silver nitrate notes

The Crowd and the Camera Out the Window

19 jun 2013

King Vidor (1894-1982) directed The Crowd (1928) at MGM with Henry Sharp (1892-1966) as cinematographer. The film is about an ordinary man (James Murray) who works as a clerk in a New York office, marries an ordinary woman (Eleanor Boardman), has children, suffers losses, and at the end of the film attends a vaudeville show with his family in a theatre full of identical-looking people. The plot is plain. The film is not.

The famous shot is the early sequence in which the camera ascends the side of an office building, enters a window high up, and finds the protagonist sitting at one of hundreds of identical desks in a vast open-plan office. Sharp shot the exterior on actual New York buildings using a lift camera. He shot the interior on an MGM stage built to look like the rest of the office building from outside. The two halves are married in a single dissolve. The shot took weeks to plan. On screen, it lasts about thirty seconds and arrives as one of the most disorienting compositions in silent American cinema.

The film's interest in mass urban life was not commercial. MGM had not wanted to make it. Vidor pushed it through on the strength of his earlier hit The Big Parade (1925). The studio gave him the budget reluctantly and tried, before release, to insert seven different alternate endings, in case audiences rejected the bleak final sequence. Vidor refused. The film opened to mixed reviews and modest box office.

Sharp's photography across the rest of the film is conventional 1928 American silent work, which makes the bursts of inventiveness (the office shot, a Coney Island sequence shot at actual Coney Island, a train interior shot in a real moving train) stand out against the ordinariness of the surrounding material. The Crowd looks, in long stretches, like a normal MGM picture. Then the camera does something normal MGM pictures did not do.

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sources
[1] Vidor, King. A Tree Is a Tree. Harcourt, Brace, 1953.
[2] Durgnat, Raymond and Scott Simmon. King Vidor, American. University of California Press, 1988.
[3] Bowers, Q. David. Thanhouser Films: An Encyclopedia and History. McFarland, 1995.
[4] Brownlow, Kevin. The Parade's Gone By.... University of California Press, 1968.