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King Wallis Vidor was born in February 1894 in Galveston, a small town on an island just off the coast of Texas, of about 18,000 people. When he was six and a half years old, a hurricane devastated his home town, killing one-third of the population. This event inspired two later creative enterprises - the direction of his first film, the short Hurricane in Galveston in 1913, and the writing of a fictional story, Southern Storm , which appeared in the May 1935 issue of Esquire magazine. By the time of his film debut, Vidor had worked as a journalist, a freelance cameraman and a cinema projectionist for a couple of years. In 1915, he moved to Hollywood and worked in various jobs in the burgeoning industry before getting the chance to direct his first feature film, The Turn in the Road in 1919. Success was slow in coming but the critical and commercial reception to Peg O’ My Heart in 1922 ensured him a place in the business. Three years later, he made The Big Parade, regarded as one of the finest anti-war films ever produced; the almost documentary feel of the first half is in stark contrast to the events on the battlefield in the majority of the second half. The film was a box office bonanza for MGM and they repaid him by changing his contract details - which originally stated he was entitled to up to 20% of the net takings - after exaggerating the costs of the production and downplaying the expected public reception to the picture. Vidor sold his stake in the film for a small sum; the picture ran for 96 weeks at the Astor Theatre in Los Angeles and total grosses up to 1930 were in the order of $5 million. [Vidor self-deprecatingly commented on the arrangement with the following remark: “I thus spared myself from becoming a millionaire instead of a struggling young director trying to do something interesting and better with a camera.”] In 1928, he directed The Crowd, another major critical and commercial success, and arguably one of the best films of the silent era. This also earned him the first of six Oscar nominations as Best Director. The same year saw the production of Show People, an interesting look at success in the film industry (with cameos by Vidor as a director and Charles Chaplin as himself) and notable as the last appearance on the silent screen of Marion Davies (who was more famous for her association with William Randolph Hearst than the many mainly mediocre films she made in her 19-year career). His first sound film was Hallelujah! (1930) which gave him his second Academy Award nomination. This was a stylised view of black life in the South, focussing on a cotton-picker who becomes a preacher, with beautifully filmed sequences and a rousing musical score. The 1930s and 1940s were good decades for Vidor and his output included the interesting but misguided western, Billy the Kid (1930), The Champ (1931) with Wallace Beery (and his third Oscar nomination for director), Our Daily Bread (1934, a bold experiment outside the studio system about communal living, with some superb sequences, but unfortunately let down by less than convincing acting), Stella Dallas (1937, the ultimate soap opera in which Barbara Stanwyck sacrifices everything for her daughter), The Citadel (1938, based on the A J Cronin novel about a doctor who compromises his principles for an easy life, shot in England with Robert Donat, and his fourth director nomination from the Academy), the almost-epic Northwest Passage (1940), the superbly witty H M Pulham (1941, with Robert Young and Hedy Lamarr [Vidor said of her: Her beauty made up for whatever she lacked in acting ability. Acting probably didn't come naturally to her but the note of unsureness in what she did seemed to give her a certain childish attractiveness.]), the flawed masterpiece, American Romance (1944), the splendidly lurid Duel in the Sun (1946), The Fountainhead (1949), and in the same year, Beyond the Forest, the only time he directed Bette Davis. The 1950s were lean years for Vidor, with only moderately successful pictures to his credit, including Ruby Gentry (1952) and War and Peace (1956), which earned him another best director nomination. His last Hollywood film was the 1959 production, Solomon and Sheba. Vidor also directed the Kansas scenes (including the tornado) on 1939’s Wizard of Oz, as well as Judy Garland’s Over the Rainbow sequence, when Victor Fleming was obliged to replace George Cukor on Gone With the Wind; Vidor received no on-screen credit for his work. After he left the studio, Vidor’s interest in philosophy inspired him to make the documentary, Truth and Illusion: An Introduction to Metaphysics, a short, in 1964. Metaphor was another short (on painting) made in 1980 (the release of which prompted the Guinness Book of Records to cite him as having “The Longest Career as a Film Director” - 67 years). Vidor wrote his autobiography in 1953, A Tree is a Tree , inspired, he said, by a budget-minded producer in Vidor’s early career who, after rejecting Vidor’s request to shoot on location, told him, “A rock is a rock. A tree is a tree. Shoot it in Griffith Park” (an extensive nature reserve just north of Hollywood often used for location work). During 1967, Vidor spent almost the entire year researching the unsolved killing of William Desmond Taylor in 1922 with a view to making a film on the subject. He never published any of his findings, but his biographer, Sidney Kirkpatrick, in his own book Cast of Killers (released in 1986) alleged that Vidor had discovered the identity of the murderer but refrained from making it public to protect individuals still alive at the time. The web-based influentual newsletter Taylorology later disputed Kirkpatrick’s revelations, noting more than 100 factual errors in his book. In 1979, Vidor was presented with an honorary Oscar for “his incomparable achievements”). He was married three times, to Florence Arto (1917-1924), Eleanor Boardman (1926-1931) and Elizabeth Hill (1932-1982). King Vidor died in November 1982. - David Young.
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Personal Quotes
"The director is the channel through which a motion picture reaches the screen." (1921)
"In Hollywood, the cameraman lights the star. In Europe, he lights the set."
[on Cecil B DeMille] “When I saw one of his pictures, I wanted to quit the business.”
[on Robert Donat] He is the only actor I have ever known who had a graph of his character development charted out on the wall of his dressing room.
[on Gary Cooper] He got a reputation as a great actor just by thinking hard about the next line.
[on Frank Capra] Very often I would see the wheels going around and the tricks coming up. It was probably useful, but I used to be aware of the mechanics of it and how you would work toward a gag to get a gag in. I'm sure he'd think the same thing about me. He's a good filmmaker.
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Classic Films screened on the 1st and 3rd Fridays of the month at 8.00pm.
Complimentary coffee, tea and biscuits served after the screening.
We're at 33 Laurel St., Willoughby in Sydney NSW, on the corner of Hollywood Cres.
All films are from the
managed by the National Film and Sound Archive in Canberra
Yearly Membership $50 single, $75 double.
Your first screening is free!
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