Silent Film Festival: The Crowd

Wednesday, September 2 at 7 PM

The fourth annual Kenworthy Silent Film Festival begins with a stirring, seldom seen masterpiece THE CROWD (1928), directed by King Vidor, in a stunning new 4k restoration from Blackhawk Films. KPAC is proud to engage composer Isabella Morrill in a commission for a new score to be performed live with the Washington-Symphony Orchestra, under the artistic direction of Danh Pham.

KPAC last collaborated with this creative team to produce Morrill’s new score for F.W. Murnau’s SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS that premiered in 2024. THE CROWD is a perfect companion piece to Murnau’s sweeping, poetic vision of modern life and the mythos of marital consecration. In the balance between archetypes and individuals, Vidor’s characters carry more weight as real people. They smoke, fiddle, and fidget like young urbanites you might actually know. Representative of a broad class of modern office workers, protagonist Joe Sims comes into focus with his own material ambitions, vanities, and foibles–paving the way for a new mode of realist drama later popularized by playwright Arthur Miller.

Previously unknown as an MGM studio lot extra, lead actor James Murray does tremendous work advancing his character’s dual–and sometimes dueling–prerogatives as both a type and a tragic individual. With a capable cast that includes an exquisitely textured performance from Eleanor Boardman playing the everyman’s wife, Mary Sims, Vidor forces a hard, honest look into one family’s struggle, sacrifice, and consolation in the big city. In the world they inhabit, their problems don’t dissolve into woozy dreams. Flourishes of Expressionist set design notwithstanding, this movie asserts a wholly American, unsentimental style of storytelling about a nation of people fed on impossible promises that impoverish the mind of other possibilities.

THE CROWD is the most important American-directed drama from the silent era, and its influence is everywhere–shot-for-shot tributes from Orson Welles (CITIZEN KANE), Billy Wilder (THE APARTMENT), and The Coen Brothers (THE HUDSUCKER PROXY). Don’t miss this rare opportunity to see it on the big screen with a new score that engages this legacy while welcoming a new, contemporary appraisal of Vidor’s vision of life in urban America.

Not Rated | 1 hr 38 min | Tickets: $20 Adult / $12 Student / $50 Festival Pass