King Vidor

Born in Galveston, TX, King Vidor was the son of a wealthy lumber manufacturer. He became interested in movies -- then a brand new form of entertainment -- as a young boy, and later took a job as a ticket-taker at the local theater, where he subsequently became a fill-in projectionist. Vidor took this opportunity to watch the same movies over and over, learning from what he saw and deciding that he could do as good a job as most of the people whose films were up on the screen. After working as an amateur photographer, he began shooting newsreel material of events in his area of Texas and selling it to newsreel producers. It was after his marriage to the former Florence Arto in 1915 that he decided to head out to the then newly formed film colony in Hollywood. The couple entered the motion-picture business, but Florence Vidor was the far more successful of the two at first, starting out as a bit player and moving up to supporting roles in films such as A Tale of Two Cities (1917) and into starring roles in the late teens and 1920s. King Vidor, by contrast, worked as an extra and clerk while writing scripts in his spare time, which he was mostly unsuccessful at selling. In 1918, he moved into the director's chair at Universal, making two-reel shorts, and in 1919 he moved up to directing features with The Turn in the Road, which was based on his own screenplay. The Vidors soon began working together under the aegis of his own production unit, called Vidor Village, making movies from his screenplays with Florence Vidor starring in them, including a 1923 production of Alice Adams. By that time, however, their marriage was in trouble and they divorced a year later. Vidor joined the newly organized MGM, where his real reputation was made, on pictures such as the antiwar drama The Big Parade (1925), a silent version of La Boheme (1926) starring Lillian Gish and John Gilbert, the costume drama Bardelys the Magnificent (1926), starring Gilbert and Eleanor Boardman (who became Vidor's second wife), and The Crowd (1928). The latter, a story (written by Vidor) of one anonymous clerk's drudge-filled life, displayed a remarkably sophisticated social conscience as well as an innovative directorial technique that placed it at the pinnacle of silent-era cinema. Vidor moved with ease into the sound era, largely because he was one of the few silent directors who didn't let the new medium intimidate him -- rather, he used sound to enhance his visual technique, which was unimpaired; his 1929 musical Hallelujah! worked better than most musicals of the era simply because Vidor refused to let the presence of sound (and sound-recording equipment) restrict the mobility of his camera or the editing of his shots. He was also one of the bolder directors of the period in his willingness to work in new formats and media, such as his 1930 Billy the Kid starring Johnny Mack Brown and Wallace Beery, which was shot in 70 mm. His output in 1931 included Street Scene, an adaptation of Elmer Rice's play that utilized an extraordinary block-long tenement set; and The Champ, starring Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper, one of the most popular melodramas of its era. Vidor also found time as a writer and producer to return to the social conscience themes displayed in The Crowd, in the form of Our Daily Bread (1934), a story of a young farm couple trying to cope with the effects of the Great Depression; the film is widely celebrated today for its stylistic eloquence. Vidor was one of the few filmmakers of his era who could make such "message" pictures and present their content gracefully. Vidor enjoyed considerable box-office success during the remainder of the 1930s, on movies such as Stella Dallas (1937) and The Citadel (1938), and even when his movies weren't entirely successful, as in the case of The Wedding Night (1935), they were always interesting to watch, and almost every Vidor movie contained at least one visually dazzling sequence; indeed, one of the complaints