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King Vidor (1894), who had already made two-reels in his native Texas, moved to
Hollywood in 1915. In 1920 he opened the Santa Monica offices of
New York-based production company First National
for which he directed the silent movies
The Jack-Knife Man (1920),
Love Never Dies (1921)
and the western The Sky Pilot (1921), shot in the Sierra Nevada.
He started churning out several movies per year:
Conquering the Woman (1922),
Woman Wake Up (1922),
The Real Adventure (1922),
Peg o' My Heart (1923),
Happiness (1923),
The Woman of Bronze (1923).
The melodrama
Wild Oranges (1924), adapted from a story by Joseph Hergesheimer, is a mediocre adaptation of Joseph Hergesheimer's
mediocre novel.
John cannot control his mad horse and his carriages goes on a wild ride until
his young and beautiful wife is ejected and dies.
John becomes a recluse and travels for three years
around the world on a sail boat with the only company of his friend
Paul.
One day they drop anchor in a remote bay. An old man watches them warily.
His beautiful grand-daughter Millie too is afraid of the newcomers.
They have been totally isolated for many years
from the rest of the world.
John explores the shore and meets Millie, who is initially afraid of him but
then fascinated. In the forest there lives a primitive man, Nicholas,
The brute is in love with her and tries to rape her. When she resists, he
drops her in the middle of a swamp infested with alligators. He
then watches sitting comfortably nearby while the alligators swim towards her.
She eventually accepts to kiss him and then runs away.
But she is falling in love with John, and John is determined not to fall in love
with another woman. Nicholas is madly jealous.
John invites Millie on his sail boat, but Millie is afraid of everything.
Nicholas sees them returning to shore and attacks John with a knife, but
John disarms him. Later a desperate Nicholas begs a terrified Millie to marry
him. She barricades herself in her room.
John, still haunted by the memory of his dead wife, has decided to leave.
But love eventually prevails and he returns to the girl. She tells him that
Nicholas is a wanted murderer who has been terrorizing her and her grandfather.
John offers to take both of them on the boat at night. That night, however,
Nicholas catches Millie and the old man as they are leaving the house, kills
the man and takes Millie to her room where he ties her to the bed. John walks
to the house and fights with Nicholas. He wins and leaves Nicholas unconscious
while the house catches fire. Nicholas is mauled to death by the old man's dog
while John, Paul and Mary take off in the sailboat and survive the storm.
not seeing
to rescue her from the world of torments in which she has become prisoner -- which sparks a fiery and violent battle for possession of the lonely swamp waif.
He kept directing mediocre movies like
His Hour (1924),
Wine of Youth (1924) and
Proud Flesh (1925), but then
struck gold with
The Big Parade (1925), the archetype of the sentimental war movie,
an adaptation of Laurence Stallings' autobiographical novel "Plumes" (published in 1924).
In 1919, the USA is busy becoming an industrial power. Slim is one of the
millions of humble Americans making a living in the big city: a construction
worker who spends the day hanging from the scaffolding of a skyscraper.
Bull is a bartender. Jim is a rich young man who has never worked in his life.
War is declared.
Jim has no intention of going to war, and even promises his mom
that he won't, but then a simple parade of young men going to enlist (and
his girlfriend's enthusiasm) is enough to convince him to join the army.
Jim is assigned to the same company as Slim and Bull. They arrive in France,
and at the beginning life is quite entertaining. The little village welcomes
them, and Jim falls in love with a cute French farm girl.
Then the order comes to move to the front (the girl, desperate, hangs to
the truck who is carrying Jim away).
Ligfe at the front is very different: airplanes shooting from the sky,
machine guns, trenches, poison gas.
When one night Slim is wounded outside, Jim disobeys orders and walks out of
the trench to bring help, and Bull follows him. They find Slim dead. Furious
and vengeful, Slim charges against the enemy, still followed by Bull. Bull
is killed. Slim succeeds in destroying the German position, but his fury
fades away when a German soldier dies in his arms.
Now the commander orders all the American troops to attack the German lines.
The following day there is another "big parade", the long convoy of
ambulances carrying the dead and the wounded back to town.
Jim is one of them. His wound is not serious, but he hears news that the
his girlfriend's village is being overtaken by the Germans and decides to
leave the hospital on crutches. He finds the village destroyed: the villagers
have already left.
The war is over. Jim returns home. He has lost a leg, but is a hero.
Worse: his fiance' has become his brother's lover.
In France, his French girlfriend is plowing a field and still thinking of him
all the time. One day Jim reappears: despite the crutches, she is ready
to hug him.
Vidor thus proved himself capable of blending the grand and spectacular style demanded by Hollywood with his own genuine inspiration. A product of the rural South and the small old world of the Midwest, he could not embrace either the industrial frenzy of the great eastern metropolises or the nineteenth-century epic of the West. More attentive instead to society and the individual in their daily evolutions and interactions, Vidor became the natural minstrel of another American civilization that of the common man a scrupulous chronicler of past and present history as seen from below, through an almost biblical perspective.
Vidor was also a natural talent in cinema: he possessed an innate gift for conveying an aspect of American life in an hour and a half of images, despite not being highly educated; and his narrative instinct was matched by a remarkable technical intuition, which led him first to study and then to be among the first to exploit sound.
Vidor directed Puccini's opera La Boheme (1926) and
the historical costume drama Bardelys the Magnificent (1926).
In the latter the libertine who doesn't believe in marriage is depicted as the
hero and the moral men of society are portrayed as either dumb or evil.
Bardelys is a noble womanizer in France during the libertine age. He specializes
in seducing other aristocrats' wives.
He comments that the men notice their wives only
when he sets his eyes on them. Women gossip about their escapades with him.
To all of them he gives the same gift: a lock of his hair.
His servants are in fact busy all the time manufacturing such little souvenirs.
Meanwhile, a count who is Bardelys' main rival in facts of love faces defeat
when he tries to seduce the virtuous Roxalanne. Invited to a banquet at court,
he meets Bardelys who makes fun of him. The count bets his entire estate that
Bardelys cannot seduce and marry the woman. Bardelys bets his entire estate
that he will do just that. When the king arrives at the banquet, he is
displeased to hear that Bardelys plans to take a leave of absence. Bardelys
protests that his honor is more important than his duty to the crown. The king
warns Bardelys that the troops will come and look for him if he dares flee
the court against the king's will. Bardelys still leaves. Along the way Bardelys
meets a fatally wounded man, Lesperon, who begs Bardelys to brings his last
words to his beloved. He dies before he can tell Bardelys the name of the woman.
When he is confronted by the king's troops, Bardelys tells them that his name
is Lesperon. Unfortunately for him, Lesperon is a dangerous enemy of the king:
the troops attack him to arrest him. Bardelys, wounded, manages to escape and
reach the castle of the gorgeous Roxalanne. She shelters him and hides him
when the troops come to search the castle. The following day her father treats
him like a hero, because Lesperon is the leader of the revolt against the
king, and her father is on the side of the rebels. Meanwhile, a suite of
Roxalanne, St Eustache, has received a letter warning him that the famous
womanizer Bardelys is set on seducing the poor Roxalanne. St Eustache alerts
the father of the beauty and pledges to kill Bardelys the moment he shows up
at the castle. Bardelays/Lesperon ridicules him. Bardelays spends a lot of
time at the castle, in theory recovering from the wound but in practice
seducing the girl. However, he truly falls in love with her.
The jealous and vicious St Eustache reports the rumors that Lesperon is dead
and that he had a fiance. A letter proves that the fiance exists. Roxalanne,
disgusted, turns him in to the troops of the king who are searching for
the dangerous traitor. Bardelys/Lesperon is arrested and taken to the court
that has to judge him. It turns out the judge is none other than his rival
the count. The count could save his neck by testifying that he is not
Lesperon, but instead lets the tribunal find Bardelys/Lesperon guilty of
treason and sentence him to death.
Unbeknownst to both, the king is on his way.
Roxalanne now feels guilty and pledges to do anything if the count will
save the prisoner. She accepts to marry the count. As the marriage is being
consummated, Bardelys stages a spectacular escape from the gallows. He kills
countless soldiers and performs acrobatic stints. Just then the king arrives
and is amused to watch the turmoil that his favorite knight is causing.
The king also recognizes him publicly, thus removing the very reason for
the death sentence. Bardelys rushes to Roxalanne's apartment but only to
find her married to the evil count. Bardelys signs the paper that leaves
all his belongings to the count because he has lost the bet but then
challenges him to duel and wins. The king orders the arrest of the count.
The count prefers to commit suicide.
Bardelys gets his estate back and can marry Roxalanne.
Vidor directed The Crowd (1928), written by
Joseph Farnham, centered around an insignificant everyman, alone in the crowd,
powerless to defend his world of emotions: it's as if someone had extracted from
a fresco of mass civilization a random piece and then had magnified it with a giant lens, revealing a tangle of delicate signs.
The protagonist is one of a million souls of the metropolis. He is prisoner
inside a bubble of emotions that the slightest event can crush.
He is one of the thousands of employees who inhabit thousands of offices in
thousands of buildings.
He lives in a poor apartment of a poor neighborhood.
The film is a relentless catalog of all the circumstances in which the crowd can crush the individual.
Vidor uses expressionist techniques to convey the suffocating atmosphere of the settings and the repressed panic of the man in the street crushed by the metropolis. The camera pulls him out of the crowd and follows him, cruel and pitiful at the same time, in the misadventures that lead him to walk the streets dressed as a sandwich man and to fear for the life of his young daughter, from the enthusiasm of a young man dominated by the myth of success to the discouragement of a head of the family troubled by a thousand problems.
The protagonist is born into a lower-middle-class family, exciting his fathers enthusiasm, who promises himself never to let him lack anything. Twelve years later, the boy sees an ambulance stopped in front of his house and slowly ascends the stairs, while a crowd of curious onlookers watches from the hall. The orphan becomes one of many employees in New York; he has only one friend, a bold, overweight man, who introduces him to a good young woman. They fall in love among the rides of the amusement park, go on their honeymoon to see Niagara Falls, and spend their first night on the train. Their domestic happiness is spoiled by the girls brothers, who flaunt their coats and look at their brother-in-law with condescension and suspicion. The wife is devoted and understanding, even when he vents his anger at not being anyone; a boy is born, then a girl. A stroke of luck brings the family a decent sum, which he hastens to squander on gifts. The children run joyfully across the street, and the little girl is hit by a truck. During the childs agony, the father tries in vain to quiet the crowd disturbing her rest. Relatives then forcibly separate him from his wife, who calls for him, devastated by grief. He, too, is struck: unable to continue his work, he loses his job, and while his fat friend rises in rank, he must accept increasingly humble jobs, even attempting suicide when his unemployment becomes chronic. His brothers-in-law try to take his wife from him, though at the last moment she takes pity on him and decides to give him another chance. To celebrate their renewed life, they go together to the circus; the camera pulls back and from above shows that all the spectators resemble them.
He is the oppressed, the alienated, the failed man: he wants to escape the crowd but must struggle alongside millions of others like him; he has no real chance of success, especially since the unscrupulous are favored. She is a domestic heroine who, with prodigious effort, supports the family. The couple is caught in a fatal condition, without blame and without remedies; Vidor offers no solutions, providing only moral support and displaying a general humanitarianism. The crowd constantly looms over the defenseless couple. Vidor unfolds his great photographic art, cataloging all situations in which the crowd crushes the individual even if he pretends to have fun: sidewalks, beaches, amusement parks; and those in which the individual suffers surrounded by the total indifference of others: relatives, neighbors, unemployed men in line like him for any job. On other occasions, Vidor exaggerates the settings according to a technique typical of expressionism: an office filled with geometric rows of desks, a vast hospital ward packed with countless identical white beds, the endless theater hall containing hundreds of laughs like theirs. Expressionism also informs the persecution by the monstrous crowd and the infinite doppelgnger of the clerk multiplied into millions of other clerks. The crowd dominates from beginning to end; it is simultaneously the pathetic protagonist and the cruel enemy of the protagonist. In the vicious circle of the protagonist pursued by the crowd who is also himself a typical individual of the crowd another doppelgnger appears, that of the crowd as both victim and persecutor, at a higher level of abstraction. In the end, one gets the impression that the crowd is an absurd machine, consuming itself to produce itself again; life has no meaning, just as the laughter at the end of the film has none; yet in that laughter, pathetically, lies the essence of man.
John Sims is born in New York into a lower-middle-class family. His father has promised himself never to let his son lack anything so that he can make his way in life. But his father dies when the boy is only twelve, and for him too begins the gray life of the individual lost in the crowd. The shot of the boy slowly climbing the stairs, while the crowd of onlookers stands in the hall he has understood that the ambulance carried away his fathers body.
We then see a comic little scene of office clerks leaving their desks en masse, flooding the restrooms (all making the same jokes), crowding the elevators, and blending into the mass of people on the sidewalks. In the evening, he studies, but makes an exception when a colleague invites him out with two girls. The outing on the double-decker bus, through streets lined with a crowd of anonymous, humiliated, and failed people. Jokes at the amusement park and the first kiss. While the fat colleague thinks only of having fun and, on the way back, cant wait to get home, John is already in love and proposes to her.
When the wedding is over, people go their own way the cheerfulness and enthusiasm were only for show. On the train taking them on their honeymoon, the newlyweds are shy and embarrassed. The other passengers laugh behind their backs. In their humble sleeping berth, with countless hesitations, the two inexperienced lovers lie down. Niagara Falls.
They live in a cramped little flat behind the railway. On Christmas Eve, her brothers and mother visit; the exchange of gifts among family members is cordial, but toward the outsider the husband there is coldness, condescension, and contempt. They reproach him for not advancing in his career, watch all his actions with critical eyes. He goes to his fat colleague to get some whiskey and ends up at a party; he gets drunk and comes home late. His wife is already in bed but still awake; she doesnt scold him she understands. Too many things dont work when one has to get by with little (the toilet tank, the folding bed, the door). She is always patient, enduring the double burden, his reproaches, and the occasional quarrel; but he vents on her his frustration at being a nobody. One word too many triggers a crisis: she packs her suitcase, he doesnt even try to stop her, and leaves irritably for work her world collapses. Yet she sacrifices herself again: she calls him back from the window because she is expecting a baby. Peace returns to the household: he throws himself into caring for her; she dries her tears and resumes living.
The hospital calls to say hes become a father; in the vast amphitheater of desks reigns indifference. At the hospital, no one pays attention to him, breathless, sweating, trembling. A door opens: dozens of identical beds in a huge hall, and in one of them, his exhausted but happy wife.
Five years later, a little girl has also been born, but their economic situation hasnt changed. On the beach, among a quarrelsome, irritable crowd the restless children, the mother preparing a picnic while the father plays the banjo. For her, the picnic is just another day, perhaps even more frantic and tiring. When he tries to help, he only manages to burn his finger.
Sims wins $500 in an advertising contest, but while she prepares a list of necessary expenses, he squanders it all on gifts. The children run joyfully to him, but as the little girl crosses the street, a truck hits her. The father runs to lift her from the asphalt, as the curious crowd gathers around.
At the childs bedside, the noisy relatives arrive, and he silences them; but the crowd in the street is also noisy, and he cannot silence it. He goes out into the street and begs them to be quiet. When the doctor announces the childs death, the mother begins to scream and calls for her husband, and the relatives forcibly separate them.
Sims returns to the office, amid endless rows of desks, to write numbers in a ledger but he cant go on. His fat colleague has become department head because he has no ties and takes life lightly; Sims loses his job.
From one job to another, he sinks to ever humbler trades. His wife also has to start working, while he loses even his last position. Her brothers find him another job, but he believes he deserves better and despite his wifes despair refuses it. Exhausted, she slaps him, insults him, and throws him out of the house. He even considers throwing himself under a train but lacks the courage. On that bridge, his son gives him a bit of hope hes the only one who still believes in him. But competition is ruthless: its not easy to find work. He becomes a sandwich-board man, but his brothers-in-law take his wife away. With his first earnings, he buys her a small bouquet of flowers, and she, moved, decides to stay so little is enough to make her happy. They go to the theater together, and the film leaves them in a vast circus, crowded with thousands of people enjoying themselves just like them.
He wants to escape the crowd, but must struggle alongside millions like himself he has no chance. She is a heroine, bearing a double burden made heavier by her husbands character.
Show People (1928) is a meta-film about film-making in Hollywood, and
it is an odd indictment of Hollywood society by one of its most prominent
members.
A Southern general drives all the way across the USA to bring his pretty
daughter Peggy to Hollywood, convinced that she can become a movie star.
They are fascinated by the big studios that line up the street, but they soon
learn that being a general does not count much in Hollywood. Peggy has to stand
in line with thousands of other aspiring actors. At lunch they are approached
by a funny boy, Billy, who claims to have a role for Peggy in a movie.
Peggy wants to become a dramatic actress, but on stage she realizes that
the movie is a slapstick of the most debased nature. Nonetheless her naive
attitude makes her look very funny, and the director decides to really make
her a protagonist, except it's comedy not drama. Her ambition is such that
she first feels humiliated when clowns wet her clothes but then begs for more
water. At the premiere she watches herself on screen (we physically see scenes
from a different film) and then she watches a drama by King Vidor himself.
As they leave, Charlie Chaplin (played by himself) asks her for an autograph
although she doesn't recognize him.
Her first film is such a success that rival filmmakers hire her do to
what she really want to do, drama. She is now so in love with Billy and almost
refuses the job because they don't hire him, but he wants her to accept,
resigned to remain a slapstick actor. Initially she has trouble forgetting
her comedy routine, but eventually she triumphs. A French count, Andre, who
is also a popular actor and womanizer, helps
her become popular among the elite of Hollywood. She changes her name to
Patricia, moves into a mansion and assumes the vain attitude of the aristocrat.
Billy, who still lives in poverty, is all but forgotten. One day Patricia and
Andre are filming in the woods. Nearby Billy's troupe is filming a slapstick.
When Billy, dressed like a clown, approaches Peggy/Patricia, she is embarrassed.
Andre has to rescue her from Billy's vulgar jokes.
She is becoming more and more pretentious, and it shows also on screen. Her
producer threatens to fire her because the audience doesn't like her acting
anymore. Peggy is outraged and continues her progression towards artificiality
by deciding to marry the count Andre and become a countess. The day of the
wedding Billy breaks into the house and confronts Peggy. He forces her to get
into a fight like the ones they used to concoct during while filming the
slapsticks. She throws a pie at him and instead hits her fiance, just like
in the slapsticks. But she doesn't laugh: she is humiliated. Billy leaves,
defeated. Andre tries to console Peggy, but then Peggy starts laughing at him.
Peggy is redeemed and realizes that Billy was the only real human among them.
Everybody else is a fake. The effect is felt also on her acting. She makes
a movie with King Vidor (played by Vidor himself) and recommends a new
dramatic actor, Billy. They have to kiss on the set and the kiss goes on
and on forever.
The Patsy (1928) is a minor domestic comedy.
A middle-class couple has two children, Grace and Pat. The mother is clearly
partian towards Grace, her favorite, who gets all the attention and all the
help, particularly in romancing the handsome Tony, while Pat is asked to do
the dishes in the kitchen. Her father is on her side, but he doesn't have the
will to stand up to his wife. After her mother has done everything to pull
Tony towards Grace, a sophisticated aristocrat, Billy, shows up and steals her
from Tony. Tony is heartbroken and finally realizes the beauty of huble Pat.
Soon Grace realizes that Billy was not serious, and decides to take Tony
back. Pat can do nothing because she told Tony a lie: that another man is
in love with her. Pat then pretends to be trapped in Billy's house and calls
Tony for help. Tony rushes to help her, but also to condemn her disreputable
behavior. All problems are cleared when Pat confesses that Tony is the only
man she has eyes for. In the meantime, the father has reasserted his
authority on the household after a formidable scene.
Vidor's first sound film was
Halleluja (1929), a musical devoted to Black folklore and featuring
an all-Black cast. Here
Vidor's experiments in the use of music and real sounds found their natural place.
The picturesque, comic, and tragic picture of the poor Black people is conditioned by the usual prejudices that portrayed the Black man as superstitious, quarrelsome, dirty, and drunken.
The film contrasts the solidarity of a rural and primitive world with the inhuman solitude of the modern city of The Crowd.
The first part is set in the Deep South: Black men loading bales of cotton, shooting dice on street corners, celebrating in smoky taverns; and in one of these taverns, among a jazz band with an acrobatic drummer, drunken gamblers, and prostitutes, a brawl breaks out in which the protagonist accidentally kills his brother; becoming a preacher, he travels around the nearby towns stirring up the enthusiasm of the crowds and even manages to convert the prostitute who caused the fight; religion and eroticism intertwine in the mass-orgy at the end of which the preacher and the prostitute run away to live together in the city, he as a factory worker and she as a housewife; when she runs away with her old accomplice, he chases them, forgives the girl who dies in the attempt, and strangles his rival in the swamp; after serving hard labor, he returns to his people.
Black men working and loading cotton, singing spirituals with smiles on their faces. At the end of the day, some play dice, others celebrate around a harlot. The Black man Zekiel takes her away for a handful of coins. Realistic down to the details of the carts and the boat, of the smoky taverns with the jazz band, ironic and frenetic, very musical. (ballet of the waiters in the tavern with the acrobatic drummer, Zekiel the preacher imitating the train by sliding his feet, boxing match between the preacher and the vices).
In the tavern, they meet Hot Shot, elegant and sophisticated; provoked, Zekiel agrees to gamble his wages on dice; urged by the girl, who is in cahoots with the cheat, Zekiel loses everything. Realizing the trick, Zekiel threatens the swindler, who points his gun at him; in the ensuing struggle, Zekiel seizes the weapon and fires: he kills his brother.
Pathetic scene of the family mourning the dead, singing spirituals and laments, followed by the Black funeral that turns into fanaticism. During the collective delirium, Zekiel discovers his calling as a preacher.
Having become famous and respected, Zekiel sees among the spectators of a procession the two thieves, who mock him and shock the crowd with their obscene jokes; Zekiel, riding a mule, dismounts and confronts the two unbelievers; he frightens them and resumes his triumphant march. The prostitute laughs scornfully but publicly challenges him to make her cry as well; Zekiel delivers his sermon. Overcome by the enthusiasm and emotional tension that gradually seize everyone present, she bursts into tears and runs toward him, answering his call. Zekiel baptizes her in the lake while the people sing, and the girl converts amid terrible spasms. Zekiel brings her to his hut, and while she is still sobbing, he begins to caress and kiss her; his mother interrupts his erotic rapture just in time.
To escape temptation, he decides to marry a good girl.
Meanwhile, the girl is harassed by the cheat Hot Shot, who tries to take her away from Zekiels influence; but the girl defends herself with a poker.
At the sermon, the girl is the most fervent; the religious rite of purification turns into a rite of perdition (while others are seized by convulsions and paroxysms); Zekiel and the girl embrace, flee together, vainly pursued by his fiance, while in the church the tribal dance continues.
Zekiel and the repentant prostitute go to live in a big city. Zekiel works in a factory. But she is again what she used to be: the cheat has found her, and the two secretly resume their affair.
While Zekiel rests, she packs her bags and leaves. Zekiel notices and shoots at them; they flee in a cart, and he chases them on foot. When she falls in the mud, her companion abandons her, and Zekiel reaches her. Before dying, she asks for his forgiveness. Zekiel then completes the chase into the swamp and strangles his rival.
He serves his hard labor sentence and then, on parole, returns to his people.
The realism of daily work, of the homes, and of leisure activities within the community is diluted by musical numbers, by religious deliriums based on spirituals, and by the pathos that overflows in the funeral and conversion scenes. Disturbing is the preacher/erotomaniac split, which turns all the Black characters into pagan satyrs.
After this film, Vidor increasingly gave in to compromises with Hollywoods spectacular cinema, and in particular with the western genre, to which he had already contributed a Billy the Kid (1930).
The Great Depression demanded films with guaranteed success and perhaps also instinctively pushed him to choose subjects that would not further demean the common man.
Billy The Kid (1930) revisits the Far West legend. It's a Western that
stays faithful to the historical record (most of the pioneers are immigrants
with an accent).
Tunston and his religious friend are pioneers looking for a lady to settle in.
They find a wonderful land but soon learn that Donovan the sheriff owns it
all and runs the region like his own personal fiefdom. Tunston organizes the
other settlers so they can stand up to Donovan's gangsters. One of the gangsters
tries to shoot them and a young handsome stranger, Billy, kills him, saving the
life of Tunston. Tunston hires him and a for a while peace reigns on the region.
Billy treats Tunston like his own father.
Tunston calls for his girlfriend Clare to join him.
The deputy sheriff, Pat, is the second best shooter after Billy: he works for
the sheriff but is an honest man.
Donovan decides to eliminate Tunston. His men attack his carriage on the day
of the wedding. To save his friends, Tunston attracts the gangsters and gets
killed. Billy swears revenge.
Next the sheriff wants to arrest Tunston's friend. Billy organizes the
resistance in the religious man's house. A very slow siege begins, with Clare
making coffee for the men and the religious man reading the Bible. They
negotiate for the women to be allowed to leave the house. Days later finally
the religious man decides to end the siege by walking outside and letting
the gangsters kill him. Billy kills the sheriff. Pat, who was only willing
to arrest the religious man, calls off the siege, but the gangsters, led by
Bob, revolt
and decide to continue the siege until they kill them all. The gangsters set
fire to the house. Most of Tunston's men die trying to flee, but Billy succeeds.
He becomes a renown outlaw. Pat is the new sheriff and it is his duty to
arrest him. Eventually the war between Billy and the gangsters of the old
sheriff, now headed by Bob, attracts the attention of the authorities. The
governor marches on the town leading an entire regiment. He tries to convince
Billy to surrender and make peace with the gangsters, but Billy refuses,
even when Clare comes in to beg him and to tell him that she loves him.
It is now Pat's duty to organize a posse. They surround Billy who hides in
a cave, and they starve him. Pat captures him by offering him a warm meal.
Billy is taken to Pat's prison. Pat and Billy behave like friends who mutually
respect each other, but Billy is still determined to take his revenge on
Bob, who murdered Tunston. Playing cards with Pat, Billy manages to steal his
pistol and flees. Clare finds him and begs him to take her with him.
Billy loves her but thinks it would be a miserable life for a girl like her,
so he lies to her and tells her he doesn't love her so she would go away.
Pat, in theory, has followed her to catch Billy but actually lets him run
away again in the direction of the border, and then smiles.
The Champ (1931)
Andy is a boxer who is training to get back in shape. He trains in humble
places, for example running behind a car on a dusty road with his child Dink.
He ruined himself by drinking but now he swears to his child that has cleaned up.
Now he has to fight small-time boxers to make a living. His son finds him drunk
in a bar when the crowd is waiting for him to get on the ring for a match.
He shares a humble room with his son, who takes care of the place like
a good housewife. Dink has one friend who is like a brother, a black boy.
Andy is lucky at the horse races and uses the money to buy a race-horse for
Dink. At the first race Dink convinces a nice lady, Linda, to bet on the horse.
Outside Andy runs into her husband Tony and the two, who obviously know each
other well, exchange unfriendly words.
The horse loses the race badly and Andy is broke again.
Linda recognizes Andy, her former husband, and realizes that the boy is
Andy's son: her son. She begs her husband Tony to find a way so that she can
see the boy. It turns out that she gave up any rights on the child to
obtain a divorce and marry Tony. She had married Andy when he was a famous
champion, but dumped him when he started drinking, and then married the
higher-class Tony. Tony offers Andy money to bring Dink to the hotel, and
Andy cannot refuse. Dink meets his half-sister and then Linda, who tries in
vain to get him to love her. She's a stranger to him, even after she tells
him that she's his mother. He is indifferent to her love. When he leaves,
Linda tells Tony that she desperately needs the boy.
While Dink is sleeping next to him,
Andy gambles all the money he got from Tony and loses it.
He also loses the horse. When Dink finds out the following day, he is heart
broken. Andy has to promise that he will buy the horse back, but he has no
money. So he visits Linda and asks for the money. Linda gives him the money
but on the condition that Dink be allowed to decide by himself if he wants
to continue living like a vagrant with Andy or start a new life with Linda, who
would send him to school and keep him in a nice house. While treating Dink
to a fancy meal, Andy brainwashes the kid to dislike Linda's lifestyle.
Andy tells Dink that he bought the horse back, but then
Andy can't resist and gambles the money again, and loses it again.
Dink and his little friends see a big commotion and Dink gets a glimpse of his
drunk father being arrested. Dink is humiliated in front of his little friends.
In jail Andy has time to think, and concludes that Dink would be better off
with Linda. Dink has already forgiven him, yet again, and comes to the
jail to bring him food. In order to convince Dink to choose Linda over him,
Andy tells him that he doesn't want him anymore. Dink starts crying: no matter
what, Dink sees his father as his best friend. Finally Dink accepts the verdict
and moves in with Linda. They dress him up and clean him up and put him on
a train, but Dink escapes and runs back to Andy. Andy is galvanized by the
event and starts training seriously to return to boxing. Dink is painfully aware
that his father is out of shape, but Andy is determined not to disappoint his
son. The night of the match the doctor tells Andy that his heart is weak,
but Andy ignores the warning. Tony and Linda came to watch the match.
They have accepted that Dink wants to live with his father. Tony is a gentleman:
he offers money to Andy to keep him from boxing, but Andy is determined to win
the match and the prize. Despite being beaten mercilessly, Andy refuses to throw
in the towel and eventually, against all odds, manages to knock down the rival.
Andy has a surprise for Dink: he bought back the horse. But he doesn't feel
well and soon collapses to the floor. He dies of a heart attack.
Dink is desperate. When Linda enters the room, he finally calls her "mother".
His exploration of the world of the humble peaked with
Our Daily Bread (1931).
The film is inspired to the social realism of the Soviet Union, not only because
it praises the idea of a commune (as opposed to the greedy selfish heartless
capitalists of the city) but also because of the final scene of the triumph of
the peasants.
A woman begs the landlord to extend the deadline for paying rent. Her husband
John is jobless and has to compete with hundreds of people for the few jobs
available. But she has an idea: she has invited a rich uncle to dinner, hoping
that he will give her husband a job. The uncle offers them a farm that he
doesn't want anymore and that the bank doesn't want either. They decide to
try it out, leave the city and move to the country.
They know nothing about farming but luckily a farmer who has been kicked
out of his farm decides to stay with them. Soon there is a crowd of unemployed
men looking for a chance to work at the farm. John becomes the leader of an
agricultural commune. Soon the farm is transformed into a beautiful town and
a huge field is plowed and seeded.
One day the sheriff shows up to sell the property because the bank wants its
money back but the men intimidate the rich people who would like to buy it
and eventually the men buy it themselves for very little.
A sexy blonde, Sally, gest stuck at the farm after her father died on the road.
She doesn't seem too sorry and is more trouble than help.
The crop is not enough to feed everybody, and one of the men, who has always
been cold and reserved, Louie,
confesses that he is a wanted criminal and offers to
turm himself in so that they can use the reward to buy food. The blonde accepts
to be the one who turns him in and then she delivers the cash to John.
However, that doesn't solve the number-one problem: a drought that is killing
their crop.
John's wife understands that Sally is trying to seduce John, and confronts her,
but Sally is cynical and indifferent.
John's wife tells her to get out. Sally replies that she accepts but John will
follow her. John is in fact ready to give up and leave with Sally, but the
very night that they start driving he hears a noise that tells him that
the irrigation canal is working. He runs back in the middle of the night and
wakes up the men to start working immediately. The men don't trust him anymore,
but he convinces them to build a ditch between the canal and their farm.
They work day and night, with the women holding torches so that they can work
also in the dark. They build the ditch in record time and exult when the water
starts flowing and flooding their field.
Il film si
schierava apertamente dalla parte dei contadini che in quegli anni erano ridotti sul lastrico e li illudeva
con una sorta di piccola utopia.
Bird of Paradise (1932) is an exotic melodrama, a very minor film
offering a ridiculous representation of life among the "savages" via
several musical/dancing rituals.
Wealthy tourists are touring the Pacific islands on a private yacht, fascinated
by what they believe to be happy carefree people.
When they stop at an island, they are in fact welcomed by dozens of islands of
islanders. When a shark appears, the handsome John tries to capture it but
instead falls overboard. A beautiful girl, Luana, risks her life to save his.
The foreigners are invited to a shamanic ritual during which they discuss
how the tribe is known to sacrifice virgins to placate the ire of the island's
volcano when it erupts. When John grabs Luana, he upsets the shaman: Luana
is the daughter of the king, and only princes are allowed to touch her.
Nonetheless she visits him at night and they swim together. John decides to
stay on the island while his friend continue their cruise. His love affair
with the princess is rudely interrupted when she is seized by warriors and
ordered to marry a prince. Jim is ties to a tree, but a crazy old lady frees
him and then trades a canoe for Jim's phonograph. This way Jim can reach the
place where yet another tribal feast is being held to celebrate the wedding,
and kidnap her. He takes her to a desert island where they start a new life
(and she rapidly learns English). One day the volcano erupts. The king sends
warriors to kidnap Luana and bring her back for the sacrifice. Jim follows
them and is captured and condemned to die with her. Just then Jim's friends
return to the island and free both of them. The natives come asking for
Luana, though, believing that only she can appease the volcano. Luana herself
demands to return to the natives, both to save Jim's life and to fulfil
her destiny.
Cynara (1932) is a mediocre and tedious adaptation of
Robert Gore-Brown's play "Cynara" and Gore-Brown's novel "An Imperfect Lover",
possibly his worst film ever.
Jim is a lawyer who is about to leave his wife to star a new career and life in
Africa withour her. She begs him to explain what happened inside his heart.
A flashback shows how his silly sister-in-law spoiled their seventh wedding
anniversary by inviting his wife Clemency to a trip to Venice.
Alone in London, Jim accepts the invitation of an older friend to dinner.
At the restaurant they meet Milly and Doris, two lively shopgirls.
His older friend John is a shameless womanizer and invites the girls to join
them. At the end of that evening Jim is determined not to see the girls again.
But John plots against his purity of heart. When Jim is called to be the judge
of a pageant contest, he tells Milly and Doris, and Doris enlists as one of
the contenders. Jim can't resist awarding him the first prize. She slips and
sprays and ankle. Jim offers to take her home. They slowly become attached, but
she accepts that he will not break his marriage. When his wife returns from
her trip, Jim is tempted to tell her the truth but then doesn't find the
strength. At the same time Doris is fired from her job, and clearly needs Jim
more than ever. Jim decides to terminate their affair and sends her a farewell
letter with some money. Having learned of Jim's behavior, Milly walks furious
to Jim's house to insult him. While they are arguing, a police officer comes
to tell him that Doris has committed suicide, and they found his note in her
room. There is a public trial, at which his affair is exposed and Milly accuses
him of having caused Doris' suicide. He has to admit that the girl was a virgin
when he met her. The flashback ends. The wife is surprisingly rather
understanding. He tells her that Doris was not a virgin after all, but at the
trail he didn't want to ruin her reputation. He bids his wife farewell and heads
for the ship. John talks to his wife and convinces her to join Jim at the ship
and leave with him for a new life.
Wedding Night (1935) is a comedy that turns into melodrama.
Tony (Gary Cooper) is a writer who has lost his inspiration and is rapidly
becoming an alcoholic. His full-time job is partying in the big city
together with his wife, but they are now broke. When the publisher refuses his new book, they are
forced to move back to their little mansion in the countryside. The wife hates
it, but Tony falls in love with the family of Polish immigrants who live next
door. Using the money that they give you to purchase part of his land, Tony
sends his wife back to the city and focuses on writing a book about his
neighbors. His main target is the young daughter whose father has promised
her to a young man without asking for her opinion.
The sophisticated novelist and the simple farm-girl fall discreetely in love
with each other. One night she has to stay at his house because of a blizzard.
The father comes to rescue her in the morning, furious at her shameless
behavior, and then orders her to marry the young Polish man in two days.
At the same time Tony's wife comes back. She has overheard something and
then reads in Tony's book the love story of the writer and the farm girl.
When Manya comes to see Tony one last night, and perhaps to ask for his help
to disrupt the marriage, she and Tony's wife have their
first meeting. The wife tells Manya that the farm girl in the novel has
no hopes against the wife of five years: she is talking to the real farm girl
about the real wife. Manya goes back to her father's home without seeing Tony,
realizing that Tony's wife is right.
Then the wife confronts her husband: Tony admits that he is in love with
the girl and that he wants a divorce, but his wife tells him that he won't
give it to him. And she doesn't tell him that the girl is to be married in
a few hours. When Tony learns of the wedding, it is too late to intervene,
but Tony shows up at the party and makes the bridegroom jealous.
At night the drunk bridegroom walks to Tony's house with homicidal intents.
Manya tries to stop him and she is accidentally killed while the two men
fight.
Stella Dallas (1937) is
the remake of Henry King's 1925 film adapted from Oliver Higgins Prouty's novel, the melodramatic parable of a mother who sacrifices everything of her daughter
and is happy just to see her happy.
Stella is a young girl in a blue collar town. Her father and her brother work
every day at the local factory. Her only excitement is that she found out a
young handsome man, Steven, is the son of a wealthy man who went bankrupt and
committed suicide. She is madly in love with him and eventually finds a way
to get his attention. She leaves the miserable home of her parents for a much
nicer mansion. They get married and have a baby. He is disappointe though that
she never tried to get an education and become a lady: she is still a
working class girl. In fact she enjoys the company of people whome he would
rather avoid, like the noisy Ed. When Steven is offered a promotion to New
York, she refuses to follow him and raises their daughter alone, consoled by
Ed who becomes her best friend. Her daughter Laurel has a rather lonely
childhood. When she turns 13, her mother goes out of her way to prepare a nice birthday party
for her, but nobody shows up, probably ashamed of her mother.
Laurel sees her father only during her vacations. He has met again his old
flame, whom he gave up when his father killed himself. She has three children
and Laurel becomes good friend of them. Laurel is mesmerized by the ladylike
composure of her father's friend. Back home, her mother looks like a much more
mundane woman. Her only friend is Ed, a man who is a lot of fun and has a
good heart, but hardly a gentleman. On Christmas, her mother invites Ed for
dinner. Ed shows up drunk. Steven shows up unexpected to surprise his daughter
and invite her to spend the Christmas holidays with them. Her mother does not
have the heart to oppose something that would make her daughter happy, even if
it means spending Christmas alone. Steven realizes it, and invites her too.
Stella is happy that Steven still cares for her and would love to accept, but
drunk Ed comes out of the kitchen and ruins everything. Little by little her
daughter gets used to the lifestyle of her father's friends, all aristocratic
and wealthy. One day she falls in love with one of the young men of this crowd.
And while she is with him she witnesses people making fun of her mother,
who looks like the typical poor woman pretending to be a lady. She is so
ashamed that she runs away without telling her boyfriend who the woman is.
Because she loves her mother, she simply tells her that she wants to go home:
she is running away from a world that would never accept her mother.
But on the train, by coincidence, a few of the girls who were making fun of
her mother talk about it, and her mother overhears them. Thus she understands.
Stella visits her husband's new companion and asks her to take Laurel with
them. Laurel is initially happy but then understands that her mother is
sacrificing for her, and wants none of it. She decides to go back to her
mother. Her mother, though, is determined that Laurel should live the
wealthy, not the poor, life. The only way to get her to leave is to pretend
that she, her mother, doesn't want her around. She even pretends that Ed
is rich (in reality, he is now an alcoholic bum) and that they are leaving
for South America. Laurel is heartbroken but Stella's plan works: Laurel
goes back to the huge mansion of her father and to the aristocratic life
of her stepmother. Time heals the wound, and Laurel announces her wedding
with a young man of the high society. Nonetheless, she hopes that her mother
would read about it in the newspaper and come to the wedding.
She did: she is outsite in the rain, trying to catch a glimpse
of her daughter getting married. Then Stella walks away, smiling.
sono molto piu` convenzionali.
Il detective film Muss 'Em Up (1936)
The Citadel (1938), adapted from Cronin's novel, is a terrible
morality tale.
Andrew is an idealistic new doctor in a destitute British town.
He realizes that the town is plagued by an epidemics of typhoid.
Fellow doctor Philip has tracked the disease to the sewer.
Corruption and indifference are ubiquitous in the
system. Philip thinks that the only way to get a new sewer is to
blow up the old one.
Meanwhile he finds out that the local schoolteacher, Christine, is keeping a
child with measles at school, but can't quite get himself to report her to
the authorities.
He helps his friend blow up the sewer, romances Christine, and then finds
a new job in a much nicer coal-mining region.
He finds out that a widespread disease is caused by work in the mines,
and demands higher wages for the miners who are affected. This makes him
enemies. In the meantime he has been conducting some
research study with Christine that has generated interest among the scientific
community. His enemies cripple his reputation among the patients and
destroy his laboratory. He resigns and move elsewhere.
When he meets his old schoolfriend Fred, a new world is revealed to him. Fred
and his partner Charles are getting rich as "society doctors", catering to
wealthy patients only. Andrew finally gets rich, but he loses his wife's
admiration. One day he meets a surgeon who explains a new sophisticated
technique, but Andrew thinks he is unqualified.
Andrew now has a dumb but rich lover, Frances, one of the many patients who are
not sick at all but pay for being "cured".
When his old friend Philip asks him to join a project for a clinic that
instead would cater to the poor, Christine is excited but Andrew ignores him.
They are dining at a restaurant and the owner tells him that her little daughter
is very sick. Andrew ignores her too, although he just learned about that
surgeon who could cure the child.
His old friend is so hurt that he gets drunk and is run over by a car.
Charles and Andrew operate on his friend, but Charles makes a colossal
mistake and Philip dies. As soon as they leave the room, Charles simply puts
on a tuxedo, ready to return to his social duties.
Andrew realizes that Charles has always been totally incompetent, and accuses
him of murder. Devastated by remorse, Andrew walks alone in the streets for
hours. He decides to return to his ideals. He delivers the sick girl to the
revolutionary surgeon who cures her. But that surgeon is not licensed, and
a commission tries Andrew for breaking the law. Andrew has to defend himself
with a moving speech.
(In the novel, instead, Philip lives and at the end they set out together to
start the clinic for the poor).
Subsequently, Vidor distinguished himself above all in westerns, a genre that allowed him to highlight the self-made man qualities of the typical American immersed in wide open spaces and an unusual taste for violence and sex, elevated to the backbone of the Frontier.
So Red the Rose (1935), adapted from Stark Young's novel, is a southern melodrama that feels like a prelude to Gone with the Wind.
The Texas Rangers (1936) is another western, adapted from
Walter Prescott Webb's
1935 book.
Two lazy bandits, the handsome one and the joker, enlist for fun and to take advantage of the situation; but faced with self-sacrifice, heroism, and sacrifice, they too become champions, especially the handsome one, who enjoys the affection of the commander's daughter; the commander assigns him the task of capturing, dead or alive, a former partner in crime, now a notorious bandit; he refuses and the commander has him arrested for complicity. The story shifts from comic-burlesque to tragic-heroic: his friend tries to capture the bandit alone, but is killed, and the child who always followed him is taken hostage. The handsome man then asks to be released, tracks down the bandit, hunts him down mercilessly, and kills him. The first man dies, the second kills him and marries the commander's daughter.
Comrade X (1940) is a romantic comedy and a grotesque satire of the
Soviet Union (at the times of the continuous purges).
A mysterious foreign correspondent, diguised under the moniker of Comrade X,
is causing great embarrassment to the Soviet government.
A Soviet commissar (replacing the previous one who has just been mistakenly
executed) summons all foreign correspondents to inform them that their
activities will be severely curtailed until the identity of Comrade X
is revealed. Missing among the journalists is a USA drunkard,
Mac (Clark Gable). He arrives the following day, welcomed by
the hotel porter and old friend Vanya. Nothing works in Moskow, and there
is no room available at the hotel. Mac does not hesitate to impose himself
on a fellow German reporter, who has a suite at the hotel, and to hire his
secretary Olga for himself. Then he invents a story that Germany just invaded
Russia, so that the hotel manager kicks out the German.
Jane is another USA journalist who used to be an admirer of him and his
girlfriend before he dumped her for a geisha in Tokyo.
Mac attends the funeral of the executed commissar and witnesses an attempt
on the life of the new commissar.
Then at his hotel he gets his secretary drunk (she's a Russian spy)
and frantically types his exclusive report. Vanya walks in and starts telling
him that his daughter is in danger because she's a communist: having realized
that communists have caused great damage, the new regime
is eliminating communists so that communism can succeed. Vanya begs Mac
to help her escape from the country. Mac ignores him. Vanya pulls out the
camera (disguised as a radio) that Mac uses: Vanya knows that Mac is Comrade X,
and can blackmail him. Mac has to accept the deal. He meets
Golubka, who works as a streetcar conductor under the name of Theodore
(because the union only allows men to drive streetcars), but she has no
intention of leaving Russia, and in fact she believes that there will soon be
a communist revolution in the USA. So, pretending to be a communist himself,
he has to convince her that by emigrating
to the USA would help the cause of communism.
He pretends to be indifferent to female beauty, although he casually kisses her.
The following day Golubka shows up with her suitcase, ready to emigrate.
Just one catch: they have to get married, the only way she can be allowed
to leave. Golubka coldly executes the marriage and walks into his bed.
She recognizes Olga as her communist idol.
Upon learning from Golubka the whereabouts of the leader of a dissenting
communist faction, he wants to leave her and rush to interview him.
But Jane walks in and, jealous and incredulous, she
tells Golubka that Mac has never been a communist. Golubka senses treason
and demands to go to the secret police. Just then the secret police break
into the room and arrest both. Mac is taken at the office of the commissar
who presents him with the radio-camera, found in Vanya's room. The commissar
doesn't believe that Vanya is Comrade X but is puzzled that Vanya pretends to
be. He becomes even more suspicious when he learns that Mac has married Vanya's
daughter and was trying to take her abroad. They are thrown in jail, where
they meet the dozens of strict communists who are being arrested, as Vanya
feared. They are all to be executed, accused of being counter-revolutionaries.
Mac makes a deal with the commissar: their freedom in exchange for the name
and photograph of the name who tried to assassinate him.
Mac is surprised to be taken to the new commissar: the assassin himself,
the former leader of the "counter-revolutionaries" and Golubka's political idol,
who has replaced the previous commissar, who has died of "pneumonia".
He explains that he has ordered the execution of his own former disciples
because they were stupid enough to admire him and believe in him.
Mac and the turncoat commissar work out a deal.
Mac, Vanya and Golubka leave in a car driven by a commissar's man.
Golubka is shocked to learn of the ideological betrayal by her idol.
Mac doesn't trust the commissar and hijacks the car. Chased by police with
machine guns, the fugitives dump the car and steal a tank. Chased by dozens
of Soviet tanks, their tank heads for the border. They enter Romania creating
panic among the population. The following day the newspapers announce the
invasion of Romania...
HM Pulham Esq (1941) is a sentimental comedy adapted from
John Marquand's novel.
Northwest Passage (1940), another collaboration with Laurence Stallings,
takes place
in Alaska
and is a typical frontier story: a handful of white men led by an indomitable major must bring civilization to the far reaches of the continent, battling the elements and the Indians.
An American Romance (1944) is about a humble worker who becomes a tycoon.
The all-star and epic western
Duel in the Sun (1946), adapted by David Selznick from Niven Busch's best-selling novel
is the most baroque and sensationalist of Vidor's films.
The superficial theme is that of the old pioneers of the wilderness against the progress of the railroad, but there is also a love triangle with uncontrolled eroticism.
The two brothers revisit the millennial Abel-Cain theme.
The girl loves two men who represent two extremes of good and evil,
and eventually undergoes a double sacrifice,
first sacrificing herself to become a concubine and then sacrificing herself to become a killer.
There is both a happy ending (the good one survives and presumably will have a happy life and inherit everything) and a sad ending (the real protagonist dies as alone as she's always been. The duel is both a duel between brothers, between good and evil, between father and (good) son, and (especially) between the girl and the evil son.
To further muddle the waters, the film has the protagonist die embracing her killer, as if embracing her inevitable destiny, her ultimate identity.
The mother's passion and death adds melodrama to the melodrama, as does the final repentance of the father. The stereotypes of the genre (the train robbery, the duel, the bandit, the cavalry) are barely there, and mostly twisted.
The film operatic and sweeping visuals, smothered in lush Technicolor
(cinematography by Hal Rosson, Lee Garmes and Ray Rennahan using highly mobile cameras), yield
stylized imagery.
The film's promiscuous tones were revolutionary for Hollywood of the 1940s. There was also promiscuity on the set: Jennifer Jones was producer David Selznick's lover (they eventually married in 1949).
The film opens with a black screen over which a
narrator (Orson Welles) tells the tragic legend of
two lovers lost in the desert.
A creole girl, Pearl (Jennifer Jones), lives around a saloon, where her mother is a famous ballerina
and her father is simply someone to make fun of (everybody knows the ballerina
is not faithful to him). That night the man sees her wife walk away with
a "gentleman" and then walk into their house. The girl tries to stop her
father, but this time he is determined to defend his honor: he shoots both
wife and lover. At the trial, he asks to be hung. And dies like a hero.
The girl takes the stagecoah to a town of Texas where her uncle and
aunt live.
An elegant young man, her cousin Jessie, is waiting for her, but he is
expecing a child and she, a hot-blooded woman, does not talk to strangers,
so their encounter is not very friendly.
Her aunt Laura Bell (Lillian Gish) is a sweet and lovely lady.
Her uncle, the "senator", is an arrogant and imperious man on a wheelchair.
He is a powerful man who owns a big ranch and a lot of land.
Jessie's younger brother, Lewt (Gregory Peck), is all the opposite of Jessie: a rude, drinking cowboy.
Jessie is the urban type: he wants to become a judge and believes in progress.
Lewt is the rural type: he wants to succeed his father at the ranch and believes
in the good old ways.
Their father resents Jessie's betrayal (and does not appreciate any of his
efforts) and spoils Lewt (and forgives him all of his sins).
The two boys differ also in the way they court their cousin: Jessie is
nice and understanding, Lewt is vulgar and scornful of her prudish behavior.
Pearl is attracted to both sides of the male persona.
Lewt's recklessness appeals to her rebellious temper as much as Jessie's
good manners appeal to her female vanity.
When the news arrives that the railroad people have entered his "territory",
the "senator" organizes a posse with all the cowboys of the area and personally
rides in front of them. He threatens the railroad people to get out, but
Jessie, who believes that the railroad is good for the future,
abandons him and joins the railroad people. The cavalry arrives in
time to avoid a bloody confrontation between father and son,
but the father calls him Judas and expels him from his ranch
(the sound of the train causes the old man's horse to jump and almost
kill him).
In the meantime, Lewt gets home after a trip and finds his sexy cousin alone,
He rapes her, but she doesn't try to stop him. She is clearly more attracted
by Lewt's flesh than by Jessie's spirit.
Jessie comes home to say goodbye to his mother, and finds Lewt in Pearl's room.
Jessie is hurt but remains kind, and Pearl cries, knowing she has lost him.
Lewt makes fun of his brother and walks out whistling.
Pearl tries in vain to explain herself to Jessie, but Jessie tells her he
will never forget.
Jessie slaps his brother in the face and then goes away.
Now that Jessie is gone, Pearl hopes at least to become Lewt's wife,
but at a party she realizes that the thought never crossed Lewt's mind.
At the same party, Pearl hears that Jessie is doing well, is engaged to a
girl from a wealthy family
and some day may become the governor of the state.
Pearl accepts the proposal of one of the cowboys, a nice man who has saved
money and wants to start a family. But Lewt provokes the man in front of
the other cowboys and then shoots him dead.
Now Lewt is wanted by the police.
His father has now lost both sons, but would never admit he has erred.
Lewt becomes a bandit and begins to attack trains.
When she visits Pearl, she first threatens to kill him but then can't resist
to the desire of the flesh.
The sheriff shows up that very night looking for Lewt: both his father and
Pearl lie to save his life.
But Lewt hasn't changed: she is willing to leave the ranch and share his life
as an outlaw, but he only wanted to use her. She begs him not to leave her,
and he has to hit her to get rid of her. She, the proud creole girl, has
humiliated herself.
Pearl's aunt is dying. She lived a life of sacrifice. She dares speak up
to her husband. At first he shouts back and accuses her of having ruined him.
But then admits the truth: that he has always been wrong, and always loved her.
She dies caressing him, the first tenderness between them in years.
Jessie, now a powerful politician, comes back to the ranch. His father
is stubborn and still resents his betrayal.
Pearl claims that she hates Lewt. Jessie invites her to move to town with
him and his wife. She accepts. But this provokes Lewt, now a notorious
bandit, who comes to town and confronts Jessie. Jessie refuses to gran a gun,
but Lewt shoots him nonetheless. Jessie survives, but Pearl does not forgive:
she sets out in the desert to track down Lewt and kill him.
When she finally meets him, in a rocky landscape under scorching sunshine,
she shoots him without any warning. Then she cries and walks towards him.
He is not dead and shoots her. She falls down. Lewt finally shows some remorse,
but Pearl is not dead and she shoots him again. They crawl towards each other.
As they are dying, they try frantically to touch each other.
They manage to hug and kiss just before dying.
The Fountainhead (1949) is an adaptation of the
1943 novel by Ayn Rand.
Beyond the Forest (1949) is his best film noir.
Lightning Strikes Twice (1951)
Japanese War Bride (1952)
Ruby Gentry (1952), scripted by Arthur Fitz-Richard and Silvia Richards,
is yet another fresco of the traditional, sexist and violent, values of
Southern society. A melodrama influenced by western movies, it is a powerful
portrait of woman who tries in vain to fight against ancestral codes of honor.
The narrating voice opens the film by telling us that Ruby is a female skipper hated by the townsfolks, and the film is a flashback of her story.
The narrator is the new doctor in town, who is introduced to the beautiful Ruby
by her rich mentor Jim on the way to a hunting party.
They stop by Ruby's place for a dinner with the other hunters.
Ruby flirts with Boake, a young man who just returned from South America, but
when he tries to touch her she scratches his face.
She has a reputation for being a little wild.
Her bigot brother Jewel foresees trouble for her and Boake.
Jim tells the doctor that he and his wife took Ruby in when she was in high
school and taught her the manners of a lady.
Ruby was heartbroken because she had rejected Boake too harshly.
After a couple of years in their mansion, she returned to her father and to a humble life.
Boake arranges a meeting with Ruby during the hunting excursion, in which
she's supposed to escort the doctor, who knows little of that primitive region.
He tries to kiss her but she aims the gun at him.
The beautiful and rich Tracy comes to pick up Boake.
Ruby is furious to see that she treats Boake like a boyfriend.
Boake and Ruby become lovers. She is convinced that he will marry her
and her family tries in vain to explain to her that he needs money, not a poor wife.
Tracy's father is lending Boake the money that he needs for a project to turn his family's swamp into a cotton plantation.
Boake tells Ruby that he has decided to marry Tracy.
Jim's wife dies just before Boake's wedding.
The doctor tells Ruby how wonderful she is and feels sorry that Ruby is mistreated by the rich families of the region.
He almost proposes. Ruby tells Jim that the doctor has a crush on her, and Jim
realizes that he is jealous. And so Jim proposes to her.
Their wedding takes place in New York, far away from the gossiping townsfolks.
Back home, they throw a party to celebrate their wedding but most
prominent families find an excuse to skip it: marrying a poor and much younger girl is viewed as a scandal.
Further inflaming the scandal is an incident caused by Jim: he attacks Boake
when he sees him romancing Ruby at another party, and also insults Ruby.
The next day Jim and Ruby go sailing to make peace but instead Jim is killed in an accident.
Soon the town turns against her. The newspaper accuses her of having murdered
her husband. She receives anonymous calls. People surround the mansion honking
their car horns.
Ruby swears revenge. She takes control of Jim's financial records and realizes
that a lot of respectable Southern gentlemen owed him money: she demands immediate
repayment, and many go bankrupt. The newspaper is one of them.
Her bigot brother Jewel tries in vain to make her stop her campaign.
She is full of hate. She summons Boake: he too owed money to Jim.
She wants him to leave his wife and stay with her, who is now rich.
He refuses to be bought. She takes her revenge: she takes over his property
and then floods the land that Boake has turned into a plantation.
She then smokes a cigarette while the waters destroy years of Boake's hard work.
He now surrenders to her but is resentful.
During the yearly hunting party, Boake almost strangles Ruby, then kisses her.
A delirious Jewel, the bigot brother, starts shooting at them determined to
punish their sins.
Boake and Ruby have to flee through the swamp.
Boake hunts them down and eventually kills Boake.
He is about to kill Ruby too but Ruby is faster and kills him, her own brother,
and rolls the body in the mud.
Now we are back to the first scene:
Ruby has become a humble skipper on a fishing boat.
Man Without a Star (1955)
is the elegy of the solitary cowboy who, beneath the tough exterior of a man hardened by every experience, hides a heroic longing for peace, freedom, and justice. He is a gunfighter who mentors a naive young boy and wins over the mistress of the ranch where they have ended up; but when she decides to impose her law by force on the other ranchers, he prefers to step aside at least until the womans new hired guns turn directly against him. Then he takes action, and his intervention proves decisive in turning the tide of the battle in favor of the small ranchers and in delivering a harsh lesson to the womans goons.
The story is further complicated by the homosexual relationship between the drifter and the boy, by the sexual contract agreed upon with the ranch owner (which she dutifully pays when he resigns), and by the budding love between the boy and the daughter of another rancher; by the mans inner torment that forces him into perpetual flight from the barbed wire (a symbol of the limitation of freedom), and by the guilt he feels for having taught the boy how to kill.
King Vidors Southern melodrama acknowledges the hard life of common people but also their darkest instincts. If, during the years of the Great Depression, Vidor mainly depicted the former, in his westerns he highlighted the latter, exposing in both cases the ambiguous boundary that separates good from evil, and how both are conditioned by society.
Two drifters are traveling on a train: one (Kirk Douglas) is a tough man who loves freedom, the other is an inexperienced boy. They witness a murder for which, upon arrival, the boy is accused; his friend saves him by identifying the real culprit and even earns the reward. In town, Douglas meets an old friend who introduces him to the local ranchers. After defending the boy from a bully, Douglas finds work at one of the largest ranches and gets the boy hired as well.
The ranch intrigues Douglas because it has an indoor bathroom. Douglas quarrels with a neighboring rancher who plans to use barbed wire; but the boy and the ranchers daughter take an immediate liking to each other. The owner arrives: she is a woman, whom Douglas immediately tries to win overfirst with compliments, then by beating up the ranchs braggart. The woman is ruthless: she wants to seize the open pastures (a declaration of war on the other ranchers) and hires hands who can also shoot. Seeing the foremans hesitation, she offers the position to Douglas; he accepts, but in exchange asks for her, and she agrees.
Meanwhile, Douglas continues to train the boy with the lasso and the gun.
The new men arrive, and the first incidents break out. The barbed wire that the small ranchers put up on the free pastures theyve occupied sparks the beginning of hostilities. The boy shows the same hatred for barbed wire as his friend. Among the newcomers is a shady Texan whom Douglas has known for some time. Douglas explains to the boy why he hates barbed wire: he knows it always brings war, and he himself was once its victim; his brother died because of itand he resembled the boy. On the spot, Douglas decides to leave, to avoid having to fight and to keep the boy out of danger. He collects from the woman what was agreed uponnamely, herselfand leaves for town. But she has the boy take her to the saloon to provoke Douglass jealousy. In the same saloon is also the Texan, looking provocative. The boy kills the first man who bothers the woman. Douglas calls him a murderer and leaves, feeling guilty (hes the one who taught him to shoot) and betrayed.
The womans men now lord it over the meek local ranchers, while Douglas spends his time getting drunk and sleeping at his old friends place. She is the one who shouts in his face about his fear of barbed wire and warns him when he decides to leave: wherever he goes, he will find barbed wire and will not be able to flee forever. As he is about to leave, the womans Texans lasso him and beat him up for fun. Douglas joins the ranchers side and helps both to put up the hated barbed wire and to defend it.
The womans men get out of control, and the Texan wounds the boy, who takes a horse and rides to warn Douglas. Douglas saves the barbed wire, kills a few enemies, and chases down the Texan, returning the beating he received. Then he decides to leave, and when the boy tries to follow him, he points to the girl who is waiting for him. He rides off alone.
War and Peace (1956) is an adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's novel.
Solomon and Sheba (1959) is a ridiculous Biblical epic.
In 1960 Vidor withdrew to a ranch where he made amateur movies that investigated
metaphysical themes, halfway between hobby and spiritual testament.
Truth and Illusion (1964)
Vidor discovered American society of the 1920s the individual crushed by the masses, the daily life of the metropolis and also revealed himself to be a masterful observer of sexuality. He was one of the first to understand the potential of sound, carefully crafting background noises (footsteps, traffic) and music. By blending inspiration and technique, he created a convincing picture of the colorful variety of humanity: the dull and cruel roar of the city in the background, and touching, generous impulses here and there.
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