King Vidor

[domino harvey]

The Cotten of the 20th has a cameo of sorts

[Gregory]

The Davis line that she repeated most often herself may have been this one here, from her earlier "rural vamp" role in The Cabin in the Cotton, which I'm sure some others here will remember from the latest Forbidden Hollywood set. It's a very "pre-Code" line, and I wonder how many who heard her say it in interviews in subsequent years thought it was just some silly coquettish thing to say and didn't get the implication (wanting to avoid just-been-fucked hair).

[Jonathan S]

Reportedly, Warner have (or did have) rights problems with Beyond the Forest - perhaps related to its literary source? If true, I wonder if these were cleared up before the French release, or if the problems are only in certain territories. Does it play on US TCM? I've always found it a vital and fascinating film, which grows on each viewing for me, unlike the talkfest All About Eve, which Davis and all the critics considered her great comeback after Vidor's "disaster".

Coincidentally, Vidor's silent Peg o' My Heart has (only?) been televised on French TCM, but after the opening reel in Ireland it's a mostly stagey and routine poor-girl-reforms-her-stuffy-rich-relatives picture, with the 38 year-old Laurette Taylor even more unconvincing than Mary Pickford as a teenager. The broadcast print seemed to suffer from gaps which were not disguised or bridged.

[Ann Harding]

You can watch The Other Half (1919) online on the European Film Gateway

[rohmerin]

I've always liked Beyond the forest, there's a Spanish VHS turn into DVD in Spain "Más allá del bosque".
The crowd is out in France, Spain and Italy but I think the image is not good (the Spanish one, dunno about the others).

https://www.amazon.es/s/ref=nb_sb_noss? ... King+Vidor" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[hearthesilence]

Has anyone ever seen Truth and Illusion: An Introduction to Metaphysics and The Metaphor: King Vidor meets Andrew Wyeth projected on film? I was wondering if film prints still circulate since both were shot on 16mm film.

(Also, I was surprised to find out that the Smithsonian has 71 minutes of outtakes from the latter, about double the running time of the finished film.)

Lincoln Center is screening both tomorrow at 7:30pm with a short 1980 documentary on Vidor, Journey to Galveston, which will be introduced by its director, Catherine Berge. There's no indication that any of these will be projected from film prints, but Metaphor is shown "courtesy of Catherine Berge and the Filmmuseum Munich" so if they have a 16mm print, maybe that's what they'll show?

[FrauBlucher]

Favorite or best Vidor talkie? I haven't seen enough of them to say. I do like Fountainhead although doesn't seem to be a fave on this board

[bottlesofsmoke]

For the more prestigious films, earlier in his sound career, the best / most interesting I’ve seen are The Champ, Street Scene, Our Daily Bread, Stella Dallas, So Red the Rose, Northwest Passage, and An American Romance. He definitely didn’t shy away from controversial subjects and ideas, which makes some of his films messy and they are often flawed. His reach often surpasses his grasp, both thematically and cinematically. Of these I’d say The Champ, Street Scene, and Stella Dallas are the ones I can recommend with the least qualification. Northwest Passage has some great action scenes, strong performances, and beautiful location photography but is also one of the most hateful movies towards Native Americans I’ve ever seen, it really has the feeling of a race war at times. So Red the Rose has issues in regards to ideas about slavery, but unlike Gone with the Wind it really tries to grapple with them, even if it doesn’t quite have the answers. The performances, as in most Vidor films, are great. Our Daily Bread is more interesting than great, a sort-of sequel to The Crowd, best viewed as a window into the Depression and New Deal politics. An American Romance is truly an epic, tracing an immigrant from rags to riches, as well as his growth as a man and American. Like so many Vidor films it feels uneven and not quite complete. It has many beautiful and charming moments, usually the quite moments of gentle Americana, as well as as much (and more) as you’ll ever want to know about steel production, since Vidor mixes in documentary style footage in with the story. I believe the studio cut this movie some, to be fair to Vidor.

Then basically from Duel in the Sun on you have the over-the-top Vidor, with campy melodrama like Beyond the Forest, Lightning Strikes Twice, and Ruby Gentry, enjoyment of these depends on your willingness to embrace their trashiness as well as the raw emotion that Vidor taps into as well as anyone, even if it isn’t in service or of quite as noble of ideas as his earlier films. The Fountainhead is a great example: you’ll enjoy yourself if you complete ignore the objectivist hooey, embrace how silly the dialogue is (Rand’s writing reminds me of Lovecraft, with characters emphatically spouting elaborate sentences that no real, normal person has ever said out loud, except Lovecraft’s characters are usually supposed to be insane) and focus in the art design, cinematography, hilarious obsession with buildings as phallic imagery (“I wish I’d never seen your building” is one of the great unintentionally hilarious lines), and the intense, bizarre, sadomasochistic nature of the main character’s relationship, similar to Duel in the Sun, another great but flawed Vidor film.

I also like Japanese War Bride it is the most thirties Vidor of his later films, a small production dealing with a controversial subject. It is a more understated film and one of the better films in the cycle of post-war films about Japanese and American relations. Man without a Star is, to me, a solid western but nothing more.

[hearthesilence]

I want to say Our Daily Bread, IIRC a sequel to The Crowd. I'm pretty sure I saw it like 10 years ago, but except for the irrigation scene which knocked me out (in a lot of ways a great stretch of silent filmmaking), I can't remember anything else about it. I do remember liking it a lot though.

[knives]

His post retirement documentaries are all pretty great and reveal a lot of the philosophical soul beneath his work.

[Black Hat]

I've seen Halleluljuah, Our Daily Bread, Northwest Passage, Duel in the Sun and Ruby Gentry. Hallelujuah was the best of the bunch, was very surprised by how good it was. Northwest Passage was not very good, Duel in the Sun is better than its reputation suggests. Like HTS I don't remember Our Daily Bread but, Ruby Genry was excellent.

[Michael Kerpan]

I think Show People is my top favorite from King Vidor.

[Black Hat]

I liked La Boheme a lot too, but I agree with you about Show People being his best work. I've meant to revisit Show People since I DVR'd it off of TCM back in January when they were doing a Marion Davies series. Did anybody happen to see any of those films? It seems like there were several gems but, I haven't had the time to watch any.

[dekadetia]

I think Show People is my top favorite from King Vidor.

Just watched this one within weeks of Rupert Hughes' Souls for Sale and was shocked by the similarities, right down to cameos by Vidor and Chaplin as themselves in both pictures.

[Michael Kerpan]

It sounds like the "tone" of these two movies are pretty different, however. I liked Marion Davies's dual roles in Show People (her main character -- and a cameo as "herself").

[bottlesofsmoke]

The Patsy, which Vidor and Davies made before right before Show People, is also great. In a foreshadowing of the latter film, she does a bunch of impressions of silent movie stars while attempting to seduce a man. In terms of Davies performance, it’s on-par with Show People, and very charming and funny overall. Their other film together, Not So Dumb isn’t at the same level - I think Vidor was still finding his way with sound film - but Davies is good and it isn’t quite as bad as it’s reputation.

[Michael Kerpan]

Davies was so fantastic as a comic actress!

[Matt]

I watched a handful of her comedies during the recent TCM showcase, and she really was a gifted comedienne. Ever Since Eve, her last film, is a very funny screwball. Page Miss Glory is maybe a little less funny, but very enjoyable and worth seeing. Hearts Divided is a fun, 76-minute, Lubitsch-style trifle with a stacked cast (including Claude Rains as Napoleon).

[pistolwink]

There are so many great bits in Show People--one of the best Hollywood-on-Hollywood movies.

One of my favorite bits is when Davies is instructed not to smile but rather to make that face actresses were asked to make for publicity stills at the time, with their upper lip curled up and their teeth extended over their lower lip (a bit like this portrait of Gloria Swanson). I've always thought that pose looked ridiculous and I guess so did a lot of people back then.

[hearthesilence]

Film Forum screened a 35mm print of The Crowd today with live piano accompaniment. I think Andrew Sarris said he was a master of “great moments” rather than of great films, and I can't say he's wrong because I seem to forget then remember what Sarris said every time I catch up with another Vidor film. They all seem uneven in some way, at least the narrative ones, but there can still be real greatness to them.

I was knocked out by some of the virtuoso moves in The Crowd, particularly the way he establishes the first New York scene, taking us into the office building (via some pretty amazing use of miniatures) then going from that incredible wide shot of the humongous room of desks and landing right where he needs to be. It's executed perfectly as well - we don't actually see the lead character, John Sims, until the final second, and Vidor doesn't cheat to accomplish this as the camera never feels like it's awkwardly frame during that dramatic swoop towards his desk. He calls back to this in the film's wonderful final shot as well.

Beyond that, my favorite trick is the dolly (or tracking?) shot where the camera follows John into a room, keeping him in the same part of the frame even though he's still walking, and as we pass through the doorway (which may very well be a set piece that's eventually pulled away), the room seems to open up into this gigantic new world. This happens twice - when we first see him at work and he goes into the men's locker room, and again when he goes into the maternity ward. He doesn't sustain this kind of virtuosity across the entire film the way Murnau does with his most impressive work, but it's still impressive nonetheless.

Even with those technical accomplishments, the greatest element of the film has to be Eleanor Boardman as Mary. I can't believe I forgot about her performance, but perhaps I needed to see it projected because her close-ups are amazing, and there are a lot of them. After a while I couldn't help but notice that the pictorial quality of her close-ups were noticeably different from James Murray's. It's subtle, but Murray's close-ups are clean and clear enough that he appears to be wearing stage make-up of some kind, particularly around the eyebrows. However, when the camera cuts to Boardman, there's a softness to the lighting that's startling when combined with the crisp detail of the image - I'm guessing the OCN still exists and the print was made from it because it looks that good. Beyond that, her acting is just so good and it's really no comparison to Murray's - she seems like she's acting in a league of her own and in a manner that's perfect for the cinema. Where Murray's facial reactions are broad and tend to exaggerate, her reactions are marvelously subtle.

What's kind of great about the film is that usually when you have a story like this, you're rooting for the guy with the idea that everyone's too hard on him. Instead, you see that everyone who talks shit about him is actually right. Her family clearly thinks she's too good for him, and there's not a moment where I'd argue against that. It really becomes a matter of "is this guy going to get his act together or is she going to wise up and leave him?"

Looking up the actors, I was surprised to find out that Boardman was actually married to Vidor when she made this. They eventually split - it looks like they had quite a few problems during their marriage, particularly the charges of tax evasion both faced - but knowing they were together brings to mind something that's been said of Vincente Minnelli's Meet Me In St. Louis and Jean-Luc Godard's Le petit soldat. In those films, it's known that the directors met their future wives and fell in love with them during the production, and it's also been suggested that all of this comes through in the filmmaking in the way those women are filmed. I'm not sure if Vidor was swooning over his wife or if he was simply trying to do what's best for her in a more calculated manner, but over the course of the movie, I think a similar effect plays out. She eventually retired, married another director at 40, and seems to have lived a long and comfortable (and wealthy) life.

Murray on the other hand is a sad story. Working odd jobs and getting mostly minor parts for films, Vidor spotted him and picked him out because he didn't want a familiar movie star or anyone glamorous - he wanted someone who can project ordinariness. Despite the film's great success, Murray's career was eventually ruined by alcoholism:

By 1934, Murray was unable to secure acting work due to his alcoholism and began panhandling. Director King Vidor...then casting his upcoming film Our Daily Bread (1934), immediately thought of Murray for the lead role. Vidor had heard about Murray's plight and set about finding him. Vidor found a much heavier and unkempt Murray panhandling on the street and offered to buy him a drink. Vidor then offered Murray the lead role in Our Daily Bread, provided Murray pull himself together. Murray rejected the offer and reportedly stated, "Just because I stop you on the street and try to borrow a buck you think you can tell me what to do. As far as I am concerned, you know what you can do with your lousy part."

About two years later, Murray was found dead in the Hudson River. It's not clear if it was accidental or suicide, but regardless, he's now buried in Queens out in Woodside.

[domino harvey]

I like that Truth and Illusion: An Introduction to Metaphysics exists, in a way proportionally equal to its novelty… but it is remarkably inept as a piece of filmmaking. It’s also hard to assess its actual function as anything but that, since as a piece of information-giving it is incoherent and utilizes laughably bad arguments, and as entertainment it is even worse. But that scrappiness is also what saves it from too much vitriol.

Been thinking a lot about King Vidor after reading Moullet’s recent interview. Truly this is a director who has never registered with me on any level but when you look at what was coming out in film criticism in the 50s and 60s, he was one of the top pantheon directors. I don’t think this perception has endured much, Moullet aside, but I’m intrigued at what I could be missing and what others who I regard highly for their tastes could possibly have seen in him. Any good recommendations for books/articles or key films for understanding Vidor? I’ve seen 15 other Vidor films already (and none rate higher than at a three star level), but what’s a few more?

[knives]

I really love Vidor even in the face of all his highs and lows. His last film, Metaphor, is a far better short for getting an insight into his mind as it is an explicitly autobiographical film set as an interview of Andrew Wyeth (I know I know). It should give you at least a little appreciation of what he was aiming for.

I also would recommend the following: Our Daily Bread, Street Scene, An American Romance, Comrade X, and Cynara

[domino harvey]

Interesting write up on Gance from Cahiers which essentially doubles as an entry on Vidor (translation by jdcopp)

ABEL GANCE

He is a visionary, even a poly-visionary. It might be said of him that he is the French King Vidor, but it has already been propounded that King Vidor is the American Abel Gance.... A definition should be accurate and measured. Gance, labyrinthine and excessive, much the same as his cross-Atlantic colleague, lends himself poorly to all definition. All the good that his admirers find in his work never goes without a some qualification, all the bad that his detractors find never goes without some jealousy. If Gance is simple, it is in the fashion of Victor Hugo, like the Himalayas.