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The birth of a life is no less a momentous event than the celebration of the birth of a nation, thus "the old go-getting kid" delivered on July 4th of the new century. Great expectations from the crib onward, the boy's great shock finds him suspended on geometric steps between the curious mob below and the dead father off-screen. New York City receives the adult protagonist, the eagerness and entitlement of the Twenties bubbling in James Murray's Everyman mug, "all I need is an opportunity." The camera climbs a skyscraper and cranes across the office to find him at one of the countless desks, a shot variously remembered by Lubitsch and Ozu and Wilder and Welles. Blind date at Coney Island, honeymoon in Niagara Falls, married life with the exhausted flapper (Eleanor Boardman) at the center of the urban anthill. "Everything's goin' to be roses... when my ship comes in." "Your ship? A worm must be towing it down from the North Pole!" Expressionistic images alternate with documentary views, formalist constructions bristle with emotion, the monumental bleeds into the mundane—of such contradictions King Vidor forges an American masterpiece. A life's progression, a fellow "out of step," the clown he once mocked is his future. Shaving cream on the earlobe when the in-laws visit, sand on the cake during the beach picnic, a hundred domestic details to anchor the grand metaphysical vision. Sturges in Christmas in July takes up the advertising slogan's shifts in fortune, jubilation and tragedy back to back in the city that won't hush for a dying child. The finale equates vaudeville house and movie theater for the integration of broken dreamers, a wholeness at once joyous and desperate. "The crowd laughs with you always... but it will cry with you for only a day." Our Daily Bread is Vidor's unofficial sequel, H.M. Pulham, Esq. a pensive remake, The Fountainhead a contrasting companion piece. With Bert Roach, Estelle Clark, Dell Henderson, Lucy Beaumont, and Warner Richmond. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |