King Vidor Films | King Vidor Filmography | King Vidor Biography | King Vidor Career | King Vidor Awards

King Vidor began work in Hollywood as a company clerk for Universal, submitting original scripts under the pseudonym Charles K. Wallis. (Universal employees weren't allowed to submit original work to the studio.) Vidor eventually confessed his wrongdoing and was fired as a clerk, only to be rehired as a comedy writer. Within days, he lost this job as well when Universal discontinued comedy production.

Vidor next worked as the director of a series of short dramatic films detailing the reform work of Salt Lake City Judge Willis Brown, a Father Flanagan-type. Vidor tried to parlay this experience into a job as a feature director with a major studio but was unsuccessful. He did manage, however, to find financial backing from nine doctors for his first feature, a picture with a Christian Science theme titled The Turn in the Road. Vidor spent the next year working on three more features for the newly-christened Brentwood Company, including the comedy Better Times, starring his own discovery, Zasu Pitts.

In 1920 Vidor accepted an offer from First National and a check for $75,000. He persuaded his father to sell his business in order that he might build and manage ?Vidor Village,? a small studio which mirrored similar projects by Chaplin, Sennett, Griffith, Ince, and others. Vidor directed eight pictures at Vidor Village, but was forced to close down in 1922. The following year, he was hired by Louis B. Mayer at Metro to direct aging stage star Laurette Taylor in Peg-O-My-Heart. Soon after, he went to work for Samuel Goldywn, attracted by Goldywn's artistic and literary aspirations. In 1924 Vidor returned to Metro as a result of a studio merger that resulted in MGM. He would continue to work there for the next twenty years, initially entrusted with molding the careers of rising stars John Gilbert and Eleanor Boardman, soon to be Vidor's second wife.

The Big Parade changed Vidor's status from contract director to courted screen artist. Produced by Irving Thalberg, the film grew from a minor studio production into one of MGM's two biggest hits of 1926, grossing $18 million. The Big Parade satisfied Vidor's desire to make a picture with lasting value and extended exhibition. It was the first of three films he wanted to make on the topics of ?wheat, steel, and war.? Vidor went on to direct Gilbert and Lillian Gish, a new studio acquisition, in La Boh?me.

Encouraged by the popularity of German films of the period and their concern with urban life, Vidor made The Crowd, "The Big Parade of peace." It starred unknown actor James Murray, whose life would end in an alcoholic suicide. (Murray inspired one of Vidor's later projects, an unproduced picture titled The Actor.) Like The Big Parade, The Crowd presented the reactions of an everyman, this time to the anonymity of the city and the rigors of urban survival. Vidor's silent career then continued with two of Marion Davies's comedies, The Patsy and Show People. His career extended into ?talkies? with a third comedy, Not So Dumb. Though only moderately successful, Vidor became a favorite in William Randolph Hearst's entourage.

Vidor was in Europe when the industry announced its conversion to sound. He quickly returned to propose Hallelujah, with an all-black cast. Although considered a politically-astute director for Hollywood, the film exposes Vidor's political shortcomings in its paternalistic attitude toward blacks. With similar political naivete, Vidor's next great film, the pseudo-socialist agricultural drama Our Daily Bread, was derived from a Reader's Digest article.

By this point in his career, Vidor's thematics were fairly intact. Informing most of his lasting work is the struggle of Man against Destiny and Nature. In his great silent pictures, The Big Parade and The Crowd, the hero wanders through an anonymous and malevolent environment, war-torn Europe and the American city, respectively. In his later sound films, The Citadel, Northwest Passage, Duel in the Sun, and The Fountainhead various forms of industry operate as a vehicle of Man's battle to subdue Nature. Unlike the optimism in the films of Ford and Capra, Vidor's films follow a Job-like pattern in which victory comes, if at all, with a great deal of personal sacrifice. Underlying all of Vidor's great work are the biblical resonances of a Christian Scientist, where Nature is ultimately independent from and disinterested in Man, who always remains subordinate in the struggle against its forces.

Following Our Daily Bread, Vidor continued to alternate between films that explored this personal thematic and projects seemingly less suited to his interests. In more than fifty features, Vidor worked for several producers, directing Wedding Night and Stella Dallas for Samuel Goldwyn; The Citadel, Northwest Passage, and Comrade X for MGM; Bird of Paradise, where he met his third wife Elizabeth Hill, and Duel in the Sun for David O. Selznick; The Fountainhead, Beyond the Forest, and Lightning Strikes Twice for Warner Brothers; and late in his career, War and Peace for Dino De Laurentiis. Vidor exercised more control on his films after Our Daily Bread, often serving as producer, but his projects continued to fluctuate between intense metaphysical drama and lightweight comedy and romance.

In the 1950s Vidor's only notable film was Ruby Gentry, and his filmmaking career ended on a less-than-praiseworthy note with Solomon and Sheba. In the 1960s he made two short documentaries, Truth and Illusion and Metaphor, about his friend Andrew Wyeth. Vidor wrote a highly praised autobiography in 1953, A Tree is a Tree. In 1979 he received an honorary Oscar (he was nominated as best director five times). In the last years of his life, he was honored in his hometown of Galveston with an annual King Vidor film festival.?MICHAEL SELIG