanish off-screen, and then the characters would come walking in from the other side of the screen. Now, I’d used that technique in Street Scene: as people would go out the other characters would come in—sort of a human and temporal cycle. The putting together of sequences in H.M. Pulharn, Esq has a lot of this sort of thing, of going to one point that carries you, by a kind of overlapping process, to the next moment, the next part of the film.” [hgm]

Bosley Crowther. New York Times, Dec. 19, 1941. It seems as though there should be a certain amount of poignance…Yet, strangely enough, there isn’t--not in the story, anyhow…, as it is being told on the screen.…And the reason obviously is that it is told at such tedious length, with so many needless repetitions that are dull enough the first time around, that all of it and nothing mich is left but a dry, melancholy flavor which faintly suggests withered leaves.…In brief, Mr. Vidor has permitted his film to lose ironic point. And although he has handled certain details and etched character with clarity; although he has got from [Heddy] Lamarr one of the sharpes and most insinuating performances of her career, he has failed to make H.M. Pulham, Esq. either a credible social comment or an account of a truly pathetic life. It is mostly a long-drawn whimper from a fellow for whom you can’t hold much regard.

Dir.-Prod.: King Vidor. Sc.: Herbert Dalmas, Willlam Ludwig, [Louis Adamic, Norman Foster, John Fante, James Hill, Tom Treanor, Wessel Smitter, Ross B.Wills, Renata Oppenheimer. Gordon Kahn, Frances Marion, Vincent Lawrence, Robert Andrews], from a story by Vidor. Ph. (Technicolor): Harold Rosson. Color consultant: Natalie Kalmus, Henri Jaffa. Special effects: Arnold Gillespie. Ed.: Conrad A. Nerving. Art dir.: Cedric Gibbons, Urie McCleary. Sets.: Edwin B. Wlllls, Richard Pefferle. Cost.: Irene. Makeup: Jack Dawn. Mus.: Louis Gruenberg. Songs: “Lord Please Send Me down Your Love,” by Gruenberg and Vidor; “Lullabye” by Gruenberg. Sound: Douglas Shearer. Asst. dir.: Walter Strohm.

With Brlan Donlevy (Steve Dangos/Stefan Dangosbiblichek), Ann Richards (Anna O’Roarke), Walter Abel (Howard Clinton), John Qualen (Anton Dubechek), Horace Stephen McNally (Teddy Dangos), Mary McLeod (Tina Dangos), Bob Lowekk (George Dangos), Mary McLeod (Tina Dangos), Bob Lowell (George Dangos), Roy Gordon (MacLane), Bobby Rich (George, age 14), Richard Hall (George, age 5), Bobby Winkler (Thomas, age 14), Jackie “Butch” Jenkins (Thomas, age 6), Andrew Warrocks (Thomas, age 10), Carol Comba (Tina, age 6), Richard Hirsch (Teddy, age 2), Charles Bates (Teddy age 8), Jimmy Griffin (Teddy, age 15), Bobby Larson (Abe, age 8), Drew Roddy (Abe, age 11), Bryn Davis (Danish mother), Preston Peterson (Danish father), Axel Anderson, Milo Sheron (immigrants), Edward Hearn (customs inspector), Art Berry, Sr. (customs inspector), D.H. Turner (guard), Alex Davidoff, Rudolph Myzet (interpreters), Mlchael Vlsaroff (Yasha), Wacklaw Reckwart (Polish miner), Kay Medford (Yulka), Ray Teal (cashier), Charles Wagenheim (merchant), Rita Gould (his wife), Robert Emmett O'Connor (Irish foreman), Art Belasco (sleeping miner), Ed O'Neill (brakeman), Bill Borzage (miner with accordeon), Ed Hennerty (man with flag), Dick Wessel (butcher), George Meader (politician), Dell Henderson (Timothy Mulveen), Leon Warwick (black singer), Marty Faust (naval officer), Howard Mitchell (guard), George Bunny (worker), Frank Faylen (barman), Barbara Pepper (prostitute), Richard Ryen (Papa Hartzler), Greta Meyer (Mama Hartzler), Leon Belasco (cigar salesman), Ilka Gruning (Mrs. Vronsky), June Pickrell (McGregor’s secretary), Charles Irwln (McGregor), Jerry O'Neil (doctor), Paul Porcase (Prof. Cantaloni), Wllllam Haade (worker), Anna Marie Biggs (soprano), Byron Foulger (principal), Joseph Crehan (judge), Jack Mulhall (client), William Tannen (test pilot), Norman Nesbit (speaker), Phylis Kennedy (receptionist), Johny Walsh (young boy), Noreen Nash and Bill Engle (vaudeville players), Snub Pollard (bearded messenger), Pat O’Malley, Tom Chatterton (members of board of drectors), George Sherman (car factory guard), Emmett Vogan (president of board), Elliott Sullivan, Harry Cording, Jimmie Dodd, Ivan Mlller, Lee Phelps, Earle Hodgins (workers at meeting), Ed Mortimer, Bert Howard, James Carlisle (corporate executives), Ethan Laidlaw, Harry Semels, Larry Grenier, George Magril, John Morton, Duke York (metal workers), J.M.Kerrigan (miner), Howard Freeman (financier), Fred Brady (cut role), Stuart Holmes (in audience at graduation), Judith Ann Donlevy.

MGM cut about 30 minutes after distributing it for approximately a month in a version of 151 minutes. These 30 minutes appear to be lost.

“Norman Foster was working with me on the script. One day he said, ‘Let’s see if we can go into the Air Corps for the Cinema Department.’ I’m not sure how far along I was with the script for An American Romance, but I’m sure we had done quite a bit of work on it by then. I felt I should make a film that many people would see. In other words, I was going to make a wide scope film of American know-how and productivity. I wanted to show what America was really about. As you can tell, the film took the final priority over joining up. I decided that people other than myself could make films for the Air Force. They didn’t need me. The film itself would be my first effort to reach an ideal of the American democracy.

“It was part of that trio of wheat, steel and war. It was about the growth of the idea of steel production. I had once read a book called The Three Black Pennies about a family in the steel business. I had always wanted to make a film about steel.

“The story was based around the town of Hibbing, Minnesota, one of the biggest open pit mines in the world. Louis Adamic had written stories about the immigrants who came to America and worked in these mines. Some of the men had to walk their way from New York. These were all completely factual case histories. I think one of the greatest stories in America concerns the immigrants, what happened to them, and how they built this country. I was glad I made it for the war effort, but most of the reactions I got were through men in the service. There was hardly a man in the service who didn’t see the film. It was used on all sorts of ships, in camps, and even in Europe.

“At this time I was painting again and I was still trying to find out more about colors and the diferent effects they had. As the film goes on, the colors gradually get lighter and lighter. The colors of aluminum and magnesium become similar to the sky colors. The story moves to Gary, Indiana, then to Chicago, and the steel colors become red like the color of molten steel. [dga] First you have the earth, the heavy earth and iron ore, becoming progressively more refined until finally it flies up, up into the sky as an airplane, taking in all of America. We started in New York and took in most of the states right across the country to California. [hgm] The film itself is the story of a man who is, or becomes, the refinement of the immigrant. The colors are supposed to follow the same progressive uplifting refinement until the story comes to California—the bluer skies, the oranges, and the general way of living.

“You know, so few cameramen really have an appreciation for the great painters, the modern painters, and so forth. Hal Rosson really did. On our days off in Chicago we went to the art museum and discussed paintings. He recognized good paintings. This is very essential for a cameraman, especially a cameraman doing color films. He had a vast amount of experience to call on, and he was a sensitive artist himself.”

There is a scene in the picture where Donlevy is going to meet Ann Richards and he is down at the bottom of the hill and there’s a schoolhouse with an American flag. Is this based on a painting by Burchfield?

“I was collecting American paintings at that time. I had an entrance hall in my home where I had a collection of Benton, Grant Wood, and Charles Hopper paintings. I tried to buy a Burchfield and a Hopper, but I never succeeded in getting the ones I wanted. I was influenced entirely by Burchfield for this shot. I don’t know whether that exact setting with the house is taken from a Burchfield painting, but it was certainly inspired by him. The character of the house is entirely based on Burchfield’s work.”

Is the sequence where Steve takes his car apart based on something you knew about?

“I remembered that Walter Chrysler bought a car once and then took it apart. He took every piece and laid it out so that he could look at the thing. That appealed to me somehow. It was a fascination I had. It goes all the way back to my childhood when I was interested in motion picture cameras. I was interested in the function of the machine and how it worked. I was trying to communicate the idea of construction and movement, and how things are put together. It fascinated me and I hoped it would be interesting to other people.

“We also shot inside a car factory. However, when we got in there we found that the military had taken over the facility to build aircraft engines. We had to take all these big radial aircraft engines off the assembly line after normal working hours and then bring in the cars. We had to take the fenders off the bodies, take out the seats from some of the others, and generally make it look like the cars were still being assembled. Some of the cars we got had been painted a dull Army drab color, so we had to paint them as well. We paid all the assembly line workers to come over and work while we shot the scenes. I did the scene somewhat impressionistically to pull it all together. I had to give it conciseness and brevity. In order to give each of the parts a different identity on the assembly line we colored and painted them different colors. We spent a lot of time and money on that. It’s basically not a documentary as far as the story line goes, but the documentary scenes of the plants and factories seem to be a little different from other films that deal with the same thing. I wanted to communicate some things that no one had done before.

“[To get permission to do the film] I told the story to [Nicholas] Schenk after Mayer had talked to him, and it was Schenk who gave me the green light. I can’t remember his exact reaction. It’s difficult to remember because they never really showed much enthusiasm for anything. They were well trained with the poker faces. They would just listen blankly as you talked, and it made things very discouraging if yor idea did not seem to be winning them over. You’d think that they had missed your point completely. You never knew whether you were having any sort of success in selling the idea. They would never say anything like ‘That’s good,’ or ‘That’s great!’

“The whole production took three years. The first year was spent in writing and pre-production, the second year was taken up with the actual shooting, and the third year was spent in editing, music, and some post-production work. I think it cost about $3,000,000, which is not terribly much by today’s standards.” [dga]

“I wrote An American Romance for a star cast consisting of Spencer Tracy, Ingrid Bergman, and Joseph Cotton, and at one time the studio promised to let me have these people. When I finally came to do the film, I had none of them: I wasn’t enough of a lunch-room politician to prevent someone else taking them over, and so I received secondary casting. [hgm]

“I was so enthused about the possibilities of my picture that I thought at the time that it would not be dependent on stars to carry the story. I didn’t realize until later that personalities can make or break a picture. They all had symbols that they stood for, and you had to have the right people playing the roles. I really learned a lesson on that film.

“We spent some of that third year in taking the film around to various places to preview it and test the audience reaction. I forget what the running time of the first version was, but I know that it was quite long. The reactions we got were that we had concentrated too much on the documentary side of the story. However, they all liked the human part of the story.

“When I was in New York after the tour I got a call from Eddie Mannix saying that the orders had come through to cut out forty minutes from the film. I asked him if the cutting could wait a week so that I could do it there. He said, ‘Oh yes, of course it can.’

“When I was [to Chicago] one of the men from MGM said that they had just received a copy of the film and it was a lot shorter than that first version. I was absolutely shocked. I came straight out to California. When I got to the studio I went to the editor, Conrad Nervig. I asked him, ‘What happened?’ He said, ‘The cuts have been so badly done that I just can’t face you. I can’t talk about it.’

“The negative had already been cut and the prints had been shipped out. I simply went over to my office and packed up everything in boxes and got the hell out. It was too late to do anything about it. I had been the producer, director, and writer on the picture. I had worked on the thing for the last three years, and now that it had gotten to the final cutting stage, they edited according to the music track. They had cut the film under the supervision of Margaret Booth. She was the head editor at the studio and had her offices up front with the executives. She had cut the documentary portion of the film only slightly, but edited the story material extensively. That was not the way it should have been done.”

“Because of the music track. Where there is a big orchestra accompaniment it is hard to take out short pieces as I had done with The Big Parade. So, you have to wipe out the big non-musical sequences in order to cut that much time out of a film. With music, you have to lift out the entire sequence. You cannot make inside trims where music has already been laid down.”

At that point you had been working with Metro for almost twenty years. What was the studio reaction when you left?

“Maybe they felt the picture wasn’t worth all the work, effort and expenditure. I don’t know. MGM had this policy that if you worked for them for twenty years with continuous employment, you would go on the studio pension plan. I somehow avoided overlapping contracts during this time. I didn’t want to feel that I was married for life to MGM. It turned out that I wasn’t eligible for the pension plan.” [dga]

Bosley Crowther. New York Times, Nov. 24, 1944. [This] opportunity was squandered in a most distressing way…For Mr. Vidor made a great big color picture with an abundance of vivid American scenes but with a story so banal and tedious that the whole film seems one massive platitude.

1944. Vidor was among the founders of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. By the time of the Alliance’s blacklisting efforts, a few years later, Vidor had dropped his membership.

1946. DUEL IN THE SUN . Vanguard—Selznick Releasing Organization. 135 min. December 31. [Cut to 126 min., May 1947].

Dir.: King Vidor [William Dieterle, Josef von Sternberg, William Cameron Menzies, Hal Kern, Chester Franklin]. 2nd Unit: Otto Brower, Reaves Eason. Prod.: Davld 0. Selznlck (Vanguard). Sc: Davld 0. Selznick, after novel (1944) by Niven Busch. Adapt. Oliver H. P. Garrett. Ph. (Technicolor): Lee Garmes, Hal Rosson, Ray Rennahan [Rex Wimpy, W. Howard Greene]. Additional ph.: Charles P. Boyle, Allen Davey. Photographic effects: Clarence Slifer, Jack Cosgrove. Technicolor supervisor: Natalie Kalmus. Eds.: Hal C. Kern, William Ziegler, John D. Faure, Charles Freeman. Mus.: Dmitri Tiomkin, conducted by Tiomkin. Song, “Gotta Get Me Somebody to Love,” by Allie Wrubel. Prod. design: J. McMillan Johnson. Art dir.: James Basevi, John Ewing. Sets: Emil Kuri. Cost.: Walter Plunkett. Choreography: Tilly Losch (solos), Lloyd Shaw (groups). Asst. dir.: Lowell Farrell, Harvey Dwight. Visual consultant: Josef von Sternberg.

With Jennifer Jones (Pearl Chavez), Joseph Cotten (Jesse McCanles), Gregory Peck (Lewt McCanles), Lionel Barrymore (Sen. McCanles), Lillian Gish (Laura Belle McCanles), Walter Huston (The Sinkiller), Herbert Marshall (Scott Chavez), Charles Bickford (Sam Pierce), Joan Tetzel (Helen Lengford), Harry Carey (Lem Smoot), Otto Kruger (Mr. Langford), Sidney Blackmer (L'Amant), J. Tilly Losch (Mrs. Chavez), Scott McKay (Sid), Butterfly McQueen (Vashti), Francis McDonald, Victor Kilian (cardplayers), Griff Barnett (prison guard), Fran Cordell (Ken), Dan White (Ed), Steve Dunhill (Jake), Lane Chandler (Cavalry Captain), Lloyd Shaw (Dance caller), Thomas Dillon (machinist), Robert McKenzie (Barman), Charles Dingle (Sheriff Thomson), Kermit Maynard (man at Presidio bar), Hank Bell (servant at ranch), Johnny Bond (servant at barbecue), Bert Roach (guest), Si Jenks, Hank Worden, Rose Plummer (dancers), Guy Wilkerson (man at bar), Lee Phelps (machinist), Orson Welles (narrator), Susan Sontag (Figurante), Misty, Dice (horses).

Chester Franklin et William Cameron Menzies directed second units. William Dieterle shot the opening scene and train wreck, and numerous retakes at Sleznick’s request.

“[David Selznick] gave me a paperback book by Niven Busch. He said he wanted to make an intimate Western, a small picture, but one that would be very well done. He was going to be busy with some other picture, and he said that I could produce and direct it. He would not interfere at all.

“Oliver Garrett and I went to work on the script. [Then] David began to get more interested. He even got a print of [Gone with the Wind] and had all of us look at it again. He talked a lot about building it up. He was the one man who really deserved the title of producer more than anyone else I knew. Eventually he let Garrett go and took over the job of writing himself.

“But after we started to shoot the picture, he was never aware of what we were filming. He began working on rewrites and it got to a point where the material he would rewrite was the scene we were doing the next day. When that happened, we would have to go ahead and shoot the first version of the scene because his new drafts would not come through until three or four. When he came by in the afternoon I would say, “David, we started this scene at nine o’clock this morning. We’re almost finished!” He would then insist that I read what he had written. He would plead with me to retake it. Usually it only amounted to a slight difference from the way we had originally shot it. In one scene, David came back to me with another draft of a sequence, with the only change being that Joseph Cotten had his arm in his lap instead of on the arm of a sofa. The slightest detail would send Selznick off on a wild chase, even if it was just the way a scarf was arranged on Jennifer. He never let up on this effort. Sometimes we would order a hundred horses for a shooting day and about five hundred would show up. We would panic and say, ‘My God, what happened?’ They would tell us that Mr. Selznick wanted to be sure that we had plenty.

“[Two days before the end,] there had been a scheduling problem because there were only a few cameras around, and we had to time the shooting of that day’s work so that both the second unit director and I could do what had been planned. Selznick showed up on the set when I was starting the scenes we were supposed to finish that afternoon. I had been waiting for the cameras, and I was a little uneasy. He came in and we got into an argument, and I [had] told him that I would take two of these blow-ups, but when the third one came, I would simply walk off the set. That kind of thing would undermine the director’s authority, and he did it repeatedly. I told him I was going to leave, and he started to kick things and began to scream at me. I took off the megaphone I had hanging from my belt and handed it to him. I said, ‘You sound like you think you could do it better. If you want to direct this picture, here’s your chance.’ With that, I walked over, got into my car, and left. He was left with all of the cattle and all of the extras waiting for some kind of instruction. He had the second unit director there, and it was an important scene. I didn’t like to do that, but I really couldn’t stay under those conditions.

“The next morning he [phoned], ‘Please, will you come back.’ I just couldn’t. It was emotionally too difficult. [dga]

“That’s when he called in William Dieterle, for whom he wrote additional scenes, such as the big opening in the Presidio Saloon with Tilly Losch’s dance and the spectacular trainwreck later in the picture. My opening scene showed Herbert Marshall in jail.

“In addition, Selznick had Dieterle reshoot some of my scenes the same way I’d shot them and using identical dialogue, so that afterwards, when the Directors’ Guild appointed a committee to adjudicate on credit for the finished picture, it was sometimes impossible to tell the difference between Dieterle’s scenes and mine. They ran the film while the cutter and I sat in, and finally decided that I was entitled to credit on all but five, eight, or perhaps even ten per cent of the total.…

“Jennifer Jones’s climactic ride into the desert involved shooting directly into the sun, an idea inspired by Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane, which had spotlights shining right into the camera. The aim of that was to accentuate the heat: the heat on the rocks, the heat on the desert, and the heat of the atmosphere.

“It was hot, too. We were on some jagged rocks about twelve miles out of Tucson: I think Jennifer still has scars on her legs from crawling over those rocks. We did a few of her closeups in the studio but shot most of that sequence over a period of several days on a hilltop, about an hour’s ride away from Tucson.…All those flamboyant sunset effects were done by [Ray] Rennahan, who was Technicolor’s man. [hgm]

“D.W. Griffith came and watched us shoot a scene. I was very flattered and pleased and certainly excited to have my mentor there watching. Lionel started to forget his lines. Lillian seemed to work fine, and remembered hers very well. Lionel just got more and more in trouble as he tried to work. The Old Master gave him the fear that he couldn’t remember all that he had learned. We kept doing it for over an hour, and finally I went up to Lionel and said, ‘I guess it’s because D.W. is here.’ I asked Griffith if he would mind going behind the set for a few minutes. He remarked that he had been there long enough, and he left.” [dga]

Josef von Sternberg. “David had a lot of admiration for him as a director. He wanted to do something for him, and he also thought that von Sternberg could do something for Jennifer. I think he was under this impression because of the work he had done with Marlene Dietrich. He could certainly handle women well. Dietrich had been helped immensely because of the careful lighting and the little touches he had given her. It was fine with me, and I liked him as a person. He probably suggested that we use a spotlight somewhere, or he may have suggested some sort of scarf or hair arrangement. He was giving advice on those things while I was off planning something else. He may have been doing this while I was working on the script. He did a lot of work in the preliminary tests that were done before the actual shooting started. Joe directed the lighting, makeup and photography tests so that we would be ready to go when the script and preproduction were all finished. After the production started, he would do anything I wanted him to do. He was around as an assistant, but he was definitely more artistically valuable. He was certainly not commercially oriented, and he never confined his work to simple tasks. He contributed quite a bit to the artistic nature of the film.

“Down in Arizona we shot a scene where Jennifer was supposed to be sweaty with all of the heat, and Joe decided that he would throw a bucket of water over her. He enjoyed doing that. One time I had an appointment with a doctor around five o’clock. I had rehearsed a scene that was slow going, really hard to get all planned out with the lighting and camerawork. I had to leave, so I just let him shoot it himself. Over a week or so later Selznick said to me, ‘My God, he shot until eight o’clock that night!’ I had given him one scene to do of the sheriff entering the room. I thought it would take about one or two takes to complete. Selznick told me that he had shot 4500 feet of Technicolor negative on the scene. He had kept everyone there late, incurring all sorts of overtime expenses. I guess he was just eager to do some real directing again.” [dga]

Bosley Crowther. New York Times, May 8, 1947. Some of the compositions, achieved with color and musical backgrounds, evoke sudden and singular sensations that are conspicuously superior to the whole. Oh, brother--if only the dramatics were up to the technical style!

Jesse Zunser, Cue, May 10, 1947. The biggest and emptiest thing since the Grand Canyon.

1948. A MIRACLE CAN HAPPEN (retitled: ON OUR MERRY WAY two months after intial release). Miracle Prods.—United Artists. 107 min. June.

Dirs.: King Vidor, Leslie Fenton, [John Huston, George Stevens]. Prod.: Benedict Bogeaus, Burgess Meredith. Sc.: Laurence Stallings, Lou Beslow, from story by Arch Oboler. Fonda-Stewart episode: John O'Hara. Ph.: Edward Cronjaer, Joseph Biroc. Gordon Avil, John Seitz. Ed.: James Smith. Art dir.: Ernst Fegte, Duncan Cramer. Sets: Eugene Redd, Robert Priestley. Costs.: Greta, Jerry Bos. Makeup: Otis Malcolm. Mus.: Heinz Roemheld, conducted by David Chudnow, Skitch Henderson. Song “Baby Made a Change in Me”: Skitch Henderson and Donald Kahn; “Queen of Hollywood Island”: Frank Loesser. Sound: William Lynch. Assoc. prod.: Arthur M. Landau. Asst. prod.: Carley Harriman. Asst. dir.: James Depew. Choreography: Nick Castle. Cost.: Greta.

With Burgess Meredith (Oliver Pease), Paulette Goddard (Martha Pease), Fred MacMurray (Al), James Stewart (Slim), Dorothy Lamour (Gloria Manners), Victor Moore (Ashton Corrington), Henry Fonda (Lank), Hugh Herbert (Elisha Hobbs), Willlam Demarest (Floyd), Eilene Janssen (Peggy Thorndyke), Dorothy Ford (Lola), Charles D. Brown (rehearser), Betty Caldwell (Cynthia), Davld Whorf (Sniffles Dugan), Frank Moran (Bookie), Tom Fadden, Paul Hurst (Deputies), Walter Baldwln (stable owner), Paul Burns (patron) Lucien Prival (Jackson), Almira Sessions (Mrs. Cotton), Nan Bryant (servant), Carl Switzer (man at bar), Anne O'Neal, Eduardo Ciannelli, Harry James.

Vidor directed the framing episodes with Burgess Meredith and Paulette Goddard, and also an episode with Charles Laughton as a pastor which was deleted on the distributors’ demand. The Fonda-Stewart sequence was begun by John Huston and finished by George Stevens.

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Henry Blanke. Sc.: Ayn Rand, from her novel (1943). Ph.: Robert Burks. Special effects: William McGann, Edwin DuPar, John Holden, H.F. Koenekamp. Camera: James Bell. Ed.: Davld Weisbart. Art dir.: Edward Carrere. Sets: William Kuehl. Cost.: Milo Anderson. Makeup: Perc Westmore. Mus.: Max Steiner. Orchestrations: Murray Cutter. Sound: Oliver S. Garetson. Prod. man.: Eric Stacey. Dial. dir.: Jack Daniels. Asst. dir.: Dick Mayberry.

With Gary Cooper (Howard Roark), Patricia Neal (Dominique Francon), Raymond Massey (Gail Wynand), Kent Smith (Peter Keating), Robert Douglas (Ellsworth Toohey), Henry Hull (Henry Cameron), Ray Collins (Roger Enright), Moroni Olsen (chairman), Jerome Cowan (Alvah Scarret), Paul Harvey (businessman), Harry Woods (superintendent), Paul Stanton (dean), Morris Ankrum (lawyer), John Doucette (Gus Webb), Tlto Vuolo (Italian worker), Griff Barnett (judge), Frank Wilcox (Gordon Prescott), Ruthelma Stevens (secretary), Almira Sessions (servant), Reels Alden (news dealer), Tristram Coffin (secretary), Roy Gordon (vice-president), Isabel Withers (secretary), William Haade (worker), Gail Bonney (woman), Thurston Hall (businessman), Dorothy Christy (lady), Harlan Warde (young man), Jonathan Hale (Guy Francon), Douglas Kennedy (reporter) Pierre Watkin, Selmer Jackson (officials), John Alvin (young intellectual), Geraldine Wall (woman), Fred Kelsey (old guard), Paul Newlan, George Sherwood (policemen), Lois Austin (guests), Josephine Whittell (hostess), Lester Dorr (man), Bill Dagwell (employee), Charles Trowbrldge, Russell Hicks, Raymond Largay, Charles Evans (administrators), G. Pat Collins (foreman), Ann Doran (secretary), Creighton Hale (clerk), Philo McCullough (bailif).

“I had the feeling, always, to have all the pictures made from the viewpoint of the leading character, and I discovered, always, that they never got a day off, because no scene happened that wasn’t observed from their viewpoint.…The Big Parade and The Crowd and all these films, the leading character sees it all happen—first-person technique. And in The Fountainhead, the solipsistic idea, the integrity, the divinity almost, of the artist is another theme which I’ve always been interested in; that the whole universe springs from the individual—what he’s conscious of, that’s reality; what he is not conscious of doesn’t exist.…

“Earlier, when I would tell a story to a star, he’d say, ‘But I don’t prompt any of these situations—I don’t motivate them.’ He’d say, ‘I want to motivate them—I am the hero.’ I didn’t understand it, because I felt that life motivated [them]. I’m still interested in this—that life creates a situation and you have to live [it], you can’t fight it. That’s what neuroticism is: fighting the life that we have to live, you know. In other words, in simple words, we make our own world; we make our own universe. Whenever you get a problem, you can say, ‘Well, this is my own consciousness.’ And if you have opposing forces, you try to integrate them. I think [all this isl reflected in the films. But in a growing way. [schic]

“[The Fountainhead] was so much in line with what I was thinking at that time. I reread Jung’s Psychology of the Self just the other day. It is mainly the self against the mob, against prevailing public opinion. I opened it up and saw that I had marked all the pages with notes. I was surprised to discover that influence on the film.

“The point is that one has a tendency to feel that you’re not perfectly cast, or not exactly suited to do a certain picture. But both War and Peace and The Fountainhead were films that came to me through an agent, and I did not set out to do them as personal projects. It was a coincidence that I was set to do this new film, because I had just gone through Jungian analysis a few years before, and I was then very conscious of this recognition of the self, the dignity of the self, and the power and divinity one has. I had been approaching this in my own way, and not exactly through Jungian techniques. What was so startling was the thought that I would do these films after the thinking I had been doing. I was very much in accord with this story, and I would ask myself later, ‘How could they be so perceptive about my own beliefs and thinking, that they would assign me these pictures?’

“My first feature film had been inspired by Buddha and The Light of Asia, I ran home after seeing the play and wrote the story. The Fountainhead and War and Peace are very much alike in this respect, and in War and Peace the character is even fat and round like Buddha. It’s a man’s search, and apparently the films I had done were able to communciate that this type of story would be good for me to do.

“The studio had excluded Ayn Rand and had put in a husband and wife writing team to do the script when I came onto the project. When I read [it] I said, ‘This is just throwing the whole story away. Why did you buy he book?’ So we finally brought in Ayn Rand herself. She volunteered to do it for free, providing we didn’t change any of her dialogue.

“I disagreed with the ending, however. I didn’t like them blowing up the building. Today, I agree with that endng, and I like the dramatic power of it.

“Ayn Rand had a definite idea about the integrity and permanance of this atist’s work. If I made a film today, I would think of making a film with the same theme, about the integrity of the self against the mob—against advertising influence, mob psychology, mob thinking. That’s where the neuroticism comes in. It happens when people try to conform to the way other people do things.

“Gary Cooper could simply say a ‘Yes,’ or a ‘No,’ and it would hold a lot of meaning because of the strength and character behind it. He really was convinced that he knew what he was doing. He had a grasp on the importance of self.

“Today, I know that the self is the only evidence of what we call God. That is the only place to find God, in one’s own self.

“After I saw [The Fountainhead] the other day, I was thinking that perhaps I shouldn’t try to do another picture. That picture is so much of what I believe, I could die happily, knowing that I had made it. [dga]

“Edward Carère designed those wonderful ‘modern’ buildings used in The Fountainhead. Like Ayn Rand’s book, they were heavily influenced by the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. In fact, Carère and I studied all that had been published about Wright and inspected all his buildings around here.

“I planned to go out and see Wright himself and discuss the whole project, but Jack Warner heard about it at the last minute and stopped us, afraid that if I discussed the thing with Wright and didn’t make a deal he might sue us later, claiming we’d stolen some of his ideas. [hgm]

“[Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper] fell immediately in love. It was a big, terrific romance, I used to have drinks with them, and I could see it happening. It really helped in the picture. When they looked at each other in the picture, it really meant something.” [dga]

Bosley Crowther. New York Times, July 9, 1949. More fervor than compelling conviction…wordy, involved and pretentious.…A more curious lot of high-priced twaddle we haven’t seen for a long, long time.…King Vidor has hotly illustrated [Ayn Rand’s reasoning] in a vast succession of turgid scenes.

Kevin McGann. At one point in the film, Toohey asks Roark what he thinks of him. When he tells Toohey, “But I don’t think of you,” it is not bravado, but daringly forthright solipsism—King Vidor’s thematic preoccupation.…The difference [from Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 1936, and Meet John Doe, 1941] indicates the opposite ideologies of the authors or directors. In the Capra films the hero’s determination at first comes from nonconformity expressed as boyish innocence and naivete, though it is soon more indignant, whereas in the Rand-Vidor film, from the beginning, it comes from manly strength and a hard-nosed conception of Self. Unlike Capra’s hero—one of the “folk,” vulnerable and sensitive, likely to get hurt—Roark begins as a rock and ends as a rock. [“Ayn Rand in the Stockyard of the Spirit,” in Gerald Peary & Roger Shatzkin, The Modern American Novel and the Movies (New York: Ungar, 1978), pp. 331, 335.]

Dir.: David Butler. Vidor appears as himself, with David Butler, Michael Curtiz and Raoul Walsh.

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Henry Blanke. Sc.: Lenore Coffee, from novel (1948) by Stuart Engstrand. Ph.: Robert Burks. Special effects.: William McGann, Edwin DuPar. Camera: Bill Schurr. Ed.: Rudi Fehr. Art dir.: Robert Haas. Sets.: William Kuehl. Bette Davis’s wardrobe: Edith Head. Makeup: Perc Westmore. Mus.: Max Steiner. Orchestrations: Murray Cutter. Sound: Charles Lang. Prod. manager: Eric Stacey. Asst. dir.: Al Alleborn.

With Bette Davis (Rosa Moline), Joseph Cotten (Dr. Lewis Moline), David Brian (Neil K. Latimer), Ruth Roman (Carol Lawrence), Minor Watson (Moose), Dona Drake (Jenny), Regis Toomey (Sorren), Sarah Selby (Mildred), Mary Servoss (Mrs. Wetch), Frances Charles (Miss Elliott), Harry Tyler (station master), Ralph Littlefield (chauffeur), Creighton Hale (old man), Joel Allen (pastor), Ann Doran (Edith Williams), Buddy Roosevelt (man), Eve Miller, James Craven (man in waiting room), Elleen Stevens, Judith Wood (servant), Hal Gerard (servant), Jim Hayward (bar patron), Bobby Henshaw (man), Sherman Sanders (old violinist), Gail Bonney, Ailene Hill, June Evans (women), Charles Jordan (jury foreman), Frank Pharr (Coroner).

Vidor. I don’t much care for Beyond the Forest for some reason or other. Still, I liked it a little better than Lightning Strikes Twice, which turned out terribly. It has a certain atmosphere—particularly the exterior hunting sequence shot up at Lake Tahoe and in the ending when Rosa Moline lurches towards the train. [hgm] Billy Wilder copied the scene in The Crowd for his picture The Apartment and he asked me how many desks I had had. I used to hear qute a bit that he liked Beyond the Forest, but he also talked a lot about the ending and the symbolism for the last scene. I wanted an episode for this film that would symbolize the whole story in a way, to pull all the essence of the story toegther and summarize in a few shots what the picture was all about. I’m sure this ending was not in the book. I certainly doubt that it was ever in the script. Rudi Fehr was the editor on this film. He was quite…a good, sensitive editor. I knew when we were working on [the end sequnce] that I could play the music up a little bit, as well as the sound effects. I knew from then on that I wasn’t going to have any more dialogue.

Bette Davis. A terrible movie.…I was too old for the part. I told them they should have put Virginia Mayo in the part—she would have been great.…The book is very good and could have made a marvelous movie.…The one interesting thing King Vidor did in the film was to make the train into her lover; that bit was good. The rest was just crazy.

Joseph Cotton: King Vidor told me he could not remember a less rewarding moment in his long and historic life behind the camera.…I did not like the part or the story.

Bosley Crowther. New York Times, Oct. 22, 1949. Bette Davis…is so monstrous—so ghoulishly picturesque—that her representation often slips off into laughable caricature. We cannot imagine that King Vidor, her director, desired this last to be, but we strongly suspect that he was working to make her look just as vicious as he could. For not only has he accepted a thoroughly denigrating script, but he has harshened and uglified Miss Davis so that she’s as repulsive as a witch in a cartoon.

Molly Haskell. In King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest, [Bette Davis’s] wildest and most uncompromising film, one she herself dislikes, she plays the evil Rosa Moline….One of the earliest discontented housewives on record, Rosa sashays around wearing a long black wig, like her surly housekeeper, Dona Drake, who is a dark-skinned lower-class parody of her. Davis’ obsession is to go to Chicago, and to this end she wrecks everyone’s lives. In one of the film’s most modern, angst-ridden scenes, she wanders the back streets of Chicago, staggering through the rain (having been turned out of a bar where women “without escorts” are not allowed), looking like another star who would later claim her influence— Jeanne Moreau in La notte.

“I don’t want people to love me,” Rosa says—one of the most difficult things for a woman to bring herself to say, ever, and one of the most important. It is something Davis the actress must have said. Thus, does the superfemale become the superwoman, by taking life into her own hands, her own way.

Davis’ performance in Beyond the Forest, as a kind of female W.C. Fields, and Vidor’s commitment to her, are astonishing.…[She] creates her own norms, and is driven by motives not likely to appeal to the average audience. She is ready and eager to give up husband, position, security, children (most easily, children), even lover; for what? Not for a thing so noble as “independence” in terms of a job, profession, or higher calling, but to be rich and fancy in Chicago! And here is Davis, not beautiful, not sexy, not even young, convincing us that she is all these things—by the vividness of her own self-image, by the vision of herself she projects so fiercely that we have no choice but to accept it. She is smart, though, smarter than everyone around her. She says it for all smart dames when David Brian tells her he no longer loves her, that he’s found the “pure” woman of his dreams. “She’s a book with none of the pages cut.” he says.

Pauline Kael. Consistently (though inadvertently) hilarious; there’s not a sane dull scene in this peerless piece of camp.…King Vidor seems to be inventing his own brand of hog-wild Expressionism…covered with droplets of erotic sweat.

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Henry Blanke. Sc.: Lenore Coffee, from novel A Man Without Friends (1940) by Margaret Echard. Ph.: Sid Hickox. Ed.: Thomas Reilly. Art dir.: Douglas Bacon. Sets.: William Wallace. Cost.: Leah Rhodes. Mus.: Max Steiner. Orchestrations: Murray Cutter. Sound: Chares Lang. Asst. dir.: Frank Mattison. Dial. dir.: Felix Jacoves.

With Ruth Roman (Shelley Carnes), Richard Todd (Richard Trevelyan), Mercedes McCambridge (Liza), Zachary Scott (Harvey), Frank Conroy (Mr. Nolan), Kathryn Givney (Myra Nolan), Rhys Williams (Father Paul), Darryl Hickman (String), Nacho Galindo (Pedro), Franklin Parker (guard), Gordon Nelson (chief guard), Leo Cleary (editor), Ed Hearn (Hank), Monty Pittman (bus driver), Ned Glass, Sumner Gretchell (Ranchers), Ralph Byrd (salesman), Byron Foulger (receptionist) Irene Calvillo (Raquel), Marya Marco (Josepha), Frank Cady (garageman), Marjorie Bennett, Helen Winston, Eileen Coghlan, Nina Perry (Conchita), Henry Sharpe (judge), Joaquln Geray (Johnny Lopez), John Pickard (trooper).

A.W. New York Times, Apr. 13, 1951. Director King Vidor, who is dealing with such fulminous elements as suspicion, crime and punishment, has not taken advantage of these potentially dramatic attributes. And, as a result, this story of a man harried by a murder he did not commit, is more often indirect and conversational than might be expected.

Richard Koszarski. While film historians have generally tended to demean Vidor’s work after Our Daily Bread, it could easily be argued that only in the 40’s or 50’s do his heroes and heroines develop the richness of personality that characterizes any director’s mature style. Certainly no one else created such florid and fascinating roles for actresses as the parts Vidor gave Bette Davis in Beyond the Forest, Mercedes McCambridge in Lightning Strikes Twice, and Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun and Ruby Gentry. Unappreciated in their own time, these bravura performances have only increased in interest with the passing years, and seem especially rare in an era which creates no film roles for its actresses at all. [Hollywood Directors, 1914-1940 (New York: Oxford, 1976)]

1952. JAPANESE WAR BRIDE. Bernhard Prods.—20th Century-Fox. 91 min. January 3.

Dir.: King Vidor. Prods.: Joseph Bernhard, Anson Bond. Sc.: Catherine Turney, from story by Anson Bond. Ph.: Lionel Lindon, [Paul Ivano]. Ed.: Terry Morse. Art dir.: Danny Hall. Sets: Murray Waite. Cost.: Izzy Berne, Adele Parmenter. Makeup: Gene Hibbs. Mus.: Emil Newman, Arthur Lange. Sound: Vic Appel, Ed Borschell. Asst. to producer: Paul Guilfoyle. Prod, manager: Percy Ikerd. Asst. dir.: Wilbur McGaugh.

With Shirley Yamaguchi (Tae Shimizu), Don Taylor (Jim Sterling), Cameron Mitchell (Art Sterling), Marie Wlndsor (Fran Sterling), James Bell (Ed Sterling), Louise Lorimer (Harriet Sterling). Philip Ahn (Eitaro Shimizu), Sybil Merritt (Emily Shafer), Lana Nakano (Shiro Hasagawa), Kathleen Mulqueen (Mrs. Milly Shafer), Orley Lindgren (Ted Sterling), George Wallace (Woody Blacker), May Takasugi (Emma Hasagawa), William Yokota (Mr. Hasagawa), Susie Matsumoto (Tae’s mother), Weaver Levy (Kioto), Jerry Fujikawa (man at fish market), Cheiko Sato, Tetsu Komai (Japanese servants), Hisa Chiba (old Japanese woman), David March (man at factory).

A.W. New York Times, Jan. 30,1952. King Vidor has directed the drama…without imagination.

1953. RUBY GENTRY. Bernhard-Vidor Prods.—20th Century-Fox. 82 min. October 27.

Dir.: King Vidor. Prods.: Joseph Bernhard, King Vidor. Sc.: Sylvia Richards, from story by Arthur Fitz-Richard. Ph.: Russell Harlan. Ed.: Terry Morse. Art dir.: Dan Hall. Sets.: E. Boyle. Jennifer Jones’s wardrobe: Valentina. Cost.: Marie Hermann, William Edwards. Makeup: Del Armstrong. Mus.: Heinz Roemheld. Music supervision: Davld Chudnow. Sound: Jean L. Speak. Asst. dir.: Milton Carter. Technical consultant: Gregory Walcott.

With Jennifer Jones (Ruby Gentry), Charlton Heston (Boake Tackman), Karl Malden (Jim Gentry), Tom Tully (Jud Corey), Bernard Phillips (Dr. Saul Manfred - narrator), James Anderson (Jewel Corey), Josephine Hutchinson (Letitia Gentry), Phyllis Avery (Tracy McAuliffe), Herbert Heyes (Judge Tackman), Myra Marsh (Ma Corey), Charles Cane (Cullen McAuliffe), Sam Flint (Neil Fallgren), Frank Wilcox (Clyde Pratt), Thomas B. Henry.

“[Selznick] felt that I had an understanding of [Jennifer Jones’s] talents and possibilities. During the production of [Ruby Gentry], we made a deal that he would not be allowed on the set. We simply couldn’t afford his emotional reactions to things that involved his wife’s work. He definitely had an obsession. He would breathe hard when he watched her scenes on the screen, and even as they were being shot. At times he could be a great asset to a picture, and at other times he could be terribly annoying. He was madly in love with her. Everything he did was for her benefit. He spent more time working on her scenes than anything else. He also realized that I knew how to handle her.

“She was one of those actresses who would really show whatever they were feeling in their facial expressions. I don’t know whether they’re really called actresses or not, but they certainly are a very photogenic group. If you can make them feel something inside, it will photograph on the screen. In other pictures when she tried to really act, she wouldn’t arrive at it from the inside. She made a lot of grimaces, and the effort on her part became very obvious. [dga]

“The scene in which the lovers drive their car into the moonlit sea was autobiographical and added to the script by me. That used to happen all the time in my part of Texas. [hgm]

“There is a scene which I love very much also in the film, because it corresponds to something vital: it’s the scene where the girl demolishes the dike. At the the moment the land is flooded, the man is destroyed. All his ambitions drain away.…The opposition between this man who tries to construct himself and to construct something and this brutal destruction seems good to me.…It’s the reverse of Our Daily Bread where the water is the savior.” [pos]

Molly Haskell. If Vivien Leigh was the ultimate romantic bad-girl fantasy, Jennifer Jones was the ultimate sexual one…in her King Vidor phase: as the tartish, hip-swinging, bosom-heaving, smudge-faced “Daisy Mae” of Duel in the Sun and Ruby Gentry. Like her modern counterpart Susan George in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, she exuded sex like a dog in heat, suggesting not so much a woman as a walking libido, a machine à plaisir, an orgone box with a woman’s features. She represented for Vidor the sexual freedom of the lower classes or the dark-skinned races, not as they are in any cross section of life, but as they were in his own feverishly physical imagination; she stood as a reproach not to man’s timidity, but to woman’s. Unlike the Susan George character who, in a state of constant libidinous excitation, makes any man less than a sex fiend look like a fairy, Jennifer Jones’ devotion is soul and body to her man, a devotion which makes the loves and compromises of the social folk around her look extremely pallid. She is unreal, even embarrassing, except in those outrageous moments when, like Stella Dallas, she explodes sexual stereotype, as in the magnificent erotic and romantic midnight ride on the beach with Charlton Heston in Ruby Gentry and the liebestod shoot-out on the cliff with Gregory Peck in Duel in the Sun. She rises to a wild magnificence as she gets her revenge on the two men who were “too good” for her. But in between these peaks her characteristic tagalong tigress is a confirmation of women’s worst fears of men’s most lubricious fantasies. That she doesn’t get very far with the men she wants—Peck in Duel, Heston in Ruby Gentry—only makes her groveling more embarrassing, especially as Peck’s bad boy and Heston’s social climber are such low specimens. For the woman viewer, there is a special humiliation, a spiritual castration, tied to the spectacle of a woman clinging to a man who doesn’t love her. [From Reverence, p. 200.]

Pauline Kael. King Vidor directed, in the seething, extravagant style he employed in parts of Duel in the Sun and in such outré items as Beyond the Forest and The Fountainhead.

“You know, it’s funny how in life, for some reason, it’s the one that got away that you always remember—a fish, a girl, a film. The film that got away from me was the one about Lindbergh that was based on his book. I’d always really admired Lindbergh. He was the one person I most wanted to meet. Then the chance came to meet him.

“[John P.] Marquand was back east reading for The Book-of-the-Month Club, and he’d read an advance copy of Lindbergh’s book. He called me and said I really ought to come east right away and meet Lindbergh, because the book could make a great film. I got right on a plane to New York, and I cried in the lobby of the Pierre Hotel when I read that book.

“Marquand introduced me to Lindbergh, and we got along just great. The two of us spent a lot of time together. Lindbergh and I ate a lot of Chinese food, which was what he liked. It was interesting the way no one ever recognized him. He’d been the most talked-about man in the country, in the world. But no one recognized him, not even once. He just wasn’t a visible celebrity without his aviator’s cap and goggles. But he didn’t mind. He said he preferred it that way. I guess he’d had enough.

“We really spent a lot of time together, and we talked mostly about the picture I was going to make from his book. I pretty much had the whole picture worked out, and we had a gentleman’s agreement. I thought.

“Then, one day Leland Hayward appeared, acting as an agent. He offered Lindbergh more than I’d planned to spend on the entire film. And Lindbergh just signed.

“I didn’t hear from Lindbergh. He seemed to have lost his big interest in Chinese food. I called him. He said sort of apologetically, ‘I did it for my family.’ Then he said brightly, ‘Couldn’t you just do it with Leland Hayward?’ Now, of course, Leland Hayward was working with Billy Wilder. My first thought was, Lindbergh doesn’t know much about business. My second thought was my first thought was wrong. Here was Lindbergh getting rich while I’d just wasted my time and enthusiasm and money.

“They made the picture with James Stewart, which was just the opposite of what I had in mind. Jimmy Stewart was in real life a general in the Air Force. He represented something quite different. He was a person who knew how to get along within the mainstream and to rise to the top. Lindbergh was a person who was always something of an outsider, always a little out of order, not quite fitting in, more of a loner and an individual than a leader.

“Younger was important too. At that time Stewart was too old for the part. But even more important, I felt he had to be an unknown. Stewart brought too much of Jimmy Stewart with him. It was such an established identity, and all those pictures he’d made before came with him to the part. I couldn’t believe I was seeing Lindbergh. Afterwards I don’t think Lindbergh was exactly happy about the picture, but then he had all that money.

“With anyone else I would have produced a contract and had him sign it. My lawyers would have been talking with his lawyers. But you couldn’t do that sort of thing with that kind of man. You couldn’t be so small as to ask for a signature on the dotted line from a man like Lindbergh, the hero. So that was how I happened a year later to be sitting in a movie theater in Westwood watching a film of the life of Lindbergh and reading the credit, ‘Directed by Billy Wilder.’ I’d been hero-struck by Lindbergh, and I’d confused the public hero with the private man.” [chan]

1954. LIGHT'S DIAMOND JUBILEE. 2-hour television broadcast, simultaneously on NBC, CBS, ABC, Dumont, 8:00-10:00 p.m., October 24, 1954, in homage to Thomas Edison.

Dirs.: Alan Handley, Alan “Bud” Yorkln, Christian Nyby, King Vidor, Willlam Wellman, Norman Taurog. Prod.: Davld 0. Selznlck. Sc. Ben Hecht, Davld 0. Selznlck. Mus.: Victor Young. Narr.: Joseph Cotten. Introduction: President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

“The Leader of the People.” Dir.: King Vidor, from story by John Steinbeck. With Walter Brennan, Brandon de Wilde, Harry Morgan.

“A Kiss for the Liutenant.” Dir.: King Vidor, from story by Arthur Gordon. With Guy Madison, Kim Novak.

Dir.: King Vidor. Prod.: Aaron Rosenberg. Sc.: Borden Chase, D.D. Beauchamp, from novel (1952) by Dee Linford. Ph (Technicolor).: Russell Metty. Color consultant: Wllliam Fritzsche. Ed.: Virgil Vogel. Art dirs.: Alexander Golitzen, Richard H. Riedel. Sets.: Russell A. Gausman, John Auston. Cost.: Rosemary Odell. Makeup: Bud Westmore. Mus.: Joseph Gershenson. Songs: “Man wlthout a Star”: Frederick Herbert (lyr.), Arnold Hughes (mus.), sung by Frankie Laine; “And the Moon Grew Brighter and Brighter”: Jimmy Kennedy and Lou Singer, sung by Kirk Douglas. Sound: Leslie I. Carey, Joe Lapis. Unit prod. manager: Edward Dodds. Asst. dirs.: Frank Shaw, George Loillier. Dlal. dir.: William Bailey.

With Kirk Douglas (Dempsey Rae), Jeanne Crain (Reed Bowman), Claire Trevor (Idonee), William Campbell (Jeff Jimson), Jay C. Flippen (Strap Davis), Myrna Hansen (Tess Cassidy), Eddy V. Waller (Bill Cassidy), Richard Boone (Steve Miles), Mara Corday (Moccasin Mary), Frank Chase (Little Waco), Roy Barcroft (Sheriff Olson), Millicent Patrick (Box Car Alice), Casey MacGregor (Hammer), Jack Ingram (Jessup), Ewing Mitchell (Johnson), Sheb Wooley (Latigo), George Wallace (Carter), Paul Birch (Mark Toliver), Bill Phillips (Cookie), William Challee (Brick Gooder), James Hayward (Duckbill), Malcolm Atterbury (Fancy Joe), Myron Healey (Mogolion), Mark Hanna (Concho), Jack Elam (vagabond).

Remakes: A Man Called Gannon (James Goldstone, 1969); Bull of the West (Paul Stanley and Jerry Hopper).

“About three weeks before the picture was supposed to start shooting, they asked me if I could shoot the film in four weeks. We were able to do it in twenty-two days. [dga] I was only mildly interested. [hgm] [What] stands out to me today is the scenes I didn’t shoot. Those standout very clearly to me. There’s one shot where the train is shown. It’s like something out of The Great Train Robbery. It is just a stationary shot with a train going from one side of the screen to the other. Maybe in my teens I would have done such a shot, but you learn to either pan with it, or you get a shot where it’s closing in on the camera. In other words, the camera should be in the same mood that the scene is. Here’s a big train rushing by and the camera is absolutely static, unable to move.” [dga]

Borden Chase. I had written the words and all that sort of thing, but I did not dream of having [Kirk Douglas] dance with the banjo. That was a special touch. He came up with these wonderful touches, and you can tell that this film was influenced by a wonderful director. [dga]

Vidor. “Kirk worried about doing this scene during the enture production He worked himself up to the point where he came to me and said that it couldn’t be done the way I wanted to do it. I just told him that he shouldn’t be worrid about it. When it came time to do the scene, we used all kinds of special techiques to help get the effect we wanted. There was a part where he fires the gun. We photographed that scene over and over again so that it was really done in short bits. We photographed him pulling the gun out time and time again, almost as if he were practicing on-camera. With those short shots you could do it in reverse. In one scene he had to flip the gun over his shoulder and catch it.” [dga]

Dir.: King Vidor. 2nd unit.: Mario Soldati. Prod.: Dino De Laurentiis. Sc.: [Irwin Shaw, uncredited], Bridget Boland, Robert Westerby, King Vidor, Mario Camerini, Ennio de Concini, Ivo Perilli from novel (1869) by Leo Tolstoi. Ph.(VistaVision & Technicolor): Jack Cardiff; 2nd unit: Aldo Tonti. Ed.: Stuart Gilmore, Leo Catozzo. Art dir.: Mario Chiari, Franz Bachelin, Gianni Polidori. Sets: Piero Gherardi. Cost.: Maria De Matteis. Makeup: Alberto De Rossi. Mus.: Nino Rota, conducted by Franco Ferrara. Sound: Charles Knott. Sound ed.: Leslie Hodgson. Dial. coach: Guy Thomajan. General production manager: Bruno Todini. Asst. to producer: Ralph Serpe. Asst to Vidor: Arthur Fellows. Asst. dir.: Piero Mussetta, Guidarino Guidi. Antiquities: Vangelisti, Lucca Tuena.

With Audrey Hepburn (Natasha Rostov), Henry Fonda (Pierre Bezukhov), Mel Ferrer (Prince Andrei Bolkonsky), Vittorio Gassman (Anatole Kuragin), Herbert Lom (Napoleon Bonaparte), Oscar Homolka (General Kutuzov), Anita Ekberg (Helene), Helmut Dantine (Dolokhov), J. Barry Jones (Count Nicholas Rostov), Anna Maria Ferrero (Maria Bolkonsky), Milly Vitale (Lise Bolkonsky), Jeremy Brett (Nicholas Rostov), May Britt (Sonya Rostov), Tullio Carminati (Basil Kuragin), Wilfrid Lawson (Prince Bolkonsky), Lea Seidl (Countess Rostov), Sean Barrett (Petya Rostov), John Mills (Platon Karatsev), Patrick Crean (Denisov), Gertrude Flynn (Peronskava), Teresa Pelatti (Masa), Maria Zanoli (Mavra), Alberto Carlo Lolli (Prokofij), Mario Addobati (Rostov’s young servant), Gualtiero Tumiati (Count Bezukhov), Clelia Matania (Mlle George, actress), Gianni Luda, Eschilo Tarquini, Alex D'Alessio, Alfredo Rizzo (Russian soldiers, leave with Rostovs), Mauro Lanciani (Prince Nicolas Bolkonsky), Ina Alexeiva (his governess), Don Little (Natasha’s cavalier), John Horne (old man at ball), Gertrude Flynn (Maria Peronsksia), Sdenka Kirchen (Rostov servant), Nandor Gallai (Count Bezukhov’s servant), Michael Tor (pope/servant), Piero Pastore (Andrey’s aide), Vincent Barbi (Balaga, coachman), John Douglas, Robert Stephens (officers, leave with Rostovs), Luciano Angelini (young soldier with Andrey), Charles Fawcett (Russian artillery captain), Piero Palermini (Russian artillery lieutenant), Angelo Galassi, David Crowley, Patrick Barrett, Michael Billingsley (Russian soldiers), Aldo Saporetti, Lucio de Santis, Dimitri Konstantinov, Robin Whlte Cross (young officers at orgy), Robert Cunnigham (Pierre’s witness), Andrea Estherhazy (Dolokhov’s witness), Marianne Leibl (Bolkonsky servant), Marisa Allasio (Matrjosa), Stephen Garrett (Nicholas Rostov’s coachman / doctor at Borodino) Micaela Giustiniani (woman), Cesare Barbetti (boy), Francis Foucaud (French prisoner), Savo Raskovitch (Alexander I), Georges Brehat (French officer) Gilberto Tofano (dying soldier), Umberto Sacripante (old man), Paola Quagliero (young girl), Christopher Hofer (French officer), Carlo Delmi (soldier of the Guard), Enrico Olivieri (French drummer), Heric Oulton, Archibald Lyall (Russian generals), Alan Furlan, Joop van Hulsen (Russian officers), John Stacey, Mino Doro (Russian generals), Giovanni Rossi-Loti (young Russian officer), Giacomo Rossi-Stuart (young Cossack), Jerry Riggio, Geoffrey Copplestone, Mimmo Palmara, Giorgio Costantini (French officers), Guido Celano (Ordnance officer), Richard McNamara (De Beausset), Andrea Fantasia (Constant), Stephen Lang (Tichon), Carlo Dale, Paul Davis (Young French officers), Dancers from the Ballet del Teatro dell'Opera di Roma, Nino Milia, Henry Vidon, Terence Cooper.

The first script was written in 1954 by Ivo Perilli and rewritten in collaboration with Ennio De Concini. Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost then did a second scenario at De Laurentiis’s request. The final script by Irwin Shaw (uncredited) was done in collaboration with Gian Gaspare Napolitano and Mario Soldati (credited only on the Italian version) and kept nothing from the Aurenche-Bost treatment.

Soldati and Tonti did about a third of the film: the sequences at the Bolkonsky country house; the sequence at Lysyja Gory; the Battle of Austerlitz; the French troops entering and retreating from Moscow; all the scenes with Napoleon and Kutusov; part of the Beresina crossing.

“I got a call from Dino de Laurentiis. He sent me a script. It was 506 pages long. I told Dino not to let anyone else look at it; it was very disconnected and disjointed. I set a goal for myself of reading fifty pages of the book per day, with lots of note-taking. I decided to take a ship over there to give me more time. By the time we got to Naples [February 1955] I had a complete outline. The character Pierre was the same character that I had been trying to put on the screen through many of my own films. My first, The Turn in the Road, had a character who spent the entire story searching for truth.

“[On March 28] De Laurentiis called and said that I had to go right to St. Moritz and talk to Audrey Hepburn. He had heard that the film she was going to do had been cancelled. The village we met in was very small. It had only one hotel and we got a room overlooking the town square. The people in the town had heard that she was going to be there, and they gathered in the square. Mel Ferrer, her husband, sat on one twin bed, and Audrey sat on the other. De Laurentiis, as soon as we were settled, told me, ‘Go ahead, King, tell them.’ I had rehearsed on the automobile ride, telling the story to Dino’s secretary. I realized that I had only one chance. There had to be no hesitatation and it had to be a great performance. I walked up and down at the foot of the two twin beds, I really gave a performance. It must have taken two hours. When I finally finished, they applauded.

“As the time grew closer to the shooting date, we [still] didn’t have a script that I wanted to shoot [after many writers]. We finally got an Italian novelist named Mario Soldati. He had lived in America and his English was very good. He and I worked very hard and fast and I found him very flexible and agreeable. [dga]

“The Italian art director [Mario Chiari] was probably the best I’ve ever worked with, and his compatriots, the assistant director (who has since died), the costume designer, and all the rest—were collectively better than I’ve ever experienced here. [hgm]

“In Pierre…I recognized a ‘brother’ and I wanted to use Peter Ustinov who seemed to me to be animated by this inner life that I was looking for. But the production opposed this, arguing there wouldn’t be much credibility to the pseudo love scenes between Pierre and Natasha. They claimed the contrast between Audrey’s refinement and Peter Ustinov’s grossness wouldn’t be ‘understood’ by the worldwide audience. I tried desperately to obtain Marlon Brandon, who was working on the film Guys and Dolls, without success. Then…Paul Scofield who…was doing a play.…[But in Hollywood De Laurenttis took Henry Fonda, who] was very good, he has all the qualities. [grp] But I don’t think he is the type of actor that would devote his life to a search for the truth. [dga]

“One problem I ran into in Italy was, if we had anyone shoot second-unit, it always looked to me like confusion. Therefore I shot the battle scenes myself, the important ones…, because I wanted the battles to be clear; I wanted them to mean something. [schic] So Soldati, who was also a very good director, did some of the scenes with the cast, and I did some of the battle scenes myself. I was not quite satisfied with some of the exaggeration he did. He seemed to be too Italian, filled with exaggeration. [dga]

“All the War and Peace battles were worked out with a stop-watch; this group of men go from here to there on a certain count—you know, the zero bomb plus twelve seconds, and so forth. I enjoyed that. I liked doing that. Always a lot of blueprints, a lot of diagrams of what each company, what each fellow, must do. Someone once asked me if I’d rather direct five thousand men than two actors—I said, ‘Always.’ I preferred it because they don’t give you arguments, they don’t talk back to you. Someone again, on War and Peace, asked if I ever felt like Napoleon, and I said, ‘Hell, Napoleon could only direct one side of a battle; I can direct both sides.’ [schic]

“I worked on War and Peace for a year and a half, supervised all the cutting, music and everything.” [mov]

Aldo Tonti, 2nd-unit director of photography and one of the great cinematographers, told me that Vidor was a legend from the 1930s when he came to Rome in 1955, the precursor of neo-realism, and he disappointed everyone. Italians are used to Italian directors who are forever jumping up and down, looking through the camera, and intervening on the set. Vidor was a great disillusion. “Vidor just sat there and did nothing. The Americans are all like that. They do everything ahead of time.” [Tag Gallagher]

Bosley Crowther. New York Times, Aug. 22, 1956. The characters seem second-rate people, hacknayed and without much depth. …Natasha, played by Miss Hepburn, is a charmingly girlish sort whose amorous infatuations with Prince Andrey and the leering Anatole are represented without warmth. Indeed, the critical surrender to Anatole, whom Vittorio Gassman plays with lips and eyes, is completely unmotivated.

Basil Wright. The great difficulty in trying to turn this vast novel into a film is in somehow finding a balance between the vast manoeuvrings of armies…as against the highly individual personalities and emotions of a large cast of subtly observed characters. Maybe Vidor…was—at any rate in the earlier reels—more successful at this than Bondarchuk; but his battle scenes, and hs burning of Moscow, are completely eclipsed by Bondarchuk [in the 1967 Russian version], who incidentally…used the same simplified skeleton of the story as did Vidor. [Long View, p. 583.]

Vidor. “As for Natasha, she permeated the entire structure as the archetype of womankind which she so thoroughly represents. If I were forced to reduce the whole story of War and Peace to some basically simple statement, I would say that it is a story of the maturing of Natasha. She represents, to me, the anima of the story and she hovers over it all like immortality itself. [New York Times. Aug. 12, 1956.]

“My main memory of that picture is of Audrey Hepburn giving a wonderful performance. I used to see it over and over again in the dubbing and music cutting, and I never tired of it. I always found something new that she did. [mov]

“I can remember back to my first film, I remember someone saying— I think it was a writer for William DeMille—something about plot, and I said I wasn’t interested in plot as such—the maneuverings of people.…

“Something about the lens is very akin to the human consciousness which looks out at the universe. ‘I am a camera’—we are all cameras. We are recording eyes, you know, we look out and record and we use our consciousness to do this. The motion-picture camera is the [tool closest] to the human sense of observation and sense of the universe. When the men land on the moon, I land on the moon—because I am conscious of it, and I take it into myself, and I am landing on the moon. This is what happens with a motion-picture camera. It approximates the consciousness that everyone has.…

“I am not horrified at sex on the screen. I think it’s probably pointing toward some sort of terrific honesty. I believe that the motion picture speeds up the process of realizing reality. As I said before, it’s only an illusion, but so is life. We look out upon the world, and it’s a drama, it’s a story, it’s a script, you know. But then, it’s what you do with it. It’s what you do with it in your own computer or your own cutting room. And we think the motion picture is responsible for [showing us] this. You know, now you just can’t have the same old plot, the same old story over and over. People won’t go. You have to open up new cans of reality all the time. They have to delve a little deeper. Otherwise people say, ‘I’ll stay home and look at television.’ So movies are the instrument for enlightenment.” [schic]

Mario Garbuglia. All the battles were designed in detail, nothing was improvised, everything was studied on the work table. I have to say it was a big switch in Italian cinema because until then no one had been in a position to do such a thing. It was due in part to the financial commitment, which could not leave things uncertain, in part to the very important experience of King Vidor, who brought in his sketch artists. We designed everything, we designed sequences by kilometers. In sum it was an enriching thing for all of us. King Vidor had already reached a certain age, he was old with white hair…and he moved like an elegant American gentleman.…The contact with our cinema at this level could not have been very negative for him…. He was happy, I think, because he rediscovered a bit of the virginity of his first years.…

His biggest preoccupation was the direction of the takes. He insisted that an army cannot go one time from right to left, then from left to right, in a battle or on a march, so once it was decided they would go from left to right they had to do so in every action, with consequences in how we would set up a set, its mobile walls, etc. Vidor claimed there would be huge confusion otherwise. So this very simple theory of his influenced us as well. The exteriors were shot in various locations. The crossing of the Berezina was shot by two units, one directed by Mario Soldati at Valenza Po in Piedmonte, where the bridges were built that would be blown. I was in a boat when they blew.…The sequence was designed shot by shot. Soldati directed three cameras at the center of the pontoon bridge…while Vidor was on the right bank with three or four cameras.…Just this sequence took three or four weeks to prepare.…A crushing but stupendous work was the construction of Moscow here at Cinecittà…three kilometers on each side. Five hundred workers did it in forty days, without an instant of relaxation. [Franca Faldini & Goffredo Fofi, L’avventurosa storia del cinema italiano, 1935-1959.]

Claudio Mancini. It was a film that revolutionized everybody and everything. It was really like being in Hollywood. Sketches and models prepared months in advance, customes studied with extreme accuracy and a profusion of means.…Yet King Vidor was something of a disappointment. In contrast to [Robert] Rossen who was a certain type of character, Vidor was an old man, at sundown, someone who already accepted anything. [ibid.]

James Card. Vidor reached his greatness before the arrival of dialogue. He had honed his skills in bringing pantomime to brilliant visual eloquence, to razor sharpness. The sound track blunted much that he had achieved. King Vidor was not a man of the theatre. His whole career had developed as he more and more effectively dealt with the mysteries peculiar to a silent medium. The King Vidor of The Crowd could never have produced a War and Peace with Henry Fonda as a Tolstoy character. [card]

Dir.: King Vidor. 2nd unit: Noel Howard. Prods.: Edward Small, Tad Richmond. Sc.: Anthony Veiller, Paul Dudley, George Bruce, [Sylvia Richards], from story by Crane Wilber. Ph. (Super Technirama 70mm & Technicolor): Frederick A. Young, [Alfredo Cristobal]; 2nd unit: John von Kotze. Camera: John Harrls, Paul Wllson. Special effects: Alex Weldon. Ed.: Otto Ludwig. Art dir.: Rlchard Day, Alfred Sweeney, Luis Perez Espinosa, [Angel Arzuaga]. Sets.: Dario Simoni. Cost.: Ralph Jester, Eric Seelig. Dresses: Shubert. Access.: Robert Goodstein. Mus.: Mario Nascimbene, conducted by Franco Ferrara. Sound: David Hildyard. Prod. man.: Richard McWhorter. Asst. to prod.(orgy scene): Hamilton Keener. Technical consultant (cavalry sequence): Augustin Medina, Kenny Lee. Asst. dirs.: Piero Mussetta, Pepe Lopez, Joseph Kenny, Jose Maria Ochoa, Paul Gannapoler. Choreograohy: Jaroslav Berger, asst: Jean-Pierre Genet,

With Yul Brynner (Solomon), Gina Lollobrigida (Sheba), George Sanders (Adonijah), Davld Farrar (Pharaoh), Marisa Pavan (Abishag), John Crawford (Jaob), Laurence Naismith (Hezrai), Jose Nieto (Ahab), Alejandro Rey (Sittar), Harry Andrews (Baltor), Jullo Pena (Zadok), Maruschi Fresno (Batsheba), William Devlin (Nathan), Felix De Pomes (Egyptian general), Jean Anderson (Takyan), Jack Gwillim (Josiah), Finlay Currie (David), Luis Santana (assassin), Virgilio Texeira, Mike Brendel, Rufino Ingles, Luis Prendes, Alfonso Roias, Walter Gotell, Anne Scott.

Filmed in Spain. Exteriors: Saragossa, Escorial, Palace of Manzanares El Dir, San Martin de la Vega.

Tyrone Power, playing Solomon, died two months into the shooting. Some attempts were made to use Virgilio Texeira as Power’s double for the last scenes. But the producers chose to reshoot the film with Yul Brynner.

“I did half of it—two months—with Tyrone Power. More than once he told me: ‘This is the best part I’ve ever had, the best picture I’ve ever been in,’and when we ran the rushes we had to agree: he was able to convey the character’s vacillation between sex and religion, sex and state obligation, so well that we thought we were going to have a simply marvellous movie. Then Power died and was replaced by Yul Brynner, who was so cautious and inhibited at stepping into the part in those circumstances that Solomon and Sheba somehow turned into an unimportant, indifferent sort of picture.…We also had weather problems. I’d started shooting in September, but it was December by the time we came to re-shoot it and we could no longer go to the places I’d originally used, so we constantly had to cheat in matters of climate and landscape. [hgm] Yul Brynner wanted to skip over the interesting complexity, he didn’t want to hear about it. It was impossible to talk with him. Numerous scenes like the love scene in the wheeping willows thus became quickly ridiculous.…

“Despite everything, the film was finished in less than a month, as Yul Brynner’s contract demanded, and I could let go of my emotions. I had kept what had happened to me emotionally hidden until then and then suddenly, walking to my office, the floodgates broke. I went back home and closed the door. I sat down and began to cry.” [grp]

“For example, there is a courtyard scene where Gina Lollobrigida drives in. To shoot that in Hollywood would have cost $60,000. In Psian it was only $20,000. We had extras there for a dollar a day. They would have cost $35 a day in Hollywood. For a scene with one thousand extras it meant a difference between $1000 a day, as opposed to $35,000 a day.” [dga]

Dir.-Prod.-Sc.—ph.—narrated (16mm): Nicholas Rodiv [King Vidor]. Ed.: Fred Y. Smith. Asst. dir.: Michael Neary.

“It started when I simply wrote a narration that interested me and challenged myself to fit it to a film, using existing objects in nature, without animation techniques of any kind. I did the photography myself for very little money….It represents an almost abstract attempt to illustrate philosophical thoughts and ideas with strictly photographed—not manufactured—images. What, it asks, is truth, and what is illusion? It draws its examples from obvious things like the movies’ illusory ‘motion,’ and the way railroad tracks seem to converge to a point on the horizon.” [hgm]

“Besides Truth and Illusion, I made about half of a [16mm] documentary about Paso Robles, a small California town where I live a good part of the year.” [pos74]

1978. Honorary Oscar: “For his incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator.”

Vidor was nominated five times for directing but never won: The Crowd, Hallelujah, The Champ, The Citadel, War and Peace.

Dir.-Prod.-Sc.: King Vidor. Ph. (16mm): Bri Murphy, Deone Hanson. Eds.: Rex McGee, Chris Cooke. Filmed: 1975.

Wyeth. Letter to Vidor: “For years I have wanted to write and tell you that I consider your war film The Big Parade the only truly great film ever produced. Over the years I have viewed the film many, many times and [with] each showing the certainty of its greatness deepens…I have always viewed it with awe and must tell you that in many abstract ways it has influenced my paintings.”

With Ray Sharkey (Byron Levin), Ornella Muti (Catherine Stockheainz), Klaus Kinski (Frederick Stockheinz), Armand Assante (Lorenzo Prado), King Vidor (Walter Klein).

Dir., sc: Catherine Berge. Prod.: Alain Lavalle. Ph. (color): Ivan Koselka. Ed.: Jean-Philippe Berger. Art dir.: Marquita Doassans. Music: Bob Hauser. Music Recording: Robert Bosch. Sound: Pierre Racine. Prod. managers: Nelly Lacroix, Roger Racine.

“I don’t have false modesty in admitting it. Thus I can cite The Crowd, Hallelujah, War and Peace, Show People with Marion Davies.” [legu]

War and Peace was your second-to-last film, and also one of your best films. Were you prepared to hang it up after just one more picture and retire from the making of features? Had you expected to stop?

“No. I never have thought of the word ‘retirement.’ I’ve never had it in my vocabulary. There was nothing better that I wanted to do than to continue making films.

“When I came back to New York and met with the office there, [United Artists] said that they wanted me to continue working for them, and that they didn’t want me going anywhere else.

“Having this offer, as it were, from United Artists, I went back to California to complete work on the ‘Milly’ story. I had been working on it for five years before either War and Peace or Solomon and Sheba. ‘Milly’was a story where a girl, who had been picked up in the mountains and brought into town, touches the lives of the people. Up until that time there was always some mystical character I wanted to show and I was trying to do it with a very down-to-earth character in the other films. I wanted to have a character that people would ask, ‘Where did she come from?’ There would never be quite a full explanation as to who she was and where she came from. She comes into town, works at the gas station, and gradually she becomes the psyche, the feminine idea, the feminine archetype. It’s called the soul figure in Jungian philosophy.

“I was also working on another project, which was Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun.

“I rented a few offices over at United Artists, and I had a writer, whom I think I had worked with before, and we just buckled down and accomplished what we set out to do. It was one of these stories for which I had a personal feeling. Sort of what you might call ‘out of my guts.’ That’s the way The Crowd was made, and that’s the way Hallelujah was made.

“There had been other projects, such as The Big Parade, that I felt very deeply about. They didn’t always read too well, or show up on paper in script form well—if l’d had to put The Crowd into script form as a screenplay and submit it around to a lot of people, it wouldn’t have been made. Even with a picture like Show People, it was the same thing. There was a certain mood to it. MGM and Thalberg had been so pleased with The Big Parade. When they first saw it, they were elated and surprised because a lot of it wasn’t in the script at all—it grew from the script while we were shooting. When The Crowd was written, they were afraid to turn it down because I might come out with a surprise.

“This all related to the ‘Milly’ story. Max Youngstein, who was in charge of United Artists, would look at the scripts we were writing for the ‘Milly’ story, but he wouldn’t understand what I was doing. The others would say, ‘When we listen to you, we get the feeling, we get the idea. But when you give us the screenplay…’ They just didn’t understand what I was doing, putting my own individuality into the script. It was like a painter telling someone what he’s going to paint. After a while I started to think that the screenplay was not fine enough, not articulate enough, and I started to go back and do some revisions. For a time I believed that the only way to get the story down on paper was to write a book.

“I spent a lot of money and a lot of time trying to put this picture over and get it made. Three times—once with Darryl Zanuck at Fox, once with Allied Artists, and once with another company, I tried to get it made. Darryl turned it down because he thought it was going to be a high-budget picture. But with Allied Artists we went so far as to choose all the locations up around Truckee and Stockton, and I even went around and put stakes in the ground to mark the camera angles. I hope the stakes are still there. At Allied Artists, (Steve) Broidy and I started interviewing people and having readings. We had a deal set for $600,000. There were a lot of backers who said that it couldn’t be made for that much, and they finally dropped out. Inasmuch as I’d made War and Peace and Solomon and Sheba, and they had both turned out all right, especially after saving Solomon and Sheba from being a complete disaster, I finally thought that I could do the films I wanted. But after a year with the writer, I don’t know what happened. I just gave it up. I quit.

“It’s the same story with the new project I then started. I guess someone came along with an idea of doing a story about Cervantes as a young man. I think it was Ilya Salkind. He came over and they paid me and a writer to do a script, and I thought we had a marvelous script. It’s based on a book called A Man Called Cervantes. We worked very hard on it. It progressed to the point where I went on to Paris to get ready to do the film.

“At this time Salkind had invested in a film with Orson Welles, and suddenly they ran out of money. So, we took the project to Madrid, and eventually someone else bought the project. This man told me, ‘I think we should have the part’—not Cervantes, but a secondary part—‘changed to a girl instead of a boy.’ I said, ‘My God! We’ve been working on this part for a long time!’ He said, ‘We can get Jane Fonda to play the part if it’s a girl.’ I guess she was twelve or fourteen years old at the time. I said to myself, Here we go again, screwing it up!

“Well, when this project was shipped over to Madrid, this new fellow turned out to have very little money. Then he wanted me to talk to someone else in Madrid. I guess I just sort of lost enthusiasm for it. I said to myself, I’m not going to run around and try to promote it just to get it made. Eventually they put some other director on it.

“I was glad to get out of it. They were diluting every idea, changing everything, and I was at a place in my life where I didn’t have to prostitute these ideas and make these compromises. In The Fountainhead Gary Cooper blows up the whole building because they change the façade and some of the other sections of the structure. That’s what I felt like at that point. I’d had enough experience with that before. Even today, if I watch Hallelujah and see the Irving Berlin song in it, even though I’m a Berlin enthusiast, I feel like getting down on the floor and hiding my face because it didn’t belong in the picture.

“I had a feeling they were looking for youth or sensationalism, like Sam Peckinpah. When censorship was lifted, they just didn’t envision me as a popular director. I tried to get a good agent to represent me, and they said that they had all they could handle.

“So anyway, I had to give up the ‘Milly’ story, and I never made any progress on The Marble Faun. It was too nebulous, maybe too steep. But it had lots of spiritual meaning, and that is what has always driven me, because right along with my filmmaking, I was interested in the facts of life and the science of being.

“About that time I went to Paris and bought a Beaulieu 16mm camera, and I thought I would make a film on my own without asking anyone whether they liked it or not. I came back from Paris and I sat down and thought, What would I do if I could just shoot what I wanted? I started to write a narration, which I called Truth and lllusion: An Introduction to Metaphysics. I shot it, narrated it, wrote it, and it became a twenty-five minute film.

“For an artist the thing to remember is, Know thyself. I think it’s true of everybody in the art of living, whether you’re doing an artistic thing or not, it’s the art of being a person. I remember walking at least four blocks along a street in Greenwich Village looking at the paintings and thinking, Why is not one of them any good? Accidentally, the law of averages should have at least made one of them good. The reason is they’re not painting from themselves. They’re painting from some other painting they saw. They’re not painting what they are as individuals. It’s hard to put that on canvas. It’s easy in a book, but it’s tough in a movie because you have a hundred people around. Today we’re getting at the immortal self, and to my way of thinking, that’s God. He’s not in an altar, not in a sunset, not in a sermon, he’s inside. It all comes from inside, and that is the place of art.” [dga]

The Big Ditch, aka The Glory Diggers. On construction of the Panama Canal, 1926.

The Yearling. With Spencer Tracy. Cancelled after two weeks’ shooting in Florida, due to problems with casting and deer, 1939.

The Turn in the Road , aka So Long Remembered, aka “The Milly Story,” aka Conquest. A disenchanted film director retires to run a gas station in “Arcadia, Colorado” and encounters a strange teenage girl, 1945-60.

Cervantes. Script by Vidor and Herbert Dalmas, from Bruno Frank’s A Man Called Cervantes. To have been produced in 1965 by Oliver A. Unger, with a scenario by Charles Peck, Jr., with actors Horst Buchholz and Yul Brynner. The film was made two years later, quite differently, by Vincent Sherman.

Mr. and Mrs. Bojo Jones. “It was a book I worked on with Sam Goldwyn, Jr., for six or eight months [in the 1960s]. I had a very distinctive idea to make The Crowd in today’s terms but Goldwyn wanted to change it because he thought it was corny. The writer we had did three scripts which were all rejected by me, and then by Sam Goldwyn, Jr.” [dga]

Filmography sources: John Robert Cocchi, Olivier Comte, James Robert Parish, in Positif 161, September 1974. Raymond Durgnat & Scott Simmon, King Vidor, American (Berkeley: University of California, 1988). Tag Gallagher. Additional research: Shannon Gee.

[brown mas] Kevin Brownlow, Behind the Mask of Innocence. New York: Knopf, 1990.

[brown war] Kevin Brownlow, The War, the West and the Wilderness. New York: Knopf, 1978.

[chan] Charlotte Chandler, The Ultimate Seduction (Garden City: Doubleday, 1984)

[comuz] Ermanno Comuzio, King Vidor (Firenze: La Nuovo Italia, 1986). tr. Tag Gallagher.

[dga] King Vidor, A Directors Guild of America Oral History, Interviewd by Nancy Dowd & David Shepard (Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1988). Dowd’s sessions took place around 1971. Her text was highly edited. Extracts reproduced here have been edited and re-arranged.

[gish] Lillian Gish with Ann Pinchot, The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969.

[grp] King Vidor, Catherine Berge, Marquita Doassans, “L’Europe: Vings ans de vie sans le cinéma,” in Vidor La Grande parade. French translation of A Tree Is a Tree by Berge and Doassans. Paris: Lattès, 1981. tr. Tag Gallagher.

[hgm] Charles Higham & Joel Greenberg, The Celluloid Muse (New York: Signet, 1969), pp. 253-78.

[legu] Eric Leguebe, Le Cinéma americain par ses auteurs (Paris: Guy AUthier, 1977), pp. 272-73. tr. Tag Gallagher.

[mov.] Shivas, Mark, and V. F. Perkins. "Interview with King Vidor." Movie, no. 11 (July/August 1963)

[pos74] Pierre Sauvage, “Post-scriptum: Vidor aujourd’hui.” Positif 161, Septembre 1974. tr. Tag Gallagher.

[pos] Bernard Cohn, “Entretien avec King Vidor.” Positif 161, Septembre 1974, pp. 13-22. tr. Tag Gallagher.

[schic] Richard Schickel, The Men Who Made the Movies (New York: Atheneium, 1975), pp. 131-60.

“How to make a sophisticated movie,” The Director (publication of the Motion Picture Directors Association),1924; reprinted in Action, Nov. 1970.

“Picture Making Has No Formula Says King Vidor,” New York Herald, Oct. 17, 1926.

“Rubber stamp movies,” New Theatre, September 1934. Reprinted in Richard Koszarski, ed., Hollywood Directors, 1914-1945

“Director’s Note book…Why Teach Cinema?” Cinema Progress, 4:1, June 1939.

“Bringing Pulham to the Screen,” Lion’s Roar (MGM bulletin), December 1941.

A Tree Is a Tree. New York: Longmans, Green, 1952. [The French translation contains updating material edited by Catherine Berge.]

F.J. Smith, “King Vidor tells how The Big Parade was made,”Motion Picture Classic , May 1926.

Bosley Crowther, “Vidor’s Individualist Manifesto,” New York Times, Nov. 13, 1938.

John Francis Lane, “Tolstoy’s War as Vidor Make It,” Films and Filming, March 1956.

Hedda Hopper, North Carolina Charlotte Observer, Sep. 12, 1956. [and elsewhere, syndicated]. On War and Peace.

Pierre Sauvage, “Post-scriptum: Vidor aujourd’hui.” Positif, Septembre 1974.

Schickel, Richard. "King Vidor." In The Men Who Made the Movies, 131-60. New York: Atheneum, 1975.

Carol A. Crotta, “Masters of Metaphor: The Friendship and Kindred Spirit of King Vidor and Andrew Wyeth,” Los Angeles Herald Examiner, Mar. 30; Mar. 31, 1980.

Nancy Dowd & David Shepard, King Vidor, A Directors Guild of America Oral History, Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1988.

[1]. Most sources indicate 1894; Vidor incorrectly told Positif that 1896 was correct.


				Tag Gallagher *King Vidor Biocritical-filmograhy*



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