The Crowd (1928)
Directed by King Vidor
John, an ambitious but undisciplined New York City office worker, meets and marries Mary. They start a family, struggle to cope with marital stress, financial setbacks, and tragedy, all while lost amid the anonymous, pitiless throngs of the big city.
5 connections found
View:
5 connections, in both directions
What critics compared The Crowd to
It runs a little long, and it strays off the path from time to time, but one look at Jack Lemmon's office building, with its endless rows of desks and fluorescent lights (borrowed from King Vidor's superb 1928 The Crowd), will hook you.
But its numerous Oscars--for best picture, direction, script, editing, and art direction--indicate that many disagree with me (including the Coen brothers, who seem to have studied it for The Hudsucker Proxy, just as Wilder studied Vidor's silent The Crowd for this).
This shot is quoted from King Vidor's silent film “The Crowd” (1928), which is also about a faceless employee in a heartless corporation.
Nonetheless, he immediately becomes one of a thousand interchangeable desk jockeys, portrayed in row after row of desks in an overhead shot that would influence everything from The Apartment to Brazil .
Such was the film's influence that its depiction of regimented office life and the palliative power of mass laughter were later referenced by such eminent directors as Billy Wilder (in The Apartment) and Preston Sturges (in Sullivan's Travels).
Furthermore, the symbiotic connection between auteur and collaborator is established in the eerie and beautiful opening, as a man (played by the director) discovers a portal that opens to packed theater playing King Vidor’s “The Crowd,” leading to the introduction of the chameleonic protagonist.
The nearly silent prologue evokes the social unease and transfixed audience of King Vidor’s 1928 rat-race commentary The Crowd.
He is then on the other side, in the aisle of a cinema, where a packed audience is watching King Vidor’s The Crowd.
The frozen crowd is shot from the perspective of the movie screen as the audience watches the final scenes of King Vidor’s 1928 silent film, “The Crowd.”
He is as much "one of the crowd" as was James Murray in King Vidor's silent classic "The Crowd" more than 70 years ago.
Because Scorsese has a mind full of movies, it’s possible to guess what he was thinking about at the end of The Wolf of Wall Street: the last shot in King Vidor’s 1928 The Crowd.
Advertisement
His most important set is a vast office where genetically superior computer programmers come to work every day, filing into their long rows of desks like the office slaves in King Vidor's “The Crowd” and Orson Welles' “The Trial.”