King Vidor

King Wallis Vidor grew up in Galveston, Texas, and survived the catastrophic 1900 hurricane as a child — an early brush with elemental force that marked his sense of scale. A teenage cameraman and cinema owner, he made his way to Hollywood and clawed up through low-budget pictures, driven by an earnest belief in film as a force for human betterment.

His breakthrough was The Big Parade (1925), a World War I story told from the mud-level view of an ordinary doughboy — unsentimental, enormous, and one of the biggest hits of the silent era. He followed it with The Crowd (1928), a startlingly modern, almost documentary portrait of an anonymous office worker swallowed by the modern city, its famous crane shot climbing a skyscraper and diving into a sea of identical desks. Then came Hallelujah (1929), an all-Black-cast musical drama of rare ambition for its day.

Vidor was one of the few silent masters to thrive in sound, and he did it by staying restless. He ranged across intimate dramas and swollen epics: the boxing tearjerker The Champ (1931), the collectivist Our Daily Bread (1934), the definitive Stella Dallas (1937), the Kansas sequences of The Wizard of Oz (1939), the delirious Western Duel in the Sun (1946), the Ayn Rand adaptation The Fountainhead (1949), and a mammoth War and Peace (1956). Nominated five times for the directing Oscar, he never won a competitive one — a striking omission finally corrected by an honorary award in 1979. He kept experimenting into old age and died in 1982, having spanned the medium from hand-cranked cameras to the wide screen, always chasing the same subject: the individual's struggle against the mass.