Get Your Auteur On

With Peg O’ My Heart (1922), the director’s first film for Metro Pictures (soon to be engulfed by a Metro-Goldwyn Merger), we are introduced to a crucial element of King Vidor’s cinema–the underdog female. The film’s eponymous protagonist (played by Broadway star Laurette Taylor) is a clear forerunner of Rose Maurrant (Street Scene), Doris Emily Lea [...]

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Swing and Miss, Sweet Charioteer

King Vidor’s The Sky Pilot (1921) finds the director coming into his own as Hollywood’s primary exponent of an “open-air religion” in the Emersonian tradition. The interpretive key to the film is contained within the title. “Sky pilot”, it seems, is western roughneck slang for “preacher”–and the narrative constitutes a sustained investigation of the proper [...]

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Is This a Jack-Knife Man I See Before Me?

With The Jack-Knife Man (1920), the Vidor oeuvre proper commences. The recruiting poster poseur of Bud’s Recruit is out. The Backyard Expressionist is IN. For the next four decades, before his creativity finally jack-knifed on the highway to Monism, Vidor managed to keep his camera trained on the crossroads between Mid-Victorian Melodrama and Modernist Mindfuck. It’s [...]

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Fantasia Island

Yes, Fantasia is now in full swing–and Anagramsci friend David Bradford will be covering a movie a day at Press Pass and Hegemony! Find out just how close a man and his cinephilia can get to world domination. And stay tuned for more King Vidor posts from me later this week! Dave

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Portrait of the Artist as a Young Red-White-and-Blueshirt; or, The Man Who Enlisted Liberty Valance

Made in 1917–the year the U.S. plunged into “The Great War”–Bud’s Recruit gives us the King at his callowest. Financed and written by “Boy City” impresario Judge Willis Brown (sort of the poor man’s Father Flanagan),  and certainly circumscribed by that stodgy gavel-wielder’s point of view, this flag-waving short nevertheless manages to ring up the [...]

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The Stranger’s Return

So where was I? Oh yes! King Vidor! Onward! Here’s the program (a discussion of every Vidor film I was able to get my hands on): Bud’s Recruit (1918) The Jack-Knife Man (1920) The Sky Pilot (1921) Peg o’ My Heart (1922) Wild Oranges (1924) Wine of Youth (1924) The Big Parade (1925) La Bohème (1926) Bardelys the Magnificent (1926) The Crowd (1928) The Patsy, [...]

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