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THE AMERICAN FILM
reasons. Primarily, it was a literal and not a cinematic expression of a theme, although the original conception was cinematic. Vidor's theme was vast in its breadth; a man's ineffectual struggle against the hostile indifference of the masses; a young man's hopeless striving against the convention, the unsympathy and the brute selfishness of the everyday people who surrounded him. The film should have been the spirit and the humanity of the crowd. It was called The Crowd. Instead, it concentrated attention on the human interest of a single individual. As the film stood, it should in all senses of selfjustification have been called The Man. The relation between the man and the crowd was ill-defined and slurred over. There was, afterwards, no clear-mindedness as to either the man or the crowd. At times there was a tendency to become interested in the individuals; the crowd became meaningless and uninteresting. All through the film there was a feeling of detail and no sense of the breadth of the conception. It was easily possible to pay attention to the small actions of James Murray and Eleanor Boardman, and hence, to lose contact with the theme because of their mannerisms. The Crowd was not a unity. The interests were divided and subdivided instead of being bound together into a forceful, filmic whole, such as The Last Laugh. I have suggested that The Crowd was filmic in its original conception and literary in its treatment. It demanded the complete elimination of all sub-titles. It should have been treated from the same angle as Murnau's film, but from a mass and not an individual outlook. Not one of the ironical titles infused into the film were of cinematic value. The manuscript should have been conceived and written by King Vidor and not by a scenarist. Added to this, the opening sequence of the man's boyhood and the death of his father were painfully unnecessary; the film should have opened on a broad scale with architecture. The psychology of the separate characters became twisted and inconsistent as the theme developed. The ending, for which presumably Vidor was not responsible, was beneath contempt. The treatment when considered apart from the theme (which is absurd) was good. It was Vidor's misfortune and lack of direction that the players were the filrrl and not the theme. The Crowd was a sincere attempt on the part of Vidor to do something well; it was a failure because of his misconception of the theme and the regrettable picture-sense of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.
The question raised by The Big Parade was a big one, and it
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