For Conservative Movie Lovers: King Vidor, Wallace Beery and ‘The Champ’ Part 4

Toward the end of the filming of The Wizard of Oz (1939), the picture’s director, Victor Fleming, was suddenly called away to salvage another production that was careening off-track at the studio, Gone with the Wind. The “Oz” portions of the movie, filmed in spectacular Technicolor, were already finished. But the “Kansas” sequences bookending the picture — including the all-important scene showing Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” on her Depression-era farm — had yet to be shot.

The studio heads called in a oft-used master craftsman named King Vidor to handle the job, and he proceeded in a few weeks to capture on celluloid some of our culture’s most beloved images.

Who was this “King Vidor”?  If you’re a modern conservative movie lover with some smattering of knowledge about classic Hollywood, you may have heard that strange name without really knowing or caring about its import. It sounds vaguely European — perhaps even fake? — and hardly evokes the same smile of recognition as Ford, Hitchcock, Hawks, Wilder. It seems to belong more with names like Curtiz, Lubitsch, Cocteau, Kurosawa — foreign-sounding, arty-farty names, ones only a geeky film aficionado could love.

And yet Vidor (you pronounce it “VEE-door,” not “VEYE-door”) was no foreigner at all. Texas born and bred, he was a champion of the little guy, the average Joe. His Christianity (he was raised a Christian Scientist), optimism, and Americanism infuse all his work. A craftsman, an innovator, an auteur, he had one of the longest careers of any director. If you have always treasured those sepia-toned Wizard of Oz sequences, and would like to find more stuff like it, do yourself a favor and hunt down Vidor’s The Champ (1931), a film that shares many of the same qualities with his later work on Oz.

Growing up as a middle-class kid in Galveston, Texas, King Vidor (1894-1982) didn’t fall in love with cinema right away. He was born just at the time that movies began being projected for audiences, and as a kid he would occasionally frequent the local Nickelodeons (so named because they cost a nickel to get in) and see the very first silent films. He was far from impressed. “When I was a young kid in Texas at the beginning of the century, I used to hate movies,” he explained decades later. “I hated their phoniness, their fakeness, the makeup which used to mask the actor’s expressions, their dreadful unreal acting with overdone pantomime gestures. People find them laughable today. I found them laughable then.”

All of that changed when, as a teenager, he became a ticket taker and backup projectionist at one of the theaters in Galveston. With nothing else to do, he found himself watching the films over and over. “I saw that two-reel Ben-Hur (1907), made in Italy [sic], twenty-one times each day or one hundred and forty-seven times in its week’s run. The men who made it never sat through it as often.” Studying the pantomime, the acting, the lighting, the camerawork, Vidor began to see the possibilities and power of this nascent art form. One thing he noticed right away: “The better the technique of the director, the fewer the subtitles.”

When a neighborhood kid hatched a plan to build a functional movie camera out of “an old projection machine and cigar boxes,” Vidor jumped at the chance to join in the experiment. They worked like kiddie mad scientists on their project, then bought a hundred feet of unexposed negative and used it to capture the spectacular destruction of a bathhouse near the Galveston seawall during a raging storm. With the help of some adults they sold the film as a newsreel to a distributor, and it got a lot of play around Southern Texas. “The day that hurricane struck,” Vidor said, “the course of my future was settled.”

He continued making newsreels throughout high school and selling them to distributors, ever trying to expand his prospects and break into a real job as a director of honest-to-God movies. It seemed that every day came further confirmation that cinema was growing into a great art form with a power to be reckoned with. Once, while watching a Western in a North Texas theater, Vidor watched in shock as a cowboy in the audience suddenly drew his pistol and began shooting at the screen! “He had come to town for a Saturday night’s spree,” Vidor recalled, “but when he saw the hero was about to be hung unjustly for cattle rustling, he couldn’t sit there with his six-shooter without doing something. The film did not stop, nor did they arrest the shooting cowboy. I suppose the three bullet holes were later patched, the manager having decided the less said about the incident the safer.” Movies, Vidor believed, were quickly becoming, “as vital to everyone’s life as milk and bread. You grew up with it. It affected your character, your dress, your lovemaking, your courage.” It was an industry of dreams and illusion and humanity that he wanted to be a part of.

Newly married, Vidor rode out to California at nineteen and ended up in San Francisco with twenty cents left in his pocket. They survived with typical Vidor-ian ingenuity, by taking empty, discarded boxes from grocery stores and scraping out the crumbs of oatmeal, Shredded wheat, and corn meal found within until they had enough for a meal. Eventually they scrounged together enough money to take a steamship to Los Angeles, where they did their best to weasel their way into the budding Hollywood film industry.

Vidor’s pretty wife became a $10 a week actress, while Vidor himself wrote dozens of scripts, photographed newsreels and travelogues, and worked any odd studio jobs that presented themselves. His breakthrough came with The Turn in the Road (1919), a film he financed from money begged from a consortium of dentists. Shot for $9,000, he found a distributor to take a chance on it, and it made $365,000 in its run. With that notch in his belt he could finally get studio jobs, and at twenty-three he was a young up-and-coming director. (his wife, Florence Vidor, became a famous silent screen actress, and they would eventually divorce for all of the usual Hollywood reasons).

Always pushing the envelope and remembering the unrealistic movies of his youth, Vidor experimented and innovated in his films. He used bright lights to smooth out the wrinkles on actresses faces, and got them laughing off-camera before a scene to capture a bit of that authentic glow of humor on film. He began timing shots to classical music, building up the editing of scenes into what felt like a musical crescendo, calling his technique “silent music.” He would sometimes even make his actors march or walk to the pace of a metronome, and the effect was almost subliminal, but haunting.

At a time when most films were suffused with fantasy and spectacle, Vidor grew to appreciate human stories that carried with them what might be called American realism. There were seldom villains in his movies — he relied instead on the trials and tribulations of real life for his drama. “War, wheat, and steel,” was his way of summarizing his interests, meaning life on the streets of middle-to-lower class America.

The Big Parade (1925), a World War I film presenting for the first time the perspective of mud-soaked grunts and GIs, became the most profitable silent film ever made (had there been any Academy Awards back then, it would have won a pile of them). Another Vidor film, The Crowd (1928), was an experimental masterpiece about ordinary people making their way through the small triumphs and tragedies of American big-city life, and garnered nominations for Best Picture and Best Director at the very first Academy Awards.

With the coming of sound, Vidor didn’t suffer the career setbacks that actors like Wallace Beery did, but he did discover that he needed to make some serious adjustments to his filmmaking style, not all of them welcome:

Silent pictures were treasured as an art form, and when talking pictures came in, most of the silent film directors regretted the change, the transition, because there was a certain technique that was very much akin to music. A silent film was never seen without music, without an orchestra. . . .We believed in the articulate powers of pantomime; we felt the things we were doing were bigger than words.

[In talking films] words reduced the actions, the emotions, the story we were trying to tell. It was like using words at the ballet. It made specific what we wanted to keep general. We could no longer appeal simultaneously to all audiences, the various levels of age and intelligence and sophistication. People were no longer free to fill in their own words. . .

It was a time of quiet despair to those of us brought up to love the lucidity of silence.

He also bemoaned the fact that all of the wonderful (and today still very modern-looking and influential) camera movements for silent pictures like The Big Parade and The Crowd were now all but impossible in the sound era, as the cameras now had to be housed in soundproofed rooms or covered with bulky soundproofed housings.

These were the problems facing him as an artist when, in 1931, he got the chance to direct The Champ.

Next Saturday in For Conservative Movie Lovers, we conclude our look at The Champ with some stories about how Vidor worked behind-the-scenes with Wallace Beery and Jackie Cooper, along with a look at the movie’s appeal both in 1931 and in 2010.

Previous posts in the series “King Vidor, Wallace Beery and The Champ“

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

FURTHER READING and VIEWING

Watch eighty-five-year-old King Vidor receive his honorary Oscar at the 51st Academy Awards on April 9, 1979.

The Big Parade (1925), directed by King Vidor: You can watch this silent film triumph in its entirety on YouTube. Part One starts here.

Hollywood Series — A Celebration of American Silent Film: King Vidor is a featured interviewee in this wonderful series by film historian Ken Brownlow. Many of the episodes are on YouTube, and I specifically recommend the first part of “The Pioneers” for an education about the true power and popularity of silent films in that era, how they were every bit as impressive to them as Star Wars and Avatar are to us.