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.


				Tag Gallagher *King Vidor Biocritical-filmograhy*



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