Silent films aren’t for everybody, although they should
be. If you’re not into silent films or you’ve never seen one, you should give
it a try. Even I will admit that I often find films from the silent era
difficult to connect with. They require a different focus from your brain. For
one thing there’s occasional reading involved. Apart from that, we’ve just
become so conditioned to having things spelled out for us in the visual arts
that many of us have become inured to anything less than an assault on the
senses. When you no longer have things like sound effects and spoken dialogue
to help you understand the story, it means your brain has to do the work of
filling in the gaps. You have to imagine how the lines are spoken and how the
scene sounds.
Yes, it can be hard work, but it can be greatly
fulfilling. Charlie Chaplin is a great place to start with silent cinema.
Another one is one of the great silent classics that I recently had the
pleasure to enjoy at a local arts cinema with live musical accompaniment. The
film is The Crowd directed by King
Vidor. I had already seen the film probably about 12 years ago and remember
thinking at the time that it was unlike any silent film I’d seen. At that point
I could probably count on both hands (and maybe one foot) the number of silent
films I’d seen. Now I’ve seen quite a few more and it remains a fresh and
lively film more in the style of modern dramas than anything that was being
produced in the late 20s.
In its subject matter it calls to mind Charlie Chaplin’s A Woman of Paris, an earlier silent film
that was equally ahead of its time in presenting a treatment of family drama. The Crowd has no epic, no spectacle, no
grand or bold gestures. It takes a simple run-of-the-mill young man, throws him
into fast-paced New York City and challenges him to sink or swim. John Sims
(James Murray) is an everyman who believes he is destined for greatness. On the
boat arriving in New York a man beside him remarks, “You’ve gotta be good in
that town if you want to beat the crowd.”
This film is the earliest example I know of that treats
New York as a force not to be trifled with. Vidor shows us bustling streets
with large swaths of people moving to and fro. He presents the concrete jungle of
skyscrapers in a way that was striking for how similar it looks 84 years later (and
this before even the Chrysler and Empire State buildings were constructed).
John meets and marries Mary (Eleanor Boardman) and they
begin their life in a one room apartment next to the elevated subway. John
grinds out his daily work doing some kind of accounting in a big firm, one man
amid hundreds, most of whom speak the same way after having worked in a
monotonous rut for so long. Things don’t ever seem to go their way as they
struggle to raise a family as the years press on and John is continually passed
over for promotion even while his good friend Bert (Bert Roach) moves up.
There is truly nothing special about John or Mary that
should warrant our special attention enough to make them the central characters
in a motion picture. Even their names are completely generic. What makes them
fascinating is that they aren’t special. They are like any average Joe. When
unspeakable tragedy strikes their family, we feel terrible watching John suffer
through it because he is probably no different than you or me.
The Crowd stands
out as a landmark film not only because Vidor and his co-screenwriter John V.A.
Weaver dared to make a film about unremarkable people, but because Vidor and
his cinematographer Henry Sharp composed shots that stood out. The use of crane
shots is incredible considering the time period. The general fluid movement of
the camera is something you just didn’t see in the silent era. Camera placement
was most often stationary, editing kept simple. One of the early shots in the film
has a camera gliding up the side of a building, entering a window to depict a
roomful of men working at desks as the camera pans over the multitude to hone
in on John. This shot would be mimicked more than 30 years by Billy Wilder in The Apartment. And the set design is
just as wonderful. This isn’t the grandiose art direction you find in DeMille’s
pictures, but the simple elegant work of Cedric Gibbons, who creates
claustrophobic spaces that amplify the tension in John and Mary’s household.
The Crowd is
narratively sound and never boring. It features a good deal of minimalist
acting that stands in contrast to the large gestures and exaggerated facial
expressions that was the style of the era. Anyone looking to delve into some
dramatic silent films would do well to start here. It is a classic that
deserves a lot more attention than it gets.
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