Tragic Muse-conceptions

All of King Vidor’s films deal with artists (people who transmute the materials furnished by life into something far more personal than life, properly speaking, ever is), but La Boheme is the first one to be set in the artistic milieu–and the director doesn’t paint a pretty picture. Oh there’s plenty of charming bonhomie and [...]

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Liberty Waving Goodbye to the People

Okay, so maybe it’s a tiny bit of a stretch, but I think there’s a lot to be gleaned from the juxtaposition of Renée Adorée (as The Big Parade‘s Melissande) and Eugène Delacroix’s “Liberty” (“Leading the People”) I’ve been calling King Vidor a “Romantic” and a “Transcendentalist”–and this exercise might help to clarify what I [...]

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Young Wine in Old Battles

King Vidor’s first film for the newly created Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Wine of Youth lulls the viewer into a comfortable  rhythm with its Jazz Age jocularity–and then rips the skin off its “comedy of manners” facade to expose the capillaries of a culture in (perennial) crisis. Perry Miller famously described Transcendentalism as “the first of a succession [...]

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Ascorbic Victory

King Vidor’s Wild Oranges (1924) brings us into the High Silent Age, complete with tinted reels; lush location photography; perfected romantic pantomime; soft focus galore; drooling, lurking evil + its correlative: skulking, cringing fear; the Goldwyn Pictures Lion (see below) and June Mathis “Editorial Direction”. Last time on Vidor Theatre, Peg O’ My Heart gave us [...]

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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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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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Metaphysician, Quit Healin’ Thyself

King Vidor’s Truth and Illusion (1964–no IMDB entry!!!) treats the viewer to the remarkable spectacle of an artist erecting his own tombstone. That’s the truth. Fortunately, Vidor’s oeuvre will always be around to ensure that the feeble speculation contained within this film never becomes anything more than an illusory epitaph for the great director. Truth [...]

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