The Crowd begins with the birth of John Sims (James Murray) and the prophecy that he will be somebody, a belief that he clings to 12 years later, on the day his father dies suddenly. And then there's a jump to 21-year-old John arriving in New York City, still fired with ambition. The jump leaves an odd hole in the narrative: We expect his father's death to have made an impact on his expectations -- to have shown him, for example, the threat of the unexpected or the value of hard work. But 21-year-old John is a bit feckless, a dreamer who can't quite get in gear to succeed. He falls in love too easily, and is soon married to a woman named Mary (Eleanor Boardman), because the John-and-Mary trope is a little too hard for Vidor and his co-scenarists John V.A. Weaver and Harry Behn to resist. This is a 20th-century Everyman story. If the hole in John's backstory is obvious, however, Vidor makes the father's death a visual motif by an expressionistic shot of young John in the stairwell of his house when he learns of the death, a remarkable image of entrapment that Vidor echoes throughout the film: The skyscrapers of New York, for example, loom in the same funnel-like way as the stairwell. But most celebrated image of entrapment in
The Crowd is the web-like rows of desks in the insurance office where John finds work but not fulfillment -- an image frequently imitated, most notably by Billy Wilder in
The Apartment (1960). (It's worth noting the work of cinematographer Henry Sharp here, as well as the set designers Cedric Gibbons -- who may or may not have done actual work on the sets, since as head of MGM's design department, Gibbons had his name put on every film -- and A. Arnold Gillespie.) As a parable about modern work,
The Crowd is an enduring film. John gets what little satisfaction he has from creativity -- in his case, entering contests to write advertising slogans -- and not from what he has to do to earn a living. Murray turned out to be a case of life imitating art: He was an alcoholic who, like John Sims, had trouble staying employed, but while the movie ends on an optimistic note for the character, the actor died at age 35, in a drowning that was possibly a suicide.
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| John Sims, age 12 (Johnny Downs), learns of his father's death. |
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| A skyscraper echoes the stairwell scene in The Crowd. |
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| The insurance office in The Crowd. |
