Product Description

Brand new, factory sealed DVD manufactured in Hong Kong. This is a silent movie made in 1928. It has the original English dialog cards with optional subtitles in Chinese. Chinese subtitles can be easily removed. High quality full screen black and white image. The following review appears in Amazon for the VHS edition: "Made in 1926-27 by King Vidor, with brilliant cinematography by Henry Sharp of huge crowd scenes, often with superimposed layers of film, this is a classic; beautifully acted and scripted, it is one of the best films of the silent genre. It follows the life of John Sims, born on July 4th, 1900, who is average in every way, with great hopes and dreams, struggling to make a living in New York City. Every scene is full of symbolism, representing man searching for his uniqueness among the masses, and with the eventual acceptance of himself as an individual. There are quite a few moments of comic relief (the Christmas Eve conversation with the in-laws is hilarious), but most of it is tragic; as he finds out after a death in the family, "the crowd laughs with you always...but it will cry with you for only a day". This was an experimental film for Vidor, and one of the many risks he took was casting an unknown actor, James Murray, to play John, and the choice was a good one. Eleanor Boardman (who was married to Vidor at the time) is marvelous as John's long suffering wife Mary. Also excellent is Bert Roach, who plays John's best buddy Bert. There is a famous camera shot early in this film, that was made with the help of a scale model, which seems as though one is going up the side of a skyscraper, through a window, and into an office. It also is a film without a heroic figure, which made the studio hesitant to release it; little did they know it would stand the test of time, and would be still seen by many, 75 years later, and appreciated as a work of cinematic art. The restoration is excellent, and it is enhanced by an orchestral score by Carl Davis.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #69106 in DVD
• Brand: BoYing
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Formats: Full length, NTSC, Black & White, Import, Silent
• Subtitled in: Mandarin Chinese
• Number of discs: 1

Customer Reviews

marvellous film; shoddy dvd copy
A masterwork of American cinema ! Five stars and more ! 'High Quality Edition' - ?!! No way. A miserable copy in which images don't fit frames and the black and white shadings are reduced to blurry grey indistinctness. Hold on to your VHS tape copy and wait for a properly remastered and restored edition.

King Vidor's Bleak but Affecting Silent Classic About Desperate Lives in the Big City
King Vidor was never the most subtle of filmmakers, but his heavily Baroque style served him well over a very long career with emotionally overwrought though supremely entertaining films like 1937's Stella Dallas and 1949's The Fountainhead. This seminal 1928 silent classic reflects Vidor's passion for melodrama but within a realistically bleak social commentary of America in the years leading toward the Great Depression. Written by Vidor and John V.A. Weaver, the story has an episodic structure that chronicles the life of an Everyman appropriately named John, born on the 4th of July in 1900, who believes his destiny is to become a big financial success. The movie follows his life as he works in New York as one of hundreds of accounting drones in an office building falls in love and marries a girl he meets through a co-worker (named Mary, of course), ekes out a meager existence as they raise two children and hits hard times after tragedy befalls them.

That John and Mary's seemingly mundane lives can seem universally transcendent is a tribute to Vidor's filmmaking acumen. Thanks to Henry Sharp's remarkable camerawork, Vidor produces two of cinema's most impressive tracking shots - the first moving from street level up a skyscraper into a field of identical desks and zeroing in on John at #137, the second in a most expressionistic-looking maternity ward where John finds an exhausted Mary at the far end of the room and their baby is brought to them. Even though the angles and dimensions are exaggerated in these scenes, Vidor offsets this stylization with realistic scenes of the teeming anonymity of city life. The story of James Murray, an insecure extra Vidor picked out of obscurity to play John, lends a particular irony to the movie, as his tragic, alcohol-fueled life ended eight years later with a fall off a pier. It's a shame since he plays John with sincere gumption and wide-eyed enthusiasm. Vidor's wife, Eleanor Boardman, is affecting as the constantly put-upon Mary. Together they make a convincingly ordinary couple in this sharply rendered portrait of downward mobility and self-acceptance.

A classic, must for serious students of film & Cinematography.
This film is a silent epic. There are shots in it that wouldn't be approached again for decades; inventive use of miniatures etc. A sweeping hard luck story and an amazing film that will school even the most committed cineaste.