The happiest ending a picture can have is one showing a sympathetic character achieving an ambition. Things in life are relative. We can derive as much satisfaction from watching Chico in Seventh Heaven rise from a sewer cleaner to a street washer as we could by seeing a bank cashier in another picture become the president of the institution for which he works. Chico's one ambition was to become a street washer. He becomes one. His ambition is achieved, and if the story had been one of his ambition it could have ended happily when he received his appointment. The fault of most motion pictures is that they are not content with showing a reasonable achievement of an ambition. Given a picture in which the main interest centers around a bootblack's ambition to own the stand at which he works, the culmination of his dream is not considered to be sufficient; we must fade-out on the hero owning all the stands in the state and controlling all the factories that make shoeblacking. In The Crowd King Vidor made a masterly picture which faded out on the central character realizing an ambition for which he had struggled and suffered. He is shown as one of the crowd; he loses his job, and the chief interest of the picture is his struggle against adversity, which ends happily when he gets his job back. As Vidor shot it, it was a poignant and powerful picture, a tremendous one that would have made a deep impression on the public. I have seen it three times, but I have refrained from reviewing it until I see it in the form in which it is to be released At the first showing it was a great picture; as I saw it the last time it was a poor one. It is a shame to watch the way it is being ruined through some supervisor's misconception of the public's taste. As Vidor finished it the audience would have been satisfied fully because the man got his job back, leaving it to presume that his struggles were over and that he would live happily ever after. The ending struck just the right note and left me under the spell of a great picture. I had been so interested in the man's struggles, his suffering had awakened my sympathy to such a degree that I sighed with relief when his employer reinstated him. At that time it was evident that Vidor had shot too much footage, for the strength of some of the sequences was sacrificed in bringing the whole picture within the required length, but, even so, it was a truly notable picture. I was appalled when I saw it the last time. Someone on the Metro lot- I can not believe it was Irving Thalberg- did not consider that Vidor's powerful ending had enough box-office appeal. Another was tacked on. It shows our hero living in a mansion paid for by the huge sums he received from writing advertising slogans. The whole idea of Vidor's conception is ruined. He made a great picture and it has become a blah one. To accommodate the added footage the cutting is so sharp that more sequences are harmed. Before we had properly developed causes and effects; now we have causes without the effects, and effects without the causes. It is deplorable that such inspired work as Vidor put into the picture originally had to be subjected to the manhandling of supervisors who could not understand what it was all about. This is not a review of The Crowd. I will review it after it comes off the operating table.

Wilfred Beaton, "'Crowd' Subjected to Too Much Supervision," The Film Spectator, December 24,1927, page 7.

© 1998, David Pierce, on editing and revisions (if any)

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