The Big Screen (17 page)

As the Depression set in, it was clear that the studios were making their money from increasingly impoverished people by selling them a dream of infinite success and remote happiness. They could tell the world and themselves that the movies preached the gospel that anyone could make it in America, and Mayer was generous with uplifting stories of his own journey. But that message was akin to the promotion that would come out of the Las Vegas casinos twenty years and more later: anyone can win. Exactly right, but only with the corollary that nearly everyone will lose. Except the house.

So it's instructive to clarify the creative character of the house, and to spell out the ways in which it defied or excluded the thing we call art. An example of this is the relationship between M-G-M and Thalberg and the director King Vidor, who is one of the most appealing talents in American film from the 1920s through to the 1950s, and someone interested in the issues that held a mass medium and a modern society together.

Vidor—he was actually named King—was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1894. His family was of Hungarian descent, but his father was a successful cotton factor in Galveston. So King was in the city on September 8, 1900, when winds of 135 miles per hour struck. About eight thousand people died (four times the number lost to Katrina), and the six-year-old King saw how “All the wooden structures of the town were flattened. The streets were piled high with dead people, and I took the first tugboat out. On the boat I went up into the bow and saw that the bay was filled with dead bodies, horses, animals, people, everything.”

Vidor was a child of the generation excited by the chance to show such action in moving pictures to the millions. That excitement may never have been the same again as film became more commonplace. Everything in Vidor's life and work clings to the passion of that novelty. His father suggested a business career. But King was led on by having a camera and by working in a Galveston theater, watching the public watch the screen. He even restaged the Galveston hurricane in a “documentary,” and trusted that it looked the way he remembered.

He went to Los Angeles in 1916 and started directing pictures. He was married to a girl from Texas, Florence, and she became a star for a few years. Anyone could win! He went to Metro, and when it became a part of M-G-M, he found himself working with Thalberg (five years his junior). The legend of the factory system is that Thalberg intended to suppress directorial vanity—he had just humbled Erich von Stroheim over
Greed
. But Vidor was so much more amiable or American, or Irving felt more relaxed with him.

Far from suppressed, Vidor was encouraged:

Is that the search for art speaking, or the need for personal glory?

Vidor wrote that in 1953, when the empire of movies was fading and when directors were not much esteemed in America. But Thalberg in 1925 was aroused by his hopes. Did Vidor have particular ideas? he asked.

“I said I had. I would like to make a film about any one of three subjects: steel, wheat, or war.” Can you guess the one Irving picked?

This was the origin of
The Big Parade
, the film that established its star, John Gilbert; that vaulted Vidor from workman director to leading asset; and that secured Thalberg's reputation as a wizard.
The Big Parade
would be about a wealthy kid turned doughboy in France for the Great War, a guy who meets an adorable French girl (played by Renée Adorée). It's not that war is neglected. There are large troop movements plus combat, and good buddies who are killed. But the problem of the war is, above all, that it becomes an obstacle to the romance it has made possible.

Thalberg preferred war to wheat or steel because its melodramatic potential was so much greater—and because broken hearts were more palatable than shattered bodies or destroyed societies. Movie had come into its own in the time of the Great War, but only by reappraising and taming its true power and its historical lessons. For the masses the light shone on war was arousing and reassuring. No one in Hollywood believed they were involved in propaganda or advertising, yet the vast popular entertainment hardly dared move ahead without the idea of keeping the viewers happy and habituated enough to come back next week.

With Thalberg's enthusiasm,
The Big Parade
cost over $300,000. At one point, Vidor had dreamed of an epic panorama filmed on a long, straight road. A second unit shot it, and all they could find was a crooked road. It was an expensive scene—with troops, trucks, and aircraft—but when Thalberg looked at the footage, he told Vidor to go back and find a straight road, shoot it again, and get what looks “right.”

The finished film opened in 1925, and its official profit was over $3 million. Vidor believed it grossed $15 million worldwide—and he was supposed to get 20 percent of the profits on a private deal Irving had given him. But before the film had loomed so large, the studio came to the director and warned him that it looked as if his percentage wasn't going to work out! So Vidor agreed to a modest cash settlement instead. That was the factory system at work, the conniving that waited beneath the guise of friendship and collaboration. More or less, everyone believed he was being screwed.

The Big Parade
coincided with the other great venture, from M-G-M,
Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ
, but that cost nearly $4 million and lost money—despite being seen by multitudes. Together the two films put M-G-M at Hollywood's forefront, with Thalberg the winner on points, for his film hid the failure of Mayer's baby.
Ben-Hur
had been a problem child, begun in Italy and brought back to Culver City, where the unprecedented chariot race was shot. But chariot races are easier than complicated ideas.

The Big Parade
is an impressive picture still, and its battle scenes demonstrate Vidor's eager eye for composition, action, and dynamics. But it is a love story, and it lacks any kind of pointed, let alone angry, commentary on why the war is being fought. It is an occasion for death and glory, for love and fulfillment, that ends in a lovers' embrace (even if the hero has lost a leg). In most ways the film depicts a nineteenth-century war, not just omitting but also not noticing the elements of horror and outrage that can be felt in, say, the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Picasso's
Guernica
, or the music of Shostakovich. It would be several years more, anywhere in the world, before anyone found the will to say the war should not have been fought, or that its existence was a measure of incompetent leadership or the failure of political systems. G. W. Pabst's
Westfront 1918
(1930), from Germany, and Lewis Milestone's
All Quiet on the Western Front
(1930) are notable developments in unease, and
All Quiet
won the Best Picture Oscar—it was respected, and its rentals
^*
doubled its production budget.
All Quiet
had the appealing American actor Lew Ayres playing a young German soldier, and the story came from a German novel by Erich Maria Remarque. Among the many wretched consequences of war is how easily it looks good on film—we feel the “excitement” and the action more than the damage. The battles outweigh the politics. Remember Jean Renoir's lament: that his acclaimed antiwar film of 1937,
La Grande Illusion
(actually a tribute to comradeship), preceded the outbreak of a second war by just a couple of years.

Vidor moved on, confident but confused. He was a great director for his time, a dynamic picturemaker, but he had no consistency. Is that lack of character or the necessary opportunism of being a director in that system? He made
The Champ
(1931) with Wallace Beery and
La Bohème
(1926) with Lillian Gish. His energy could be assigned in so many directions—that's what the studio wanted. Not long after
The Big Parade
, Thalberg caught up with him again and asked what he wanted to do next. Vidor admitted later that he had no idea at hand, but you don't let a boss get away: “Well, I suppose the average fellow walks through life and sees quite a lot of drama taking place around him. Objectively life is like a battle, isn't it?”

“Why didn't you say this before?” asked Thalberg—he was a skilled entrepreneur, and a deft talker.

“Never thought of it before,” said Vidor. We are in the days of the innocent pitch!

The first thought was to call the picture
One of the Mob
, but then
The Crowd
took over. (This is the movie Louis B. Mayer talked out of being Best Artistic Achievement in that first run at the Oscars, when
Sunrise
won.) Driven on by Vidor's own scriptwriting,
The Crowd
(1928) is as innovative as
The Big Parade
is old-fashioned. It's about an ordinary couple in New York City, John and Mary. They lose one child. Their fortunes sink, but they rally from the example of another child and because of their perseverance. The simplicity is as breathtaking as the style is soaring—much influenced by German camera movements and a dramatic shaping of décor. As the camera ranges over a panorama of desks in an abstract setting, it is as if for the first time modern America has been presented on film, without melodrama or false sweeteners.
The Crowd
can still break your heart—which never has happened with
Sunrise
. Nevertheless, M-G-M sent the picture out with two endings—one tough, one much cheerier—and they let exhibitors choose!

Another appealing characteristic of Vidor showed up in the casting. Mary was set to be played by Eleanor Boardman (the director's second wife), but for John he felt he wanted a fresh face, attractive, but an unknown—because
The Crowd
was about the ordinary members of the audience. A star personality would have defeated Vidor's idealism. One day on the lot a man brushed past Vidor. The director looked up and knew this was the type he wanted. He discovered the man was a humble extra, James Murray. When Vidor told him he was a director with a part to cast, Murray turned surly and dubious. Sure, he said grudgingly, he'd do a test, but only if he had bus fare to get to the studio.

Murray won the part, and he is so natural, so strong and vulnerable, he holds the picture together. Then he disappeared. Vidor had guessed he was a drunk. Several years later, Vidor was planning to do
Our Daily Bread
, a film about a collective farm, so radical it alarmed Thalberg. So Vidor had to raise the money himself and make it independently. But he wanted Murray back, because the man in
Our Daily Bread
was John a few years later. At last he found the one-time actor on the street begging for lunch money. He was heavier and unshaven. Vidor bought him a drink and offered him the new part. But Murray had lost hope. This was 1934, and so many Americans were huddled in their soul:

“Just because I stop you on the street and try to borrow a buck,” said Murray, “you think you can tell me what to do. As far as I am concerned, you know what you can do with your lousy part.” In two years' time, Murray's corpse was pulled out of the Hudson River.

Vidor never forgot Murray or his un-Hollywood-like intransigence. Years later he tried to set up a film about Murray's life, but it was deemed too downbeat. Vidor was in the tumult of being a big-time moviemaker in the very testing 1930s.
Our Daily Bread
was attacked in some places as being inspired by communism. It even won a prize in a Soviet film festival. By 1936, Vidor felt compelled to play a leading part in the foundation of the Directors Guild, set up to defend directors against studio exploitation and part of the unionization of the business that occurred in the 1930s with the organization of writers and actors.

He was a popular man, a loyal friend, and a good director, but he seems without self-awareness. Within just a few years of
Our Daily Bread
and the Directors Guild, the same Vidor had helped found the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, and then he directed (with blazing conviction) Ayn Rand's
The Fountainhead
(1949), perhaps his greatest film, in which that very noncerebral actor Gary Cooper plays Howard Roark, the willful architect whose genius defies society, convention, and the bromides about public spirit. As a metaphor for the Hollywood process it was so penetrating, the system had to ignore it. And this was three years before
Sunset Blvd
.

King Vidor is endlessly fascinating, and the dynamism of many of his pictures has not dated. He perceived the significance of “the ordinary fellow” for
The Crowd
, yet he was a relentless outsider led on by his appetite for visual melodrama. In 1956 he had the chutzpah to make a version of
War and Peace
(with Henry Fonda and Audrey Hepburn). The picture is not well thought of, and not what Tolstoy is about. But it carries the enthusiasm, and reckless confidence, of a man who clearly supposed that if Tolstoy had been born a little later and come to America, he would have become a screenwriter. How could he have turned down that enormous audience?

In his senior years, Vidor was unable to mount a project at a studio—in the system he had helped create. He wanted to do Cervantes or Faulkner, but he grew weary of pitching and bargaining. It had been so much easier and quicker with Thalberg. “I was glad to get out of it. They were diluting every idea, changing everything, and I was at a place in my life where I didn't have to prostitute these ideas and make these compromises. In
The Fountainhead
, Gary Cooper blows up the whole building because they change the façade and some of the other sections of the structure. That's what I felt like…”