Even if The Crowd were not as good as it is, Metro would deserve a lot of credit for having made it. It is a peculiar organization. In rapid succession it turns out pictures that give little evidence of the expenditure of any thought on them, and then it comes along with something like The Crowd that is so full of thought that it will not be a box-office success, in spite of the fact that it is one of the finest and most worthy motion picture ever made. King Vidor's conception was an extraordinary one and he has put it on paper with a degree of faithfulness and conviction that could be attained only by a master craftsman. When he reached into the crowd his hand fell on the shoulder of one of its standard parts, and out of that part he made a motion picture. His hero is one of the men upon whom nature relies to keep intact the integrity of its crowds, a man without either virtue or vices, and lacking the mental equipment to lift himself by his thoughts above the level of the others whose elbows always were touching his. With this thought, and with his average man, Vidor proceeds to write an essay and spread it on the screen. In so doing he presents us with two performances of extraordinary merit, those of Eleanor Boardman and James Murray. The acting of these young people is enough in itself to make a picture notable purely as a picture, but a dozen such performances in such a picture could not make it notable as screen entertainment. It has the fundamental weakness of attempting to interest us in something inherently uninteresting. We are not interested in average things, whether animate or inanimate. We are interested in anything in the degree that is above or below the average. We are interested in Lindbergh because he is a fine, brave boy who soars above the average; we are interested in Hickman because he is a beast so far below the average that he attracts our attention. We are not interested in young Johnny Sims, one of several hundred clerks in an insurance company's office. He is one of hundreds in the same office and of untold millions throughout the world, and there is nothing about him to attract our attention. Vidor presumed that we would become interested in Johnny when he was pointed out to us, but pointing at him does not make him more interesting. I am aware that great plays and great books have been written about average people, but in them the average people did things or thought thoughts that we would not expect from average people, proving, after all that they were not true to the average. The Crowd gets all its merit from the fact that it deals with people who do not rise above or fall below the mean average. In short, it tries to interest us in the most uninteresting thing on earth: an average product. The most successful story always will be the one which deals with the most interesting subject in the most interesting way. It can not be a picture that possesses only one of these superlatives. There are some things so uninteresting that they cannot be made interesting by any kind of treatment. The average man is one of them.

Wilfred Beaton, "Average Man Rather Poor Screen Material," The Film Spectator, April 14, 1928, page 6.

© 1998, David Pierce, on editing and revisions (if any)

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