The Crowd

King Vidor's film about an ordinary man who believes he is meant to be somebody and discovers he is, in fact, nobody. John Sims grows up dreaming of greatness, marries, has children, and slowly drowns in the routine of office work and a marriage that curdles. Vidor opens with a montage of a boy's birth and the title "The crowd laughs with you always, but it will cry with you never," then follows John into a vast, fluorescent office floor that was built as a single set to dwarf him. The film was a departure from the glamour MGM usually sold, and Irving Thalberg reportedly backed it against his own instincts. It was not a hit, but its influence on social realism in American film is hard to overstate. The 1928 film entered the United States public domain on January 1, 2024.