"The Crowd" a Picture That Dampens Enthusiasm
By Wilfred Beaton (1928)
But The Crowd was a fine thing for Metro to
do. I am afraid, however, that the poor box-office record that it is going
to make will have a blighting effect on the organization's output. In the
future when a director wishes to get Mayer's permission to make a picture
with a thought in it, The Crowd will be trotted out as proof that
the public does not wish to think. The Vidor picture would not have been
made if the Metro executives understood the business that they are in.
If they knew anything about screen fundamentals they would have seen that
the picture could not be successful. While we go to the film houses primarily
for entertainment, we go to them also for inspiration. The reason the public
enjoys a picture whose logical ending is happy, more than it does one which,
to be logical must have an unhappy ending, is the inspiration it derives
from the former. Johnny Sims and his friends are paying over ninety per
cent. of what the world pays to see motion pictures. The screen has become
practically their only source of inspiration. The discouraged stenographer
is inspired by the fact that the stenographer in picture marries the boss,
and the traveling salesman is given fresh hope when he sees Dick Dix or
Bill Haines, playing a salesman, cop the millionaire's daughter in the
final reel. Johnny Sims sees that there is a future for him when the picture
shows the clerk becoming vice-president and marrying the president's daughter.
But what does anyone get from The Crowd? The comfortable citizen
who drove to the theatre in a car of his own and who can sleep at night
without worrying about the grocery bill, sees paraded before him on the
screen every heartache he and his wife endured during the years of their
upward struggle. Out of locked closets come spectres of the past that the
screen breathes life into and makes real again. And what do the friends
of Johnny Sims get out of it- the young people who constitute the crowd?
The only thing that keeps their heads up and eyes front is the thought
that some day they will rise above the multitude, as the heroes in motion
pictures always do. But this picture has no such inspiration. With extraordinary
vigor and conviction it plants the utter futility of endeavoring to battle
one's way to success. It shows that the crowd is too powerful to be combatted,
and it breathes hopelessness and despair. All these drawbacks are accentuated
by the excellence of the production from a motion picture angle. I do not
think a finer example of intelligent direction ever reached the screen.
As an example of cinematic art The Crowd is a success, but as a
medium of screen entertainment it will be a failure. It is too depressing,
and carries realism just a little farther than the public will prove willing
to follow. But it should not discourage further adventures into realism,
which should be applied to themes that strike a more optimistic note. Metro
is to be commended discarding the superlatively happy ending that was tacked
onto The Crowd at one stage of its evolution. It ends now just as
it should.
Wilfred Beaton, "The Crowd" a Picture That Dampens Enthusiasm," The
Film Spectator, April 14, 1928, pages 6-7.
© 1998, David Pierce, on editing and revisions (if any)
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