King Vidor

King Vidor (1894-1982), American motion-picture director, known as a creative and ground-breaking figure in the early decades of United States cinema. Born in Galveston, Texas, Vidor was fascinated with movies as a child and, while still in school, he worked in the local nickelodeon. He soon began shooting news footage of local events and selling his films to newsreel companies. In 1915, with his wife, actor Florence Vidor, he went to Hollywood, California, to try his hand at professional filmmaking. Florence quickly became a well-regarded performer in silent films, while Vidor acted in small roles and wrote screenplays before finding work as director of a few short comedies. In 1919 he moved to feature-length films, directing his wife in several motion pictures. Eventually they formed their own production unit, Florence Vidor Productions, for which he made three films in 1922, but both the partnership and the marriage foundered, and in 1924 Vidor signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), where he was to remain for the next 20 years.

At MGM he made the impressive antiwar film The Big Parade (1925), which earned him a reputation as one of the finest directors in the film industry and was the first of a string of films that helped to make MGM Hollywood's leading studio. His 1928 film The Crowd, built around the theme of the individual lost among the masses, won Vidor his first Academy Award nomination and is still widely regarded as his greatest film. He then directed several silent comedies, and in 1929 he made his first sound film, Hallelujah. This musical drama was praised for its effective and natural use of sound. Other significant Vidor films of the next decade include Street Scene (1931), The Champ (1931), Our Daily Bread (1934), Stella Dallas (1937), The Citadel (1938), and Northwest Passage (1940). In 1944 he made An American Romance, a saga of a steelworker's rise to wealth and power, but MGM cut it heavily, and Vidor left the studio, working from that point on as an independent.

For American producer David O. Selznick, Vidor made the most important picture of his later career, Duel in the Sun (1946), a melodrama about a family power struggle in the American West, which showed Vidor at the peak of his directorial powers. His next major film was stylistically closer to his more abstract early work: The Fountainhead (1949), based on Russian American author Ayn Rand's novel about a stubbornly idealistic architect. Vidor's output lessened in the 1950s, but his War and Peace (1956) is noted for its elegance and restraint. The spectacle Solomon and Sheba (1959) was not a popular success, and thereafter Vidor spent much of his time teaching and lecturing, occasionally making cameo appearances in films. He had one substantial role as an actor in Love and Money (1982).

Although Vidor was nominated a number of times for the Academy Award for best director, he never won. In 1979, however, he was honored with a special Academy Award for “his incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator.” His autobiography, A Tree is a Tree, was published in 1953 and his reflection on cinema, King Vidor on Film Making, was published in 1972.