King Wallis Vidor ( ; February 8, 1894 – November 1, 1982) was an American film director, film producer, and screenwriter. His 67-year career spanned the silent and sound eras, with works distinguished by a sympathetic depiction of contemporary social issues. Considered an director, Vidor approached multiple genres and allowed the subject matter to determine the style, often pressing the limits of film-making conventions.Berlinale Retrospective 2020: "...he was actively involved in making movies for 67 years." And "allowed the material to define the style." And on "auteur": "Vidor's status as an auteur is definitely underscored by his independence and by the passion he brought to films. ...Vidor was indeed at times something of an auteur filmmaker..." And on "humane": "There is also a whole series of motifs that repeatedly turn up in his films, and which reflect the things he cared about – issues of class, as well as the issue of race in the US, which he incorporated into his films with a humanist bent..." WSWS Reinhardt 2020: "What distinguished him as an artist was his instinct for substantial and relevant social topics and conflicts."Gustaffson 2016: "At his best, Vidor "made films about the human condition, about human's moral and physical battles, and the battle between us and nature.Baxter 1976, p. 41: "...Vidor adapted well to sound."
His most acclaimed and successful film in the silent era was The Big Parade (1925).Phillips, 2009: "The 141-minute feature was the first silent American movie to deal realistically with the horrors of war and to do it from the standpoint of ordinary soldiers. It was also the most profitable silent-era feature and remained MGM's most successful film until Gone with the Wind in 1939. In some American cities, it screened for more than a year." Also: Decades after its release "it remains a formidable work."Thomson, 2007: The metronome "sequence seems to have influenced many directors especially Kurosawa and Spielberg."Reinhardt 2020: "His film The Big Parade (1925) influenced other anti-war films such as Lewis Milestone's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)." Vidor's sound films of the 1940s and early 1950s, such as Northwest Passage (1940), Comrade X (1940), An American Romance (1944), and The Fountainhead (1949), have been characterized as some of his best.Sarris, 1973. P. 27: "...the major directors of 1940 by almost any standard...included King Vidor (Northwest Passage, Comrade X)Baxter 1976. P. 63: The 1940s and early 50s were "Vidor's greatest period...in [his] career."Koszarski, "...later films [such as] Northwest Passage, An American Romance, and The Fountainhead demonstrate that Vidor was able to create films of personal expressiveness...it could be easily argued that only in the '40s and '50s do his heroes and heroines develop the richness of personality that characterizes any director's mature style." His dramatic depictions of the American western landscape endow nature with a sinister force where his characters struggle for survival and redemption.Thomson, 2007: "He made films glorifying the effects of Western civilization and its contents, detailing how ordinary men are made extraordinary through their fight against the neutral destructiveness of nature."Baxter 1976: "...the sense of the American landscape...distinguishes his best films. What sets Vidor apart from his contemporaries is...a dark, almost demonic view of the land." And p. 9: "...Vidor's disquiet about natural forces."Higham 1972: "Vidor has always been a poet of the American landscape, creating vivid images of rural life..." Vidor's earlier films tend to identify with the common people in a collective struggle, whereas his later works place individualists at the center of his narratives.Higham 1972: "Vidor's earlier movies had tended to emphasize the virtues of the common man. But gradually he came to believe that the individualist was the most important of beings, that a man must ignore received opinion and hold ruthlessly to what he believes."Senses of Cinema 2007: In his later films "Vidor's men became more unlikable and scarier as his country itself veered away from the proletarian dreams of the 1930s and into the consumer culture of the '50s and beyond. All his men work against things: war, consuming lust, the land, the illnesses of the body, bourgeois routine, lost love. They always emerge stronger from their struggle."
He was considered an "actors' director"; many of his players received Academy Award nominations or awards, among them Wallace Beery, Robert Donat, Barbara Stanwyck, Jennifer Jones, Anne Shirley, and Lillian Gish.Berlinale, 2020: "In general, King Vidor was a great "actors' director". You often see performances in his films that are absolutely astounding. And often it's the women who shine..." Vidor was nominated five times by the Academy Awards for Best Director. In 1979, he was awarded an Honorary Academy Award for his "incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator."Thomson, 2007: "He received five best director nominations and an honorary Oscar" from the Academy of Arts and Science. Additionally, he won eight national and international film awards during his career, including the Screen Directors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 1957. In 1962, he was head of the jury at the 12th Berlin International Film Festival. In 1969, he was a member of the jury at the 6th Moscow International Film Festival.
Early life and career Vidor was born into a well-to-do family in Galveston, Texas, the son of Kate (née Wallis) and Charles Shelton Vidor, a lumber importer and mill owner. His paternal grandfather, Károly Vidor, was a refugee of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. He adopted the Americanized name "Charles" when he settled in Galveston in the early 1850s and fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War.Thomson, 2007: "His father was a well-off lumberman..."Baxter, 1976, pp. 4–5: His father "a dealer in South American lumber" at time of Vidor's birth.Durgnat and Simmon, 1988 p. 19: His father "owned a hardwood forest in the Dominican Republic ... quite prosperous at the time of Vidor's birth...but soon after, his [father's] fortunes declined ..." Vidor's mother, Kate Wallis, was of Scotch-English descent and was a relative of the second wife of frontiersman and politician Davy Crockett.Durgnat and Simmon, 1988 p 19: Index lists Vidor's mother as "Kate", not Katherine. Elizabeth Crockett was Vidor's maternal great-grandmother. On Vidor's Crockett ancestry see this link: https://medium.com/save-texas-history/honoring-a-widow-of-the-alamo-elizabeth-crocketts-land-legacy-d364da8f8f0b Retrieved June 22, 2020. "King" was his given name, not a sobriquet, and honored his mother's favorite brother, King Wallis.Baxter 1976, p. 4Gallagher, 2007; Mother was "Scotch-Irish"
At the age of six, Vidor witnessed the devastation of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. He published a historical memoir of the disaster titled "Southern Storm" for the May 1935 issue of Esquire magazine. In an interview with the Directors Guild of America (DGA) in 1980 Vidor recalled the hurricane's aftermath:
Near the end of production for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's The Wizard of Oz, Vidor was called in to direct the remaining scenes set in Kansas. His contributions include the cyclone sequence and the musical number "Over the Rainbow."Thomson, 2007
Vidor was introduced to Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science by his mother at a very early age. Vidor would endow his films with the moral precepts of the faith, a "blend of pragmatic self-help and religious mysticism."Baxter 1976, p. 5Thomson, 2007: "his mother raised Vidor as a Christian Scientist. The philosophy of Mary Baker Eddy had a lifelong effect on his work – he took her few good ideas and extrapolated a metaphysical philosophy of his own..."Durgnat and Simmon, 1988 p 309: Vidor's films "suggest a consistent distrust of Christianity, whether established or inspired."
Vidor attended grade school at the Peacock Military Academy, located in San Antonio, Texas.Baxter, 1976, p. 5: Vidor remarked that he "hated" the institution.
Amateur apprenticeship in Galveston As a boy, Vidor engaged in photographing and developing portraits of his relatives with a Box Brownie camera.Baxter 1976. P. 5
At the age of 16, Vidor dropped out of a private high school in Maryland and returned to Galveston to work as a nickelodeon ticket taker and projectionist. As an 18-year-old amateur newsreel cameraman, Vidor began to acquire skills as a film documentarian. His first movie was based on footage taken of a local hurricane. He sold footage from a Houston army parade to a newsreel outfit (titled The Grand Military Parade) and made his first fictional movie, In Tow (1913), a semidocucomedy concerning a local automobile race.Baxter 1976. P. 5: In Tow "a documentary"Durgnat and Simmon, 1988 p. 21: In Tow "a two-reel comedy...in all respects incompetent."
Hotex Motion Picture Company Vidor, in a partnership with vaudevillian and movie entrepreneur Edward Sedgwick, formed the Hotex Motion Picture Company in 1914 ("HO" for Houston, "TEX" for Texas) to produce low-budget one- or two-reelers. The enterprise garnered a national press release in Moving Picture World announcing its formation. Only still photos survive from these comedy-adventures, for which Hotex failed to collect any royalties.Durgnat and Simmon, 1988 p. 21-22
In 1915, newlyweds Vidor and actress Florence Arto Vidor, along with business partner Sedgwick, moved to California in search of employment in the emerging Hollywood movie industry, arriving on the West Coast virtually penniless.Baxter, 1976. P. 5, p. 7: "...in San Francesco [Vidor] and Florence lived off breakfast cereal scraps found in grocer's boxes and free condensed milk samples..."Durgnat and Simmon, 1988 p. 21-22
Hollywood apprenticeship Based on a screen test arranged by Texas actress Corinne Griffith and shot by Charles Rosher in Hollywood, Florence Vidor procured a contract with Vitagraph Studios, marking the start of her successful movie career. Vidor obtained minor roles acting at Vitagraph and Inceville studios, such as a chauffeur in The Intrigue (1916). As a low-level office clerk at Universal, he was fired for trying to present his own scripts under the pseudonym "Charles K. Wallis", but soon was rehired by the studio as a writer of shorts.Baxter, 1976. P. 7: Vidor, while a young cameraman in Texas, had provided Griffith with a letter of introduction to a cousin in California, who had in turn gotten Griffith a job as an extra at Vitagraph. In 1915, Griffith returned the favor to the struggling Vidor and Arto.Durgnat and Simmon, 1988 p. 23: Vidor served "as prop boy, script clerk, bit actor..." And: Griffith a former "Texas flame" of Vidor. And p. 326: "pseudonym" derived from Vidor's christened name Charles King Wallis Vidor.Holliman, TMC
Judge Willis Brown series Beginning in 1915, Vidor served as screenwriter and director on a series of shorts about the rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents by social reformer Judge Willis Brown. Written and produced by Brown, Vidor filmed ten of the 20-film series, a project in which Vidor declared he had "deeply believed". A single reel from Bud's Recruit is known to survive, the earliest extant footage from Vidor's film directing career.Baxter 1976. P. 8-9Berlinale, 2020
Brentwood Film Corporation and the "Preachment" films, 1918–1919 In 1918, at the age of 24, Vidor directed his first Hollywood feature, The Turn in the Road (1919), a film presentation of a Christian Science evangelical tract sponsored by a group of doctors and dentists affiliated as the independent Brentwood Film Corporation. Vidor recalls of his first foray into Hollywood film-making: