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Part I
by Raymond Durgnat
King Vidor, Raymond Durgnat tells us, "contained multitudes." In a forty-year career that paralleled the growth of American cinema from a charmed adolescence to a tenacious, if tenuous independence, Vidor directed almost every kind of film (comedy, western, war movie, weepie, message film). And many of his pictures (the big parade, the crowd, show people, hallelujah!, our daily bread, northwest passage, duel in the sun, war and peace) remain popular and museum classics.
But Durgnat, in this book-length study written especially for FILM COMMENT, is talking about something else: the multitude of threads of the American character that are woven into the director and his films. Vidor was a populist and a transcendentalist, a puritan and a sensual lyricist, a conservative and a liberal. In tracing the roots of these complexes and contradictions, Durgnat has in effect written a critical history of American social and political thought. And because Durgnat is equally a film historian and a social critic, his insights into Vidor's work are as informed as they are idiosyncratic. His extended comparisons of Vidor with virtually every Pantheon director are particularly enlightening. Indeed, like the filmmaker he so admires, Durgnat contains multitudes.
-Richard Corliss
"On the name Vidor, cinema historians have once and for all stuck the label 'epic poet' . . . " So Etienne Chaumeton writes in Cinema 56, before a long and interesting comparison between Vidor and Gance ("in which, " one is relieved to discover, "Vidor clearly comes off best . . . ").
In film criticism, "epic poet" still suggests a certain simplicity of message that Vidor's films, however powerful, never quite accept, even on first viewing. And one turns, with a surprised sense of discrepancy, from the libidinous emphases for which certain Vidor films became (perhaps unjustly) notorious, to the stream of gentle, almost pious sentiments and scruples of his autobiography and interviews- and to certain suggestive ellipses or intimations therein. The democratic humanism of his films before World War Il scarcely accords with his adaptation of Ay ? Rand. Complications rapidly appear: not just between films but within them, at their very core.
Given the standpoint of the social and moral criticism which permeates his work (in exact conformity with his...