
Audio By Carbonatix
King Vidor’s great silent classic The Crowd (1928) holds up astonishingly well 75 years after it first played in theaters, and knowledgeable film lovers leap at any opportunity to see it — especially if that opportunity comes complete with live piano accompaniment, as in days of yore. The Crowd will screen Friday night, January 2, in the Colorado Chautauqua Silent Film Series, with fluent pianist Hank Troy interpreting every mood at the keyboard.
Like many of Vidor’s early films — including The Big Parade (1925), one of the first to deal realistically with World War I, and Our Daily Bread (1934), a startling look at Depression-era poverty and pluck — The Crowd is as much an act of social conscience as it is an entertainment. In this carefully told tale of one “little man” (James Murray) and his wife (Eleanor Boardman) caught up in the anonymity and the coldness of big-city life, Vidor captured the deprivations that lay behind the Roaring Twenties. We see the man’s shabby apartment, his anxious wait in a hospital corridor for the birth of his son, his dashed hopes, the indifference of the urban masses to the death of the son. Vidor would go on to become one of Hollywood’s most successful directors of the sound era, with commercial hits such as Stella Dallas (1937), Duel in the Sun (1947) and The Fountainhead (1949), but many believe The Crowd remains his masterpiece. It shows at 7 p.m. Friday at Chautauqua, 900 Baseline Road in Boulder. For information, call 303-442-3282 or go to www.chautauqua.com.