Everyone has their own choice for the best silent film ever made, my choice is King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928), which I saw most recently in a special screening attended by Kevin Brownlow and with a live orchestral score by Carl Davis, who was present to conduct his own music.

The premise of The Crowd is simple: It’s the story of a man named John Sims, born on the Fourth of July, 1900. Twelve years later, John’s father dies but not before he has drilled into his son the need for him to be better than everybody else — to be important, to stand out from the crowd. At the age of 21, John sets out for New York City, gets a job at an insurance company, then meets and falls in love with a woman, Mary (Eleanor Boardman). They marry and raise a family. John has the normal strengths and failings we all have but one thing he has an extra helping of (courtesy of his dad) is ambition. As life’s disappointments mount, he nurses his ambition and pride as best he can, burying it deep inside of himself. Worse, he feels ashamed that he’s just one of ‘the mob’ and this isolates him from his wife and children. And when tragedy strikes the family, John’s pride comes roaring back, this time wrapped in the disguise of feeling sorry for himself — John loses his job and becomes a vagrant. Mary, long loyal to her husband, is persuaded to end the marriage. John’s despair becomes so great he is at the point of ending his life.

It’s at this moment that his son, who is tagging along with him in the street, tells him what a great dad he is. Recognizing he has his son’s whole-hearted love and support (something he never had from his own father), John becomes aware he has received a secular kind of blessing, an affirmation of his self-worth. As Ralph Waldo Emerson would describe it, “Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.” John realizes that the love between him and his son is greater than any trauma or tragedy from his past, and his pride — which was nothing in the end but fear of failure — falls away, and with this he is able to reclaim the love that his family is waiting to give him.

The Crowd is immeasurably helped by the performance of the two leads. John Murray, chosen because the role called for an actor with virtually no artifice, gives one of the greatest of all performances in silent film. Eleanor Boardman, whose prior films typically cast her as a sophisticate, beautifully portrays a simple woman progressively worn down by life, but still doing everything possible to keep her family together. For its use of technical aspects: use of moving camera, forced perspective, lighting, and for its understanding of story structure and thematic content — for its ability to use — with ease and facility — every effect, every technique at that point understood and learned by filmmakers to tell a story, The Crowd stands as a crowning achievement in the art of film in 1928, the year it was released.

The Crowd also strikes new ground in what would later be called modernism. With its interest in the emotional lives of its characters rather than with plot and, with its fragmentary assemblage of a typical life of an ordinary family, the film invites comparisons to other modernist works by writers such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. The Crowd even manages to be subversive. Vidor’s inclusion of a toilet in the scene of their cramped apartment is as shocking in its own way as Henry Miller’s use of ‘unprintable words’ in Tropic of Cancer. Louis B. Mayer famously hated the film because of the bathroom scene — he called it that “damn toilet film.”

These subversive qualities had their repercussions; the studio, not knowing what they had, delayed the release of this film and with this delay (which coincided with the public’s sudden interest in talking pictures), and with the studio’s lack of support, The Crowd failed to gain the sweeping recognition that it might otherwise have achieved. Although critically acclaimed, The Crowd is often brushed aside when talking about important films of its era. Having no major stars and with no easy way to describe or sell the film, The Crowd has an odd ‘orphan’ status among the films of its era — outside of festivals or film school, few people have seen it, at least on a big screen.

Because of this history, The Crowd is perhaps more important in its influence on future filmmakers. The Italian directors saw in King Vidor’s work a populist vision of the common man, the template of their vision of neorealism. Vittorio De Sica himself described The Crowd as the first ‘neorealist film,’ and freely admitted he used elements of this film for Bicycle Thief and Umberto D. Roberto Rossellini is quoted as describing the ‘unforgettable impression’ of The Crowd made on him, stating that watching the film “really struck me and put me on the road toward truth, toward reality.”

And who can forget Billy Wilder’s rethinking of many ideas from this film, when he made arguably his best picture, The Apartment, even playing direct homage to the film by recreating The Crowd’s opening scene of the New York skyline panning into a dissolve of endless desks manned by robotic workers?

And yet there is more to The Crowd than merely a summation of its artistic achievements or its importance in shaping the future of filmmaking. When John learns to accept his limitations that he is just an ‘ordinary man’ (even to rejoice in this realization — because with this insight he acquires a particular kind of freedom), The Crowd is offering an update of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, which also celebrated the freedom of the ordinary man. To conclude you are ‘nothing special,’ to accept your fate as one of the many blades of grass in a field stirred by the wind, is to see the world with new eyes.

In his essay ‘Inside The Whale,’ George Orwell describes Whitman’s insight that by acceptance of our ordinariness, there is a new-found joy of discovery — despite all hard knocks, the disappointments, all the pettiness of life, one can still find “that he is enjoying himself…” Whitman was writing in a time of national expansion and for many, unparalleled prosperity, but more than that, he was writing in a country where “freedom was something more than a word.” Orwell however, offers a cautionary conclusion, “Luckily for his beliefs, perhaps, he died too early to see the deterioration of American life that came with the large-scale industry and the exploiting of immigrant labor.” The Crowd is offering a current appraisal of the boundless optimism of the American Dream as envisioned by Whitman: Yes, the freedom to pursue your dreams is still part of our nation’s founding principle, but that dream is bounded by many barriers, both visible and invisible, and perhaps for most of us, the important part of living each day will be the ability to appreciate the small, simple things in our daily life, such as the gratitudes and affirmations we get from friends and family.

As I walked out of the theater, I saw Kevin Brownlow and confessed to him that this was my choice for Best Silent of All. He smiled, and said: ‘Mine too.’ We all know that Abel Gance’s Napoleon is the film that Brownlow has made into a career, and Kevin Brownlow has forgotten more films than I’ll ever see … and maybe he was caught up like I was, in the spirit of the evening.

Even so, for me, his answer was a thrilling validation. There are many Best Silents of All, and one is permitted to change one’s mind–as often as one wishes–for which film to award the title. But for me, even though there are many great films out there, I will always come back to The Crowd as the ultimate achievement of what can be done in the wonderful and often neglected art of silent film.