The Man and The Crowd (1928) Photography, Film, and Fate
“Make films about the people, they said”, Jean-Luc Godard once quipped, “but The Crowd had already been made, so why remake it?” Gideon Leek rewatches King Vidor’s classic, in which a young man with big dreams moves to New York City and becomes an identical cog who learns to love the machine of modernity.
In an 1861 lecture before the Tremont Temple in Boston, the American abolitionist Frederick Douglass spoke on the democratic potential of the daguerreotype. “Men of all conditions may see themselves as others see them. What was once the exclusive luxury of the rich and great is now within reach of all. The humblest servant girl, whose income is but a few shillings per week, may now possess a more perfect likeness of herself than noble ladies and even royalty, with all its precious treasures, could purchase fifty years ago.”1 A more half-empty perspective was expressed by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. “With the daguerreotype everyone will be able to have their portrait taken—formerly it was only the prominent; and at the same time everything is being done to make us all look exactly the same—so that we shall only need one portrait.”2 Douglass hoped photography would make everyone equal; Kierkegaard worried it would make everyone the same. In one of the key late silent films, King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928), it is Kierkegaard’s prophecy that comes true — if not for the daguerreotype, then for its technological successor, the motion picture.3
Vidor’s 1928 film tells the story of Johnny Sims, born on the Fourth of July at the dawn of a new century. The Crowd is a reflection on the United States in the 1920s, the America of Warren G. Harding’s “return to normalcy” in the wake of World War I and the Spanish Flu. Sims is a man who is meant to be America — its hopes, its dreams, its destiny. At twelve, he “recited poetry, played the piano and sang in a choir” (the intertitle notes: “So did Lincoln and Washington”). About this chosen son of a small town, his father swears, “There is a little man the world is going to hear from.” Johnny held these great expectations close, saying, in response to his schoolmates’ more concrete dreams (preacher, cowboy): “My daddy says I’m going to be something big.”
