Background
Vidor was born in Galveston, Texas, where he survived the great Galveston Hurricane of 1900. His grandfather, Károly (Charles) Vidor, was a refugee of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, who settled in Galveston in the early 1850s.
(1986 Hardback edition. Dust jacket is missing. Gift quali...)
1986 Hardback edition. Dust jacket is missing. Gift quality. Same day shipping.
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(The greatest silent film perhaps ever made was so unusual...)
The greatest silent film perhaps ever made was so unusual, it was not released for almost a year. It broke every rule in the book and lost out on an Academy Award because it dared to show a toilet in a modest family apartment. The classic World War I drama “The Big Parade” became the most profitable film in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer history, a rank it held until “Gone With the Wind.” As a result, producer Irving Thalberg gave director King Vidor a chance to make a seemingly non-commercial film about the average man’s journey through life. MGM could afford an experiment now and then, Hollywood’s boy wonder assured Vidor without seeing a screenplay. The finished film grossed nearly $1 million but was so offbeat the studio delayed it and nervously reworked it, omitting a prominent character played by a rising young star. Several different finales were filmed; it was clumsily sent out to theatre owners with an alternate happy ending, and the choice left up to them. “The Crowd” was among the last silent films, released in 1928 at the dawn of the talkies and saved from the dreaded addition of sound sequences perhaps only because MGM was slower than most studios to adopt the new technology. MGM’s Louis B. Mayer himself vetoed the film’s Academy Award chances because Vidor showed a lavatory, referring to it as “that goddamn toilet picture.” James Murray, an extra handpicked for the starring role, managed to hide a serious drinking problem during filming but allowed it to destroy a promising career and died tragically young. In addition to his interviews with Vidor and Eleanor Boardman, his then-wife and the film’s female lead, the author had access to studio memos, telegrams and other documents—plus virtually every draft of the screenplay, enabling him to track the project from rough idea to problematic finished product. The book describes and illustrates a variety of deleted scenes, as well as alternate endings. Details of the film’s release and restoration are also included, along with biographical sketches of the cast and crew and a listing of unbilled actors and creative personnel, many previously uncredited. “ ‘The Crowd’ is practically plotless. And yet every incident is so brilliantly directed and acted that the film blazes to life. The shots are simple, yet full of emotional power; King Vidor treats his characters so lovingly and with such understanding that one cannot help but share his feelings. ‘The Crowd’ is the finest American silent film I have ever seen,” says Oscar-winning film historian Kevin Brownlow, who wrote the forward. “Jordan Young’s research is worthy of his subject… I read it at one gulp, and found it as fascinating as I had hoped.” The revised paperback edition includes more than 100 illustrations, magazine and newspaper articles and other memorabilia, much of it omitted from the ebook. The separately published Addendum is also included, as of Sept. 6, 2017.
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(“King Vidor’s The Crowd: The Making of a Silent Classic” ...)
“King Vidor’s The Crowd: The Making of a Silent Classic” by Jordan R. Young was acclaimed “one of the best film books of 2014” in The Huffington Post. But a writer’s work is never done. Having interviewed both King Vidor and Eleanor Boardman in the late 1970s, the author was determined to talk with their daughter Belinda Vidor Holliday—the director’s last surviving offspring--but was unable to reach her prior to the book’s publication. In this addendum, he includes a subsequent conversation with Ms. Holliday. Young also takes the opportunity to provide additional information about music played on the set of “The Crowd,” deleted scenes, the critical reception in New York City when the picture premiered in 1928, a statement from Eleanor Boardman at the time of the film’s release, further information about her co-star James Murray, and supporting actors Dell Henderson and Alice Puter. This addendum also corrects a handful of errors, including details of the film’s Los Angeles premiere, and includes a number of photographs and newspaper advertisements. The bonus story, “The Tevye That Never Was: The Lost King Vidor-Max Davidson Project,” is a work of short fiction that picks up where “The Making of a Silent Classic” leaves off. Vidor is riding high on the release of “The Crowd,” but he’s in a quandary about what to do next. “The Jazz Singer” has made it clear the silent era is coming to an end. Then Vidor stumbles upon Max Davidson—a little Jewish comedian—and decides to star him in a film version of Sholem Aleichem’s stories about Tevye the milkman. The director has the backing of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer producer Irving Thalberg, but first he has to go to the mat with studio head Louis B. Mayer. It’s going to be a tough sell. Author Jordan R. Young is a film and show business historian whose other books include “Spike Jones Off the Record,” “The Laugh Crafters: Comedy Writing in Radio and TV's Golden Age,” “Reel Characters” and “Acting Solo:
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(On February 1, 1922, the distinguished silent-film direct...)
On February 1, 1922, the distinguished silent-film director William Desmond Taylor was shot to death in his Los Angeles bungalow by an unknown assailant. Reports of strange activities at the scene of the crime circulated soon after. When the police arrived, was the head of Paramount Studios burning a bundle of papers in the fireplace, and was a well-known actress searching the house for letters she claimed were hers? Despite a full-scale investigation, the case was never solved; for sixty years is has remained a lingering Hollywood scandal. In 1967, more than forty years after Taylor's death, the great King Vidor, whose directing credits include Northwest Passage, The Fountainhead, Duel in the Sun, and War and Peace, determined to solve the mystery, which had haunted him throughout his career, in order to make a film about it. Through his intimate knowledge of both the studios and the stars, he succeeded, where dozens of professional detectives had failed, in discovering the identity of the murderer. But because his findings were so explosive, he decided he could never go public and locked his evidence away. After Vidor's death in 1982, Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, Vidor's authorized biographer, gained access to the evidence and reconstructed the amazing story of Taylor's murder and Vidor's investigation. With a cast of suspects that includes the actress Mabel Normand, a reputed drug addict; the beautiful ingénue, Mary Miles Minter; Mary's domineering mother, Charlotte Shelby; Taylor's homosexual houseman; and Taylor's secretary, who bore an uncanny resemblance to Taylor's mysteriously elusive brother, this true crime story has all the elements of a classic murder mystery. Covered up for more than half a century, the full story can now be told in all its riveting, shocking detail.
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director producer screenwriter
Vidor was born in Galveston, Texas, where he survived the great Galveston Hurricane of 1900. His grandfather, Károly (Charles) Vidor, was a refugee of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, who settled in Galveston in the early 1850s.
As a schoolboy, Vidor was an assistant projectionist in a nickelodeon. In 1913 he directed his first film, Hurricane in Galveston, a short about the natural disaster in 1900, which Vidor had witnessed as a boy.
Two years later he went to Hollywood, where he worked as an extra, a clerk, and a scriptwriter while his wife, Florence Vidor (divorced 1925), became a well-known silent-film actress. In 1918 Vidor returned to directing and made 16 short films. The following year he helmed his first feature, The Turn in the Road, a drama that he also wrote. He subsequently directed a number of films, some of which starred his wife.
In 1922 Vidor began working at Metro, which later merged (1924) into the entity known as MGM. His breakthrough was the antiwar masterpiece The Big Parade (1925), which became MGM’s biggest moneymaker to that time and vaulted lead John Gilbert to stardom. The epic, which centres on three soldiers during World War I, offered a honest portrayal of war, with Vidor effectively conveying the gruesome nature of trench warfare; George W. Hill directed parts of the film, but his work was uncredited. The film helped establish Vidor’s reputation as a trailblazer, and many of his subsequent films were notable for reflecting his humanistic vision. Such was the case with The Crowd (1928), which was another success for the director. The urban drama, which he cowrote, starred Eleanor Boardman (Vidor’s wife in 1926–31) and James Murray as a couple struggling in a harsh and impersonal New York City. The Crowd earned Vidor the first of his five Academy Award nominations for best director. In 1928 he directed Marion Davies in a pair of notable comedies, a genre he would rarely return to. In The Patsy the actress portrayed a misfit socialite who falls in love with her sister’s boyfriend; the silent film was notable for a scene in which Davies imitates several of Hollywood’s top female stars. Show People was a thinly disguised account of Gloria Swanson’s rise to stardom.
If Vidor was disappointed, he did not let it affect his next project. The popular Not So Dumb (1930), adapted from a George S. Kaufman–Marc Connelly Broadway play, was another effervescent comedy with Davies. However, Billy the Kid (1930), with Johnny Mack Brown as the famed outlaw and Wallace Beery as Pat Garrett, the sheriff who killed him, was a box-office disappointment. Much better was the inventively naturalistic Street Scene (1931), from Elmer Rice’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play. The moving drama, which was set on a New York street, follows the lives of the various residents. The acting was especially notable, with Sylvia Sidney appearing in one of her best roles. Vidor’s success continued with The Champ (1931), an unabashedly maudlin—but wildly popular—tale of father-son love. Beery starred as a washed-up boxer who looks to make a comeback in order to keep custody of his son (Jackie Cooper). The film received an Academy Award nomination for outstanding production, and Beery won the statuette for best actor (shared with Fredric March). In addition, Vidor earned another Oscar nod for best director.
In 1932 Vidor directed Cynara, a mediocre drama about a straying husband that starred Ronald Colman and Kay Francis, and Bird of Paradise, which cast Joel McCrea as an American who visits a South Seas island and falls in love with a woman (Dolores Del Rio) who is to be sacrificed to a volcano god. Next was The Stranger’s Return (1933), which centres on an unhappily married woman who leaves New York City and moves in with her grandfather, who owns a farm in the Midwest; it is a little-remembered drama about the merits of returning to one’s bucolic roots. That theme was explored with a different slant in what became Vidor’s biggest artistic gamble, Our Daily Bread (1934), a Depression-era drama about a struggling couple who create a farm collective. An unapologetically didactic picture (heavily influenced by Sergey Eisenstein and other Soviet filmmakers) about the rewards of communal living, it was not popular with audiences, and Vidor—who had once again invested his own money to get the production off the ground—reaped a major financial loss.
Vidor then helmed one of his best-remembered efforts, Stella Dallas (1937), an adaptation of Olive Higgins Prouty’s novel. Barbara Stanwyck essayed the role of an uncouth mother who sacrifices her own happiness for that of her class-conscious daughter (Anne Shirley); both actresses were nominated for Oscars. Nearly as popular was Vidor’s 1938 adaptation of A.J. Cronin’s novel The Citadel, with Robert Donat as a once-idealistic doctor seduced by fame and wealth, despite the pleas of his wife (Rosalind Russell). Its outstanding cast also boasted Rex Harrison and Ralph Richardson, and Vidor earned his fourth Academy Award nomination for director.
Although he was not credited with any releases in 1939, Vidor had a hand in The Wizard of Oz, shooting a few of the black-and-white scenes when Victor Fleming was ill. Vidor was then entrusted with two of MGM’s most prestigious productions of 1940. Northwest Passage was a rousing adaptation of Kenneth Roberts’s best seller about Rogers’s Rangers, an 18th-century militia headed by Robert Rogers. The strong cast included Spencer Tracy, Robert Young, and Walter Brennan; W.S. Van Dyke and Jack Conway also filmed some scenes, but their work was not credited. Later that year came Comrade X, a strained romantic comedy that starred Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr; it bore more than a passing resemblance to Ernst Lubitsch’s Ninotchka, a hit for MGM a few months earlier. Northwest Passage and Comrade X would be Vidor’s last box-office successes for more than six years.
One of Vidor’s great strengths to this point had been his ability to effectively adapt popular fiction for the screen. In 1941 he helmed H.M. Pulham, Esq., from a John P. Marquand story about a wealthy Bostonian (Robert Young) who, tired of his respectable but dull life, reconnects with a former love interest (Lamarr). The bittersweet film also boasted a strong script by King and his third wife, Elizabeth Hill, but its box office was weak. Vidor then submerged himself for the next three years in writing, producing, and directing An American Romance (1944), an ambitious, expensive epic about a steelworker (Brian Donlevy) who rises beyond his class to become a leader of industry. However, it was met with indifference by wartime moviegoers. As with Our Daily Bread, Vidor’s decision to bypass bankable stars in favour of lesser-known actors likely compromised the film’s chances. In addition, MGM made further cuts to the movie, which played a role in the director’s ending his long association with the studio.
But if he had temporarily lost his way in Hollywood’s commercial mainstream, Vidor returned with one of the decade’s most controversial projects, David O. Selznick’s epic melodrama Duel in the Sun (1946). Selznick was desperate to re-create the national excitement that Gone with the Wind (1939) had enjoyed, and he also wanted a spectacular showcase for Jennifer Jones, his future wife. The western was begun in 1944 and completed 20 months later, though Vidor quit two days before the final wrap because of tensions with Selznick, who continually revised the script and hired a number of directors to reshoot Vidor’s work; a partial list included Josef von Sternberg, William Dieterle, and William Cameron Menzies. Jones had her limitations as an actress, but she was more than adequate as the tempestuous Pearl, who makes life miserable both for herself and for the two brothers (Joseph Cotten and Gregory Peck) who desire her. A monument to Selznick’s ego and censored in several major cities, Duel in the Sun was still one of the year’s biggest hits.
Vidor’s decline was evidenced by the next projects he undertook. Lightning Strikes Twice (1951), a murder melodrama with Ruth Roman and Richard Todd, and Japanese War Bride (1952) were the sort of near B-films that would have been inconceivable for someone of his stature a decade earlier. Vidor had more success with Ruby Gentry (1952), a melodrama that starred Jones as a Southern vixen who marries a wealthy man (Karl Malden) but has an eye for a former boyfriend (Charlton Heston). Vidor then waited three years for his next feature film, which turned out to be the modest (although enjoyable) Kirk Douglas western Man Without a Star (1955).
Perhaps tired of expending his efforts on such lightweight fodder, Vidor signed on to direct nothing less than one of the world’s great works of literature. But his three-and-a-half-hour version of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace failed to find an audience when it was released in 1956, a victim of uneven acting—although Audrey Hepburn gave a notable performance, a visibly uncomfortable Fonda was miscast—and eight screenwriters (one of whom was Vidor). Even so, Vidor received an Academy Award nomination for best direction, although the battle scenes, arguably the film’s best parts, were actually directed by Mario Soldati.
Vidor’s last feature was Solomon and Sheba (1959), an entry in the biblical-epic genre that was then popular. Tyrone Power died of a heart attack during filming and was replaced by Yul Brynner, who refilmed the extant footage. The result was quite acceptable, but the film was overshadowed by Ben-Hur (1959). Vidor subsequently retired from directing, though he later taught. In 1979 he was given an honorary Oscar for “his incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator.” Vidor’s autobiography, A Tree Is a Tree, was published in 1953.
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(1986 Hardback edition. Dust jacket is missing. Gift quali...)
Vidor was married three times:
Florence Arto (m. 1915–1924)
Suzanne (1918–2003) (Florence later married Jascha Heifetz, who adopted Suzanne);
Eleanor Boardman (m. 1926–1931)
Antonia (1927–2012)
Belinda (born 1930)
Elizabeth Hill (m. 1932–1978)