A Double Feature at Apex of Silent-Film Art Form

MGM/UA Home Video Silent Classics Series, which recently issued a superb laser-disc reconstruction of the remnants of Erich von Stroheim’s silent film classic “Greed,” has now released a double-feature laser set ($49.95) of two of the most poignant and eloquent silent pictures ever made, King Vidor’s “The Crowd” (1928) and Victor Seastrom’s “The Wind” (1927, released in 1928).

Nothing will prepare you for this experience. Both films were created just as the new talkies blasted the silent film into oblivion. Each represents the apex of the silent-film art form and both have been beautifully preserved by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill for Britain’s Thames Television in association with MGM.

The two films are immeasurably enhanced by Carl Davis’ newly composed, always appropriate and at times thrilling orchestral scores recorded in digital stereophonic sound. Davis’ score for “The Wind” perfectly mirrors each visual image. You can hear the wind all around you (a brilliant use of percussion). It is a tour de force that turns these 60-year-old black-and-white images into an unforgettable sound experience.

More than six decades after it was first shown in a theater, “The Crowd” is still an amazing piece of work, especially in this format. Vidor was looking for a film to follow his greatest commercial hit, “The Big Parade.” He decided to tell the story of an average guy, John, who buys into the American dream. He meets and marries Mary, has two children, and can’t seem to break out of the crowd. When he finally does, his one moment of happiness is quickly shattered by tragedy, which paralyzes him and threatens to destroy what’s left of his life.

The almost plotless film is filled with one daring image after another. Hidden cameras pictured New York as it had never before been captured in an entertainment film--a marvelous historical record. The crowd is everywhere. One shot soars upward along a skyscraper, then dissolves into a massive office floor filled with seemingly hundreds of people at desks, finally searching for and finding John--one of the mass at work in a suffocating job. When John’s life turns tragic, we feel the crowd turning on him, closing in on him in a different way.

Brownlow points out that MGM chief Louis B. Mayer hated the film. He insisted that a new ending be shot, set in a mansion showing John and Mary by a glittering Christmas tree. John has become a success at writing ad slogans. Mary’s new dialogue title was to read: “Honest, Johnny, way down deep in my heart, I never lost faith in you for a minute.”

Six more endings were shot and tested at seven previews until Vidor finally came up with, in his words, “the semi-cynical ending.” The amazing sequence of shots shows John and Mary and their son laughing, if a bit too hysterically, at a vaudeville show, momentarily forgetting everything else in their lives. Then the camera pulls back, and we see the now-laughing crowd in the theater--row after row after row of uniform faces, stifling even in their escapism.

The film was sent out with both this ending and the happy ending, but no exhibitor to Vidor’s knowledge ever showed the happy ending because it was so ridiculously false. Too bad MGM/UA didn’t include that scene and other scenes eliminated from the final print for this special laser edition.

Lillian Gish introduces “The Wind,” explaining that Seastrom was also pressured into putting a happy ending on the film, “which we all felt was morally unjust.” But that ending was allowed to stand. Few films ever made evoke the natural elements better than this drama of a young woman driven to madness by the driving, relentless wind.

The young Gish is radiant in this story of a delicate Virginia girl forced to marry a barely civilized cowboy. In the original ending, Gish wanders into the desert, insane, after killing a rancher who had his way with her. But exhibitors refused to run the picture with that ending, so it was replaced with Gish refusing to leave the husband she now loves and wanted to be with always, regardless of the wind.

The new ending, the only flaw in this exceptional film, “broke our hearts,” Gish told Brownlow. In the introduction to the film, Gish also explains that the exteriors were shot in the blazing heat of the Mojave Desert (when she opened a hot car door to retrieve some makeup, she left a swath of skin on the handle). It took eight airplane propellers going full speed to create the continuing wind.

As “The Crowd” and “The Wind” clearly prove, “talkies” and films in Technicolor are not the only moving-picture art form. Few films have spoken so clearly about the fragility of the human spirit and how easily it can be destroyed, whether the environment is an urban or a desert hell.