A Book Review by William Blick.
Informative, erudite, and comprehensive in several ways, with exhaustively precise details of Vidor’s career.”
When I opened the pages of Kevin Stoehr and Cullen Gallagher’s new book, King Vidor in Focus (McFarland, 2024), I was immediately drawn to Vidor’s “Creed and Pledge” in the introduction. He exclaims: “I believe in the picture that carries the message to humanity. I believe in the picture that will allow humanity to free itself from the shackles of fear and suffering that have so long bound it with iron chains….” Stoehr and Gallagher’s book traces Vidor’s artistic development and innovation from peak-silent era filmmaking to a discussion of later films made during the decline of the Golden Age of Hollywood. The writing is informative, erudite, and comprehensive in several ways, with exhaustively precise details of Vidor’s career. It consciously avoids academic double-speak that mire down so many film studies work and discusses the challenges and obstacles Vidor had to overcome at the price of self-expression.
When I was a boy of 10 years old, my father set me down to watch King Vidor’s The Champ (1931) with Wallace Beery. Though I turned my nose up at the black and white film and how archaic it all was, I can say it was one of the first films I can remember crying over. The heart-breaking ending can bring anyone to tears. This was my segue into vintage film and my first introduction to the filmography of Vidor, including other significant contributions to popular film, most famously, The Wizard of Oz (1939). Vidor stepped in uncredited to direct some key sequences when Victor Fleming left to shoot Gone with The Wind (1939), as noted in King Vidor in Focus. I would return to Vidor in an undergraduate film class, with The Crowd (1928), a popular Introduction to Film 101 selection. With these entries being obvious, Stoehr and Gallagher’s detailed approach asserts that Vidor’s filmography overall is seminal to American cinema.
The authors begin with the early films, many of them shot by Vidor as a teen, and subsequently destroyed in the very early 20th century. These films, made up to the early 1920s, adapted dramatic source material that was not his own. The authors explain that this work provided a means for exercise and that Vidor would only really be at home if he could write and express himself cinematically.
The authors identify The Jack-Knife Man (1920) as King Vidor’s primary masterwork. It is set in “Everytown, U.S.A”, where a dying mother leaves her child in the care of an old riverboat man. Visually sophisticated and innovative for its time, its thematic material appeals to the heart of humanity.
Stoehr and Gallagher consider Wild Oranges (1924) to be Vidor’s second masterwork, while many regarded it to be his most visually sophisticated film to date. As Vidor continued his work, the authors note that the bigger the production value and attention by studios, the less the director’s singular artistic vision came to fruition. King Vidor in Focus presents Vidor as an artist most comfortable in smaller films, and more conforming with mainstream attention.
The book informs the reader that Vidor had the longest career of any Hollywood director, with the “little” films and big pictures, many of note, all in focus. Of particular note is the discussion of The Citadel, a movie that was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It is about a Welsh mining town and perhaps influenced John Ford’s epic How Green Was My Valley, as Stoehr and Gallagher suggest. It is a shining example of classical storytelling through image and discussed in-depth in this book.
It is often said that great art comes from its ability to illuminate some aspect of the human condition. In this book, Stoehr and Gallagher discuss how Vidor achieved this repeatedly and with variety. What results is a comprehensive exploration of a groundbreaking artist whose work has the ability to carry a message to humanity and had been known to elicit emotional responses from the audience. The book demonstrates Vidor’s enormous range and his ability to make almost any genre his own. For example, take Northwest Passage (1940), a western, epic, and odyssey film that includes many traditional genre elements, but is in no way conventional. This film saw Vidor’s ability to work synergistically with famous actors, such as Spencer Tracy and Walter Brennan. The authors also note that Northwest Passage was one of the first films to utilize Technicolor in full, indicating that Vidor did not shy away from innovation and changes in filmmaking.
In addition to a comprehensive bibliography are multiple notes by the authors. These items make it essential reading for anyone looking to seriously research Vidor’s work, including his late-career short documentaries. The authors demonstrate Vidor’s overarching influence, and the immortal themes that live on in his works. It is a fitting homage to a great auteur and a vital source for film scholars and aficionados alike.
William Blick is a film and literary/crime fiction critic; a librarian; and an academic scholar. His work has been featured in Senses of Cinema, Film Threat, Cineaction, and CinemaRetro, and he is a frequent contributor to Retreats from Oblivion: The Journal of Noircon. His crime fiction has been featured in Close to the Bone, Pulp Metal Magazine, Out of the Gutter, and others. He is an Assistant Professor/Librarian for the City University of New York.