DVR Alert: "The Crowd"
King Vidor's brilliant 1928 silent drama about the hunger for fame has never looked more prescient. On TCM September 12.
If you have DVR capability and access to the Turner Classic Movies channel, set up a recording for Monday September 12 at 6 a.m., because one of the all-time greats is showing, and it’s not on DVD or available for streaming. (In fact, I don’t think it was ever on VHS.) It’s King Vidor’s 1928 drama “The Crowd” (**** stars out of ****) and in its patient, pitiless dissection of one average guy’s desire to become famous — to be seen — it could stand next to any cautionary tale of our selfie-made social media era. (Put it on a double bill with, say, Aubrey Plaza’s “Ingrid Goes West” from 2017, and tot up the parallels.)
“The Crowd” was one of the last silent films made before talkies lowered the boom, and it is formally dazzling, with innovative camerawork by the aptly named Henry Sharp that deploys masses of human bodies in patterns that look ahead to “The Apartment” and other commentaries on the human animal’s herd instinct. It’s the hero’s desire to break free from that herd, of course, that feels so familiar in its yearning and its grief — even the character’s name, John Sims, ripples into our own pop-culture future. (“The Sims” was a hit game because it lets us rise above the crowd and simulate God.)
When I was writing my 2013 history of stardom, “Gods Like Us: On Movies Stars and Modern Fame,” I couldn’t help but be drawn to Vidor’s dark but trenchant vision and not just for what was up there on the screen. The saddest tale of all may be the one that unfolded in the film’s aftermath, to an actor who became seen and was completely unprepared for it. From “Gods Like Us”:
A star's persona is a construct agreed upon by all who consume it and all who profit by it, and that construct is taken as fact (or at least useful fiction) by everyone except the star, who knows but may not want to admit how temporary the persona truly is. No less a god than Cary Grant went famously on the record about this, writing in his autobiography, "I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant; unsure of each, suspecting each." If it was hard for him, imagine how psychically discombobulating it must have been for someone like James Murray, who was plucked out of the ranks of extras to play the lead role in King Vidor's dark 1928 masterpiece “The Crowd”?
The movie is precisely about the urge of the common man to become uncommon, and Murray's John is a handsome young blowhard who insists "everything will be roses when my ship comes in" until he has to face the fact that he's just another human in the throng, that dreaming doesn't make it happen. “The Crowd” destroys the fantasy of stardom in a burst of diamond-hard social realism – unsurprisingly, it was critically admired and a commercial failure – and Murray conveys the shallowness at the start of John's pilgrim's progress, the neurosis in the middle, and the bleak acceptance at the end. (It's true, by the way. Most of us are not seen or celebrated by those who do not personally know or love us. “The Crowd” implies that to wish otherwise is the business of fools, not that anyone wanted to hear that then or wants to hear it now.)
Murray was praised by Vidor as "one of the best natural actors we had ever had the good luck to encounter." His career was set, starring roles presented themselves, yet the actor rapidly unraveled. Given the actuality of fame, he retreated to the pipe dream, and by the early 1930s, he was an alcoholic panhandling for spare change on the street. When Vidor bought him lunch and offered him a part in 1934's “Our Daily Bread,” Murray cursed him out and stalked off. He was dead by 1936, drowned in the Hudson River after drunkenly clowning around and falling off a pier. Was it the suddenness with which he was raised up that undid Murray? Did he identify too closely with his “Crowd” character's insecurities, or was this simply a case of a person becoming a star with no inner psychological core, no sense of self, to support the new edifice? Haunted, Vidor later wrote a screenplay based on Murray's life; called "The Actor," it was never produced. Who'd play the part, anyway? Who would want to star in a role that exposed stardom as a useless trick at best and a destroyer at worst?
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