The Crowd (1928)

Most of us aren’t destined for greatness. Yet many of us have been told we’ll do tremendous things, one day. Our loved ones see themselves in us, and pull for us, and if confidence proves our only barrier to success, it won’t be due to their efforts. They’re our cheerleaders.

But really, those who stand out from the population will only do so because that population—that crowd—is the majority. A uniform crush of mediocre men and women, far more alike than not. What are the odds you’re special? Your loved ones scoff at ‘odds,’ but the crowd needs proof. Demands proof.

The Crowd, King Vidor’s masterful piece of silent cynicism, doesn’t believe in you, either. It demolishes its own hero, Johnny Sims, in its first ten minutes. Eight-year-old Johnny sits on a fence rail with his friends, describing his future. He doesn’t know what his future will hold—only that it will be bright. His Dad said so. That’s when the children notice an ambulance arriving at Johnny’s house. Dad is about to die.

Vidor now places his camera at the top of the staircase in Johnny’s home, pointing downward. At the foot of the stairs is a cluster of family and friends. Johnny, alone among them, begins climbing the stairs, growing larger in the frame as he ascends. The look on his face is the thing: only confusion, bewilderment. He’s above the crowd, but he’s lost. And so shall his life be defined.

The Crowd is one of the greatest silent films. It’s also one of the greatest films, period, but the first bit of hyperbole is best, because The Crowd’s silence is key to its power. Other late silents, starring the Brooks’s and Garbo’s, are acted in a manner so close to sound pictures that they seem to lack nothing but the murmurs. The Crowd, however, draws from its roots. It takes full advantage of the silent cinema’s ability to draw broad character-types, unreliant on names, perhaps, but imbued with humanity by the gifted pantomime artists who play them. And so we have Johnny (James Murray), the charming, dreaming ne’er do well, and his spirited, suffering wife, Mary (Eleanor Boardman); a supportive pragmatist of the sort ne’er do wells rely upon to keep eating.

What’s interesting is that John and Mary know they’re types. They marry quickly (partly from lust, since both are beautiful), go to Niagara Falls for their honeymoon and eventually have kids, as though fulfilling the demands of a template. While Mary keeps house, Johnny wins bread by writing numbers down one side of a ledger with a fountain pen, all day long. His desk is one of about a hundred, arranged in straight rows over the floor of a huge room in a huge office building in huge New York City. Johnny does hate his job, though; he amuses himself by writing ad slogans he hopes will win him a prize. He does this on company time. At home, Mary tends to mundane matters, and waits.

Months become years. The marriage deteriorates. Mary and Johnny fight and blame and measure their strength in terms of their capacity to overlook past problems. And Mary, for whom we have far more sympathy, grows acidic and blunt. Yet whenever things go well, as they occasionally do, there’s Mary, dancing a dim-witted jig right alongside her husband. Mary, like Johnny, is capable of huge emotional shifts the moment her misery is lifted. Perhaps this is not because either of them is truly joyful, but because each recognizes that immense joy is what they ought to feel at that moment? Mary, like Johnny, sees happy couples in magazines every day and believes they can be like them. The more they seem to be, the happier they act. But Johnny and Mary shift between joy and sorrow so rapidly that all their dreams and goals seem false to us.


It’s Boardman’s performance that anchors the film. It is her Mary who must develop from a snarky gum-chewer to a worn-out but wiser wife by the end of The Crowd. Boardman’s finest moment comes when she first threatens to leave Johnny. It is he who then walks out the door—on his way to work—and she is alone. Only now do we find out she is pregnant—a revelation that comes not from anything she says so much as a sudden look of horror on her face when she realizes she will have to raise that baby without a father. When she calls Johnny back, and tells him the news, both husband and wife are all smiles. Johnny’s still a bitter, lazy prick, but now he’s a Dad, too.

The couple have far crueller days ahead of them. But let’s move ahead to the ending. This set of scenes comprise, alongside the field of blowing barley in Yasujiro Ozu’s Early Summer (1951), the greatest closing moment I’ve ever witnessed on-screen. It is hard to describe without revealing too much of what went before. It’s enough to say that Johnny is humiliated on a deep, deep level—so deeply that he cannot detect it. And so profoundly is he degraded that he laughs his head off at someone exactly like himself. That is, someone exactly like everybody else.

Note: King Vidor prefigures his famous first shot of Johnny’s desk with shots of the building’s exterior, itself peppered with geometric rows of windows. The sequence has been well-copied, most famously by Billy Wilder in his 1960 classic, The Apartment (1960).

Where to find The Crowd:
Any ideas, readers? The Crowd is notoriously hard to find on video, I’ve never seen it on DVD; in fact, this blog entry is based on a live screening put on by Cinematheque Ontario.