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A Man and the Crowd (1928)
“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.
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.” A more half-empty perspective was expressed by the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Boy matures into man with the drop of a title card: “When Johnny was twenty-one he became one of the seven million who believe New York depends on them.” We see Sims idealistic and smiling, proudly resting his monogrammed luggage on a ferry railing, gazing fondly at the city. And I bet his father thought he would be President!” Later, after a great deal of melodrama — alcohol, affairs, the death of a child — an abject, jobless Sims also finds gainful employment as a sandwich board clown, wearing a sign that reads: “I am always happy because I eat at Schneider’s Grill”.
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