I love this movie so much

Perfect cast and a good story

One of my all time favorites.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

No doubt this film deserves a place of honor in the way it is filmed. The crowd scenes, for one, are impressive, especially considering the technology available at the time. But the story is really not well though out. Sure, it's about the trials and tribulations of a young couple, but after an auspicious start the young man turns out to be a n'er-do-well, and his hapless personality is never really examined. Too much of the early parts of the film are spent dramatizing how normal and ordinary their early life is, then it all falls apart as he fails to hold down job after job for reasons that are never explored. He isn't a drunk, and he doesn't have PTSD from the war, so......what happened? Is he depressed? At the end, they all go out to watch a movie and laugh, in a particularly eerie crown scene. No wonder this movie wasn't popular ! !

John (James Murray) and Mary (Eleanor Boardman - Mrs Vidor) are two, faces in the crowd. They meet, they get married, they have children. A common story. But in the cinema, nothing is common.We are more interested in John. He is a good little boy full of promises. He will become someone important. Unless… Unless his father dies, which happens when he is 12. Now we switch the figures. John is 21. He lands in New York convinced he is different and will tame this city. Meanwhile, he works as an accountant in an insurance company. But he studies at night, to become – still – someone important. One evening, his friend Bert (Bert Roach) invites him to Coney Island with two girls. At first, he refuses but in the end, he accepts. There, he meets Mary. They kiss in the Tunnel of Love. They are soon to get married. Despite Bert's pessimism, their marriage lasts. They have two kids. One day, John has a brilliant idea for an advertisement. He gets 500 dollars. He calls his children to celebrate this great moment. This is when Fate intervenes: their little girl gets run over by a car. Misfortunes will multiply, and John will have to fight the Crowd of those who did not want to be different.This film by King Vidor is not what we call a joyful film. It is very different from what the MG was offering to the movie audiences. Showing normal people was not a very good marketing product. It was not well accepted to show ordinary people and a sad ending. Therefore, Vidor held on and this ending is one of the nine endings which were shot. This is the least sad ending (the least bad ending?): John does not reach his goal. He will never be someone important. Just a face in the crowd, among many (many, many…) others. This is why the film is very interesting. We can see a quick romance. Quick, because the whole society demands it. everything goes fast: cars, trains and people going to work. Therefore, people have very little time for themselves, or to build something. The crowd is a huge wave which overwhelms everything. The peak hours are a moment which show this very well. When the clock strikes the end of the day's work, you can see crowds of people rushing to the elevators or the undergrounds alone or as couples. But John just want one thing: being different. He feels superior to the others. He thinks he has a mission, a great purpose. And this feeling starts irritating the others. He even mocks the poor guys who have to juggle to make (a bit of) a living, advertising for a restaurant. But would he have mock them if he had known that one day, he would have to do the same thing? As soon as John enters New York, things are different. Vidor picks up a building, the camera travels from bottom to the top, stops in front of a window, and then enters: desks, desks, desks... Hundreds of them! So he goes on, forward, to one desk: John Sim, 137. And he takes this man - a face in this desk crowd - and brings him to the light. We are going to learn everything which makes him a man: his life, his dreams, his wife, his kids, his (step) family... And his misfortunes! (Vidor will recall the emotion of the little girl's death in another movie - Hallelujah - when another child dies) Even if this child brings him his misfortune, the other brings him anew hope: he is completely desperate, on the brink of suicide when he realizes that his other child LOVES him. His son wishes to become like him! This was what he needed. Now we know he will get better and better. But to get better, he will have to accept to be just a member of the society like anyone else, and therefore be just a face in the crowd. And he accepts it. The story is over. The camera goes backwards revealing us the crowd of people around him, again and again, till he disappears in this overwhelming crowd. Vidor has put him back where he originally belonged.

The most remarkable thing about 'The Crowd (1928)' is that is manages to cover so much emotional ground. John (James Murray) is a young man who knew from an early age that he would become somebody special, that he would stand out from the crowd. At age 21, he travels to New York, the towering metropolis introduced via a montage of impressive high- angled shots that resemble Robert Florey's 'Skyscraper Symphony (1929).' John joins the accounting sector of a large insurance firm, and studiously assures himself that he need only work his way up. Years pass. John marries, has two children. It takes him five years to realise that he has become what he swore never to become: a member of The Crowd.Vidor's message is a double-edged sword. Early in the film, The Crowd is something to be loathed: the camera, in a virtuoso display of technical brilliance, swoops down upon a seemingly-endless room of seated accountants, each man turning pages in mechanical unison. (Billy Wilder later paid homage to this scene in 'The Apartment (1960)'). But when John finally determines to break free from The Crowd, his world falls apart around him – he can't maintain a job, his wife threatens to leave him, he loses his dignity. The film's ending is intriguing in its ambiguity: John is absorbed into the crowds of a laughing theatre audience.Is it a happy ending, an embracing of conformity? Is it ironic, an acknowledgment of mass delusion? Is Vidor integrating his character into the cinema audience? In 'The Bicycle Thief (1948),' a similar disappearance into the crowd is viewed as tragic, but here I'm not so sure. F.W. Murnau's 'The Last Laugh (1924)' told a similar tale, depicting the bleak prospects of a working-class doorman, played by Emil Jannings. UFA studio thwarted that film by enforcing a ludicrous happy ending that Murnau included only with a snide introductory title card. M-G-M also toyed with a happy ending to 'The Crowd,' but fortunately Vidor's version ultimately won out, a conclusion genuinely unsettling in its uncertainty, and sure to inspire discussion.

At a time when movies were learning how to indulge audiences with epic romance and timeless fantasy, King Vidor's simple story of ordinary people struggling against the relentless anonymity of big city life must have come as something of a revelation. Vidor stylishly combined realistic backgrounds with natural performances and in doing so was able to avoid the usual histrionic overkill of silent screen melodrama. The beautifully realized story follows an ambitious young man to bustling, metropolitan New York City, where his big dreams are slowly crushed under the accumulating pressures of work load and home life until, gratefully, he sinks to the level of the downtrodden masses he'd previously laughed at. Unlike so many other Jazz Age relics the film has aged remarkably well; decades later it's still an emotional experience, and a perfect example to modern audiences of the visual eloquence achieved at the height of the silent era.