King Vidor

Beginning in 1915, Vidor served as screenwriter and director on a series of shorts about the rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents by social reformer Judge Willis Brown. Written and produced by Brown, Vidor filmed ten of the 20-film series, a project in which Vidor declared he had “deeply believed”. A single reel from Bud’s Recruit is known to survive, the earliest extant footage from Vidor's film career..[31][32]

In 1918, at the age of 24, Vidor directed his first Hollywood feature, The Turn in the Road, a film presentation of a Christian Science evangelical tract sponsored by a group of doctors and dentists affiliated as the independent Brentwood Film Corporation. King Vidor recalls his first foray into Hollywood film-making:

I wrote a script [The Turn in the Road] and sent it around... and nine doctors put up $1,000 each... and it was a success. That was the beginning. I didn't have time to go to college.[33]

Vidor would make three more films for the Brentwood Corporation, all of which featured as yet unknown comedienne Zasu Pitts, who the director had discovered on a Hollywood streetcar. Better Times, The Other Half, and Poor Relations, all completed in 1919, also featured future film director David Butler (director) and starring Vidor's then wife Florence Arto Vidor (married in 1915), a rising actor in Hollywood pictures Vidor ended his association with the Brentwood group in 1920.[34]

King Vidor next embarked on a major project in collaboration with a major New York-based film exhibitor First National. In a bid to compete with the increasingly dominant Hollywood studios, First National advanced Vidor funding to build a small film production facility in Santa Monica, California dubbed Vidor Village. King Vidor issued a founding statement entitled “Creed and Pledge” that set forth moral anodynes for film-making, inspired by his Christian Science religious faith:[35][36]

I believe in the motion picture that carries a message to humanity.

I believe in the picture that will help humanity to free itself from the shackles of fear and suffering that have so long bound it in chains.

I will not knowingly produce a picture that contains anything that i do not believe to be absolutely true to human nature, anything that could injure anyone or anything unclean in thought or action.

Nor will I deliberately portray anything to cause fright, suggest fear, glorify mischief, condone cruelty or extenuate malice.

I will never picture evil or wrong, except to prove the fallacy of its line.

So long as I direct pictures, I will make only those founded on the principles of right, and I will endeavor to draw upon the inexhaustible source of good for my stories, my guidance and my inspiration.[37]

His manifesto” was carried in Variety magazine's January 1920 issue.[38]

The first production from Vidor Village was his The Jack Knife Man (1920), a bleak and bitter story of an orphaned boy raised by an impoverished yet kindly hermit, performed by former stage actor Fred Turner. Through entrepreneurial efforts he achieved financial success and is ultimately rewarded with the affection of a gentlewoman, played by Florence Vidor. Redolent with the precepts of the “Creed and Pledge”, the films ``relentless realism” did not please the executives at First National. They demanded entertainment that would garner a mass share of box-office receipts so as to fill their theaters. [39]

As film critic and biographer John Baxter observed “[t]his experience had a fundamental effect on Vidor's attitude toward film-making.” Under pressure “as the studio system began to harden into place”, the 26-year-old Vidor began to craft his films to conform to prevailing standards of the period. His 1920 film. The Family Honor exemplifies this shift towards romantic comedies and away from the ideals that had informed The Jack Knife Man.[40]

Vidor's The Sky Pilot (1921) was a big-budget Western-Comedy shot on location in the high Sierra Nevada of California. John Bowers stars as the intrepid preacher and Colleen Moore (soon to be famous as the quintessential “flapper”) as the girl he loves and rescues from a deadly cattle stampede. The natural landscapes serve as an essential dramatic component in the film, as they would in subsequent Vidor movies. The cost overruns cut into First National profits, and they declined to fund any further Vidor projects. [41]

Love Never Dies (1921) is a “rural love story” with a spectacular disaster scene depicting a locomotive and box cars derailing and plunging into a river below. The dramatic presentation of rivers served as a standard motif in Vidor films. Impressed, producer Thomas H. Ince helped to finance the picture.[42]

In 1922, Vidor produced and directed films that served as vehicles for his spouse, Florence Vidor, notable only for their “artificiality”. These works conformed to the comedies of manners and romantic melodramas that were typical of his contemporary, Cecil B. DeMille at Famous Players-Lasky studios. Later, Vidor admitted to being overawed by DeMille's talents. Florence Vidor, in her later career, frequently starred in DeMille productions.[43]

Vidor's next picture, The Conquering Woman, was an unabashed imitation of DeMille's outstanding drama Male and Female (1919). Vidor followed up with Woman, Wake Up and The Real Adventure (both 1922) and each depicting a female struggling successfully to assert herself in a male dominated world As such, these may be considered as early examples of feminist-oriented cinema, but with entirely conventional endings. [44][45]

By the early 1920s, Florence Vidor had emerged as a major film star in her own right and wished to pursue her career independent of her spouse. The couple divorced in 1926, and shortly thereafter Florence married violinist Jascha Heifetz Vidor would soon marry model and future film actress Eleanor Boardman. [46]

In 1921, Vidor would direct actress Colleen Moore in The Sky Pilot and they would begin a three-year romance that became “a Hollywood legend”.[47]

Vidor Village went bankrupt in 1922. Vidor, now without a studio, offered his services to the top executives in the film industry.[48]

Vidor's yeoman service to Louis B. Mayer secured him entréeinto Goldwyn Pictures in 1923, a holding soon to be amalgamated with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Samuel “Sam” Goldwyn and other film producers of the early 1920s, favored “literary” texts as the basis for movie screenplays. Parvenu-rich movie executives wished to provide a patina of class or “tone” to an industry often regarded as vulgar and cash-driven. [51]

Vidor was content to adapt these “prestigious properties” so securing his reputation as a reliable studio asset.[52] His work during this period did not rise to the level of his later work, but a few films stand out. Wild Oranges (1924), from a story by Joseph Hergesheimer, is notable as a harbinger of his best work in the sound era. The natural features of the coastal regions of Georgia are endowed with sinister and homicidal potential, where a fugitive arrives to terrorize rural residents. As such, the film exhibits Vidor's trademark use of nature to symbolize aspects of the human conflict. [53]

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's cast of rising movie stars included soon-to-be matinee idol John “Jack” Gilbert. Vidor directed him in His Hour (1924), based on a Elinor Glyn “febrile romance”, and is one of the few films from Vidor's output of that period to survive. Gilbert, as the Russian nobleman Prince Gritzko, was so ardently performed as co-star Aileen Pringle’s seducer that one scene was deleted. [54]

Vidor's typically “routine” movies of this period include Wine of Youth (1924) and Proud Flesh (1925) emphasize the “time-honored virtues” of familial and matrimonial loyalty, even among the liberated Jazz Age flappers.[55] King Vidor's tenure as a studio stringer was at an end. His next feature would transform his career and have a resounding impact on the late silent film era: The Big Parade.[56][57]

Three years later he made The Big Parade, among the most acclaimed war films of the silent era, and a tremendous commercial success. [58] The Big Parade established Vidor as one of MGM's top studio directors for the next decade. Producer Irving Thalberg arranged for Vidor to film two more Gilbert vehicles: La Bohème and Bardelys the Magnificent, both released in 1926. In La Bohème, a film of “great and enduring merit”, leading lady Lillian Gish exerted considerable control over the film's production. Bardelys the Magnificent, a picaresque swashbuckler mimicked the films of Douglas Fairbanks. Vidor would spoof the movie on his own Show People (1928) with comedienne Marion Davies. [59]

Vidor's next film would be a startling departure from romantic entertainment to an exposure of the “cruel deception of the American dream”.[60]

In the late 1920s European films, especially from German directors, exerted a strong influence on filmmakers internationally. Vidor's The Crowd resonates with these populist films, a “pitiless study” of a young working man's descent into isolation and loss of morale who is ultimately crushed by the urban “assembly line”, while his wife struggles to maintain some order in the relationship. Though the most uncharacteristic of Vidor's pictures, it was his personal favorite: the picture, he said “came out of my guts.”

Employing relatively unknown actors, the film had modest box office success, but was widely praised by critics. In 1928, Vidor received an Oscar nomination, and his first for Best Director. M-G-M executives, who had been content to allow Vidor an “experimental” film found that bleak social outlook of The Crowd troubling - reflected in their one-year releasing the film. The Crowd has since been recognized as one of the “masterpieces" of the late silent era.[61][62]

Cosmopolitan Pictures, a subsidiary of M-G-M studios and owned by influential newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, insisted that Vidor direct Marion Davis - Randolph's longtime mistress - in his sponsored films, to which Vidor acquiesced. Though not identified as a director of comedies, Vidor filmed three “screwballs” that revealed Davies comedic talents with her “drive-you-to-distraction persona”. The Patsy a comedy of manners, brought Marie Dressler and Dell Henderson, veterans of Mack Sennett slapstick era out of retirement to play Davies’ farcical upper-class parents. Davies performs a number of amusing celebrity imitations she was known for at social gatherings at Hearst's San Simeon estate, including Gloria Swanson, Lillian Gish, Pola Negri and Mae Murray. [63] The scenario for Show People (1928) was inspired by the glamorous Gloria Swanson, who began her film career in slapstick. Davis’ character Peggy Pepper, a mere comic, is elevated to the high-style star Patricia Pepoire. Vidor spoofs his own recently completed Bardelys the Magnificent (1926), an over-the-top swashbuckling costume drama featuring romantic icon John Gilbert. Some of the best-known film stars of the silent era appeared in cameos, as well as Vidor himself. Show People remains the enduring picture of the Vidor-Davies collaborations. [64]

Vidor's third and final film with Davies was his second sound film (after Hallelujah (1929)): Not So Dumb (1930). Adapted from the 1921 Broadway comedy Dulcy by George S. Kaufman, the limitations of early sound, despite recent innovations, interfered with the continuity of Davies’ performance that had enlivened her earlier silent comedies with Vidor.[65]

In early 1928, Vidor and his spouse Eleanor Boardman were visiting France in the company of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. There Vidor mixed with literary ex-patriots, among them James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. Vidor was shaken by news that US film studios and theaters were converting to sound technology and he returned quickly to Hollywood, concerned about the impact on silent cinema. [66] Adjusting to the advent of sound, Vidor enthusiastically embarked upon his long-desired project of making picture about rural black American life incorporating a musical soundtrack. He quickly completed writing the scenario for Hallelujah and began recruiting an all African-American cast. [67]

M-G-M studios had not yet decided which emerging sound technology they would invest in, Vitaphone or Movitone, a decision that would determine what camera system Vidor would use. Vidor circumvented the dilemma by appealing directly to President of Lowe’s Inc. Nicholas Schenck, who authorized Vidor to begin shooting outdoor location sequences without sound and with the caveat that Vidor waive his $100,000 salary. [68]

As Vidor's first sound film, Hallelujah (1929) combines a dramatic rural tragedy with a documentary-like depiction of black agrarian community of sharecroppers in the South. Daniel L. Haynes as Zeke, Nina Mae McKinney as Chick and William Fontaine as Hot Shot developed a love-triangle that leads a revenge murder. A quasi-musical, Vidor's innovative integration of sound into the scenes, including jazz and gospel adds immensely to the cinematic effect.[69]

Vidor, a third-generation Texan, encountered black workers employed at his father's sawmills when he was child and there he became familiar with their spirituals. As an adult, he was not not immune to the racial prejudices common among whites in the South of the 1920s. His paternalistic claim to know the character of “real negro” is reflected in his portrayal of some rural black characters as “childishly simple, lecherously promiscuous, fanatically superstitious, and shiftless”. Vidor, nonetheless, avoids reducing his characters to Uncle Tom stereotypes and his treatment bears no resemblance to the overt racism in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915).[70]

The black sharecroppers resemble more the poor white agrarian entrepreneurs Vidor praised in his 1934 Our Daily Bread, emphasizing the class, rather than race, of his subjects. The film emerges as a human tragedy in which elemental forces of sexual desire and revenge contrast with family affection and community solidarity and redemption.[71]

Hallelujah enjoyed an overwhelmingly positive response in the United States and internationally, praising Vidor's stature as a film artist and as a humane social commentator. Vidor was nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards of 1929.[72][73]

Filmed just before passage of the Production Code of 1933, Vidor's Billy the Kid is free of the fixed moral dualities that came to typify subsequent Good Guy vs. Bad Guy Westerns in Hollywood. Starring former football champion Johnny Mack Brown as Billy and Wallace Beery as his nemesis Sheriff Pat Garrett, the protagonists display a gratuitous violence that anticipates Vidor's 1946 masterpiece Duel in the Sun (1946). Homicidal behavior resonates with the brutal and deadly desert landscape, Hemingwayesque in its brevity and realism. Studio executives were concerned that the excessive violence would alienate audiences, though the Prohibition Era in the United States was saturated with news of the gangster-related killings. [74]

Shot partially in the new 70 mm Grandeur system, the film was conceived by producers to be an epic, but few cinemas were equipped to handle the new wide-screen technology. The film did poorly at the box-office. [75][76][77][78]

Upon his return to M-G-M after his sojourn to complete Street Scene for Samuel Goldwyn, Vidor embarked on his second picture starring actor Wallace Beery, this time with child actor Jackie Cooper in The Champ (1931 film). Based on a story by Francis Marion, Vidor adapts a standard plot about a socially and economically impaired parent who relinquishes a child to insure his/her escape squalid conditions to achieve an upwardly mobile future. The film is a descendant of director Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), as well as Vidor's own early silent shorts for Judge Willis Brown. Vidor owed M-G-M a more conventional and “fool-proof” production after executives allowed him to make the more experimental Street Scene in 1931. The Champ would prove to be a successful vehicle for Berry and propel him to top-rank among M-G-M movie stars.[79]

After finishing the sentimental vehicle starring Wallace Berry, in The Champ, Vidor was loaned to Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) to make a “South Seas” romance for producer David Selznick filmed in the US territory of Hawaii. Starring Dolores del Río and Joel McCrea, the tropical location and mixed-race love theme in Bird of Paradise included nudity and sexual eroticism.[80]

During production Vidor began an affair with script assistant Elizabeth Hill that led to a series of highly productive screenplay collaborations and their marriage in 1937. Vidor divorced his wife, actress Eleanor Boardman shortly after Bird of Paradise was completed.[81][82]

The Stranger Returns (1933) and Our Daily Bread (1934) are Depression era films that present protagonists who flee the social and economic perils of urban America, plagued by high unemployment and labor unrest to seek a lost rural identity or make a new start in the agrarian countryside. Vidor's expressed enthusiasm for the New Deal and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s exhortation in his first inaugural in 1933 for a shift of labor from industry to agriculture.[83]

In The Stranger Returns, a “city girl” Miriam Hopkins abandons her life in a great metropolis to visit her grandfather (Lionel Barrymore) in Iowa, the aging patriarch of a working farm. Her arrival upsets the schemes of parasitic relatives to seize the property in anticipation of Grandpa Storr's passing. The scenario presents the farm as “bountiful”, even in the midst of the Dust Bowl where banks seized tens-of-thousands of independent family farms in the Mid-West and drove millions into low wage seasonal agricultural labor.[84] The picture is a paean to family “blood” ties and rural generational continuity, manifested in the granddaughter's commitment (though raised in New York City) to inherit the family farm and honor its agrarian heritage.[85]

Vidor continued his “back to the land” theme in his 1934 Our Daily Bread. The picture is the second film of a trilogy he referred to as “War, Wheat and Steel”. (His 1925 film The Big Parade was “war” and his 1944 An American Romance was “steel”.) Our Daily Bread - “wheat” - is a sequel to his silent masterpiece The Crowd (1928).[86][87]

Our Daily Bread is a deeply personal and politically controversial work that Vidor financed himself when M-G-M executives declined to back the production. M-G-M was uncomfortable with its characterization of big business, and particularity banking institutions, as corrupt. [88] A struggling Depression-era couple from the city inherit a derelict farm. In an effort to make it a productive enterprise they establish a cooperative in alliance with unemployed locals who posses various talents and commitments. The film raises questions as to the legitimacy of the American system of democracy and to government imposed socialism. [89]

The picture garnered a mixed response among social and film critics, some regarding it as a socialistic condemnation of capitalism and others as tending towards fascism - a measure of Vidor's own ambivalence in organizing his social outlook artistically.[90][91]

Street Scene (1931), Cynera (1932), The Wedding Night (1935), Stella Dallas (1937)

During the 1930s Vidor, though under contract to M-G-M studios, made four films under loan-out to independent producer Samuel Goldwyn, formerly with the Goldwyn studios that had amalgamated with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1924.. Goldwyn's insistence on fidelity to the prestigious literary material he had purchased for screen adaptations imposed cinematic restraints on his film directors, including Vidor. The first of their collaborations since the silent era was Street Scene (1931)[92]

The adoption of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Elmer Rice depicts a social microcosm in a major American metropolis and its social inequalities. The cinematic limitations imposed by a single set restricted to a New York City block of tenements building and its ethnically diverse inhabitants presented Vidor with unique technical challenges. He and cinematographer George Barnes countered and complemented these structural restrictions by using a roving camera mounted on cranes, an innovation made possible by recent developments in early sound technology. [93]

The excellent cast, drawn largely from the Broadway production, contributed to the critical success of the film, as did the huge publicity campaign engineered by Goldwyn. Street Scene's immense box-office profits belied the financial and economic crisis of the early Depression years, when movie studios feared bankruptcy.[94]

Cynara, a romantic melodrama of a brief, yet tragic affair between a British barrister and a shopgirl, was Vidor's second sound collaboration with Goldwyn. Starring two of Hollywood's biggest stars of the period, Ronald Colman and Kay Francis, the story by Francis Marion is a cautionary tale concerning upper- and lower-class sexual infidelities set in England. Framed, as in the play and novel, in a series of flashbacks told by the married barrister Warlock (Colman), the story ends in honorable redemption for the barrister and death for his mistress. Vidor was able to inject some “pure cinema” into a picture that was otherwise a “dialogue-heavy” talkie: “Colman [in London] tears up a piece of paper and throws the pieces out a window, where they fly into the air. Vidor cuts to St. Mark's Square in Venice (where Francis, his spouse is vacationing), with pigeons flying into the air...”[95]

In his third collaboration with Goldwyn, Vidor was tasked with salvaging the producer's huge investment in Soviet-trained Russian actress Anna Sten. Goldwyn's effort to elevate Sten to the stature of Dietrich or Garbo had thus far failed despite his relentless promotion when Vidor began directing her in The Wedding Night (1935).[96]

A tale of a doomed affair between a married New Yorker (Gary Cooper) (whose character Vidor based on novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald) and a farm girl (Sten) from an old-world Polish family, Vidor provided thoughtful direction to Cooper and Sten while cinematographer Gregg Toland’s devised effective lighting and photography. Despite good reviews the picture did not establish Sten as a star among movie-goers and she remained “Goldwyn's Folly”.[97]

In 1937 Vidor made his final and most profitable picture with Samuel Goldwyn: Stella Dallas. A remake of Goldwyn's most successful silent movie, the 1925 Stella Dallas, also an adaption of Olive Higgins Prouty's popular novel. Barbara Stanwyck stars as the eponymous “martyr of motherhood” in the sound re-make. Vidor analyzed director Henry King’s handling of his silent production and incorporated or modified some of its filmic structure and staging. Stanwyck's performance, reportedly without undue oversight by Vidor, is outstanding, benefited by her selective vetting of Belle Bennett’s famous portrayal. Vidor contributed to defining Stanwyck's role substantially in the final cut, providing a sharper focus on her character and delivering one of the great tear-jerkers in film history. [98]

Despite the success of the film it would be his last with Goldwyn, as Vidor had tired of the producers outbursts on the set. Vidor emphatically declined to work with the “mercurial” producer again.[99]

In 1967, Vidor researched the unsolved 1922 murder of fellow director William Desmond Taylor for a possible screenplay. Vidor never published or wrote of this research during his lifetime, but biographer Sidney D. Kirkpatrick posthumously examined Vidor's notes. He alleged, in his 1986 book A Cast of Killers, that Vidor had solved the sensational crime but kept his conclusions private to protect individuals still living at the time. The widely cited newsletter Taylorology later noted over 100 factual errors in A Cast of Killers and strongly disputes Kirkpatrick's conclusions, but credits the book with renewing popular interest in the crime.

Holiday greetings from the Vidors, December 25, 1920

Vidor was married three times:

1. Florence Arto (m. 1915–1924)

   • (later married Jascha Heifetz)

   • Suzanne (1918–2003)

   • (adopted by Jascha Heifetz)

2. Eleanor Boardman (m. 1926–1931)
   • Antonia (1927–2012)
   • Belinda (born 1930)
3. Elizabeth Hill (m. 1932–1978)

At the 11th Moscow International Film Festival in 1979, he was awarded with the Honorable Prize for the contribution to cinema.[105] In 2020, Vidor was honored with a retrospective at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, showcasing more than 30 of his films.[106][107]