King Wallis Vidor: February 8, 1894 – November 1, 1982 

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✪ King Wallis Vidor was an American film director, film producer, and screenwriter whose 67-year film-making career successfully spanned the silent and sound eras. His works are distinguished by a vivid, humane, and sympathetic depiction of contemporary social issues. Considered an auteur director, Vidor approached multiple genres and allowed the subject matter to determine the style; often pressing the limits of film-making conventions.

Inner strength and personal expressiveness in the midst of conflict, both physical and social, was a theme that ran through many of  Vidor’s films, from 1925’s The Great Parade through Our Daily Bread (1934), Stella Dallas (1937), Northwest Passage (1940), Duel In the Sun (1946), The Fountainhead (1949), Ruby Gentry (1952) and War and Peace (1956).  As testament to the human spirit, Vidor’s protagonists almost always emerged stronger from their struggles.

Vidor’s earlier films tend to identify with the common people in a collective struggle, whereas his later works place individualists at the center of his narratives.

His most acclaimed and successful film in the silent era was The Big Parade (1925). However, Vidor’s sound films of the 1940s and early 1950s arguably represent his richest output. Among his finest works are Northwest Passage (1940), Comrade X (1940), An American Romance (1944), and Duel in the Sun (1946). His dramatic depictions of the American western landscape endow nature with a sinister force where his characters struggle for survival and redemption.

Vidor was considered an “actors’ director” and many of his players received Academy Award nominations or awards, among them Wallace Beery, Robert Donat, Barbara Stanwyck, Jennifer Jones, Anne Shirley and Lillian Gish.

Vidor was nominated five times by the Academy Awards for Best Director. In 1979, he was awarded an Honorary Academy Award for his “incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator.” Additionally, he won eight national and international film awards during his career, including the Screen Directors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 1957.

Vidor was born into a well-to-do family in Galveston, Texas, the son of Kate (née Wallis) and Charles Shelton Vidor, a lumber importer and mill owner. His paternal grandfather, Károly Vidor, was a refugee of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, who adopted the Americanized named “Charles” when he settled in Galveston in the early 1850s, and fought for the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Vidor’s mother, Kate Wallis was of Scotch-English descent and a relative of the second wife of noted frontiersman and politician Davy Crockett. The “King” in King Vidor’s name is no sobriquet, but his given name in honor of his mother’s favorite brother, King Wallis.

At the age of six, Vidor witnessed the devastation of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900 firsthand. Based on that formative experience, he published a historical memoir of the disaster titled “Southern Storm” for the May 1935 issue of Esquire magazine. In an interview with the Directors Guild of America (DGA) in 1980 Vidor recalled the horrors of the hurricane’s effects:

All the wooden structures of the town were flattened … the streets were piled high with dead people, and I took the first tugboat out. On the boat I went up into the bow and saw that the bay was filled with dead bodies, horses, animals, people, everything.

Near the end of production for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s The Wizard of Oz, Vidor was called in to direct the remaining scenes set in Kansas. His contributions include the cyclone sequence and the musical number, “Over the Rainbow.”

Because of DGA guidelines that give sole credit to the hired director, Vidor received no official acknowledgement for his most viewed work; the black and white scenes of The Wizard of Oz (1939). While Victor Fleming was called away to direct Gone With the Wind, Vidor shot Judy Garland singing “Over the Rainbow” from angles that underlined the sense of yearning.

Vidor was introduced to Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science by his mother at a very early age. Vidor would endow his films with the moral precepts of the faith, a “blend of pragmatic self-help and religious mysticism.”

As a boy, Vidor became interested in photographing and developing portraits of his relatives with a Box Brownie camera. Vidor attended grade school at the Peacock Military Academy, located in San Antonio, Texas.

At the age of sixteen, Vidor dropped out of a private high school in Maryland and returned to Galveston to work as a nickelodeon ticket taker and projectionist. As an 18-year-old amateur newsreel cameraman Vidor began to acquire skills as a film documentarian. His first movie was based on footage taken of a local hurricane (not to be confused with the 1900 Galveston hurricane). He sold footage from a Houston army parade to a newsreel outfit (titled The Grand Military Parade) and made his first fictional movie, a semi-docucomedy concerning a local automobile race, In Tow (1913).

Vidor also worked as an “extra” or made cameo appearances during his film career. An early film still exists from an unidentified Hotex Motion Picture Company silent short made in 1914, when he was only 19 years old (he wears a Keystone Cop costume and false beard)

In 1914 in a partnership with vaudevillian and movie entrepreneur Edward Sedgwick, Vidor formed the Hotex Motion Picture Company (“HO” for Houston, “TEX” for Texas) to produce low-budget one- or two-reelers. The enterprise garnered a national press release in Moving Picture World announcing its formation. However, all of the shorts produced by HOTEX are now considered lost films. Only still photos survive from these comedy-adventures, for which HOTEX failed to collect any royalties.

In 1915, Vidor married his first wife, actress Florence Arto Vidor and along with business partner Sedgwick, moved to California in search of employment in the emerging Hollywood movie industry. He arrived on the West Coast virtually penniless.

Based on a screen test arranged by Texas actress Corinne Griffith in Hollywood, Florence Vidor procured a contract with Vitagraph Studios, marking the start of her own successful movie career. Vidor obtained minor roles acting at Vitagraph and Inceville Studios (the spy drama The Intrigue (1916) survives, in which he plays a chauffeur). As a low-level office clerk at Universal, Vidor was fired for trying to present his own scripts under the pseudonym “Charles K. Wallis,” but soon was rehired by the studio to write screenplays for shorts.

Beginning in 1915, Vidor served as screenwriter and director on a series of shorts about the rehabilitation of juvenile delinquents by social reformer Judge Willis Brown. Written and produced by Brown, Vidor filmed ten of the 20-film series, a project in which Vidor declared he had “deeply believed.” Only a single reel from Bud’s Recruit is known to survive, the earliest extant footage from Vidor’s film directing career.

In 1918, at the age of 24, Vidor directed his first Hollywood feature, The Turn in the Road (1919), a film presentation of a Christian Science evangelical tract sponsored by a group of doctors and dentists affiliated as the independent Brentwood Film Corporation. Vidor recalls of his first foray into Hollywood film-making:

“I wrote a script [The Turn in the Road] and sent it around … and nine doctors put up $1,000 each … and it was a success. That was the beginning. I didn’t have time to go to college.”

Vidor would make three more films for the Brentwood Corporation, all of which featured as yet unknown comedienne Zasu Pitts, who the director had discovered on a Hollywood streetcar. Vidor ended his association with the Brentwood Group in 1920.

King Vidor next embarked on a major project in collaboration with a New York-based film exhibitor First National. In a bid to compete with the increasingly dominant Hollywood studios, First National advanced Vidor funding to build a small film production facility in Santa Monica, California, dubbed Vidor Village. At the opening of Vidor Village, King Vidor issued a founding statement entitled “Creed and Pledge” that set forth moral anodynes for film-making, inspired by his Christian Science ideals:

His “manifesto” was published in Variety magazine’s January 1920 issue:I

-I believe in the motion picture that carries a message to humanity.

–I believe in the picture that will help humanity to free itself from the shackles of fear and suffering that have so long bound it in chains.

–I will not knowingly produce a picture that contains anything that I do not believe to be absolutely true to human nature, anything that could injure anyone or anything unclean in thought or action.

–Nor will I deliberately portray anything to cause fright, suggest fear, glorify mischief, condone cruelty or extenuate malice.

–I will never picture evil or wrong, except to prove the fallacy of its line.

–So long as I direct pictures, I will make only those founded on the principles of right, and I will endeavor to draw upon the inexhaustible source of good for my stories, my guidance and my inspiration.

Redolent with the precepts of the “Creed and Pledge,” the executives at First National were not pleased with Vidor. They demanded entertainmentwhich would garner a mass share of box-office receipts so as to fill their theaters.

By the early 1920s, Florence Vidor had emerged as a major film star in her own right and wished to pursue her career independent of her spouse. The couple divorced in 1926, and shortly thereafter Florence married violinist Jascha Heifetz. Vidor would soon marry model and future film actress Eleanor Boardman.

Vidor Village went bankrupt in 1922 and Vidor, now without a studio, offered his services to the top executives in the film industry.

Film producer Louis B. Mayer engaged Vidor to direct Broadway actress Laurette Taylor in a film version of her famous juvenile role as Peg O’Connell in Peg o’ My Heart.

Vidor’s yeoman service to Louis B. Mayer secured him entrée into Goldwyn Pictures in 1923, a holding soon to be amalgamated with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Samuel Goldwyn and other film producers of the early 1920s favored “literary” texts as the basis for movie screenplays.

Vidor’s typically “routine” movies of this period include Wine of Youth (1924) and Proud Flesh (1925) emphasize the “time-honored virtues” of familial and matrimonial loyalty, even among the liberated Jazz Age flappers. King Vidor’s tenure as a studio stringer was at an end. His next feature would transform his career and have a resounding impact on the late silent film era: The Big Parade.

In 1925 Vidor directed The Big Parade, among the most acclaimed films of the silent era, and a tremendous commercial success. The Big Parade, a war romance starring John Gilbert, established Vidor as one of MGM’s top studio directors for the next decade. Vidor’s next film would be a startling departure from romantic entertainment to an exposure of the “cruel deception of the American dream.”

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Vidor’s The Crowd resonates with other populist films of the era as a “pitiless study” of a young working man’s descent into isolation and loss of morale who is ultimately crushed by the urban “assembly line,” while his wife struggles to maintain some order in their relationship. Though the most uncharacteristic of Vidor’s pictures, it was his personal favorite. The picture, he said “came out of my guts.”

Employing relatively unknown actors, the film had modest box office success, but was widely praised by critics. In 1928, Vidor received his first Oscar nomination for Best Director. MGM executives, who had been content to allow Vidor an “experimental” film, found the bleak social outlook of The Crowd troubling; reflected in their one-year delay in releasing the film. However, The Crowd has since been recognized as one of the “masterpieces” of the late silent era of cinema.

In early 1928, Vidor and his spouse Eleanor Boardman visited France in the company of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. There, Vidor mixed with literary expatriates, among them James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. Vidor was shaken by news that US film studios and theaters were converting to sound technology and he returned quickly to Hollywood, concerned about the impact on silent cinema.

Vidor’s first sound film Hallelujah (1929) combines a dramatic rural tragedy with a documentary-like depiction of black agrarian community of sharecroppers in the South. A quasi-musical, Vidor’s innovative integration of sound into the scenes, including jazz and gospel adds immensely to the cinematic effect.

Vidor, a third-generation Texan, encountered black workers employed at his father’s sawmills when he was a child, and there he became familiar with their spirituals. The dueling themes of sin and salvation- blues and spirituals- inspired the dramatic content Vidor frequently found in his films.

“The environment of my youth in my father’s East Texas sawmill towns had left many indelible memories” he wrote of the Black men and women employed by his father, Charles Shelton Vidor, a prosperous lumberman in the Pineywoods of Texas and Louisiana.

“The sincerity and fervor of their religious expression intrigued me, as did the honest simplicity of their sexual drives,” wrote Vidor, who had attended several river baptisms as a boy. He’d also poked his head inside the raucous barrelhouses built in remote logging camps to keep the workers entertained.

Hallelujah enjoyed an overwhelmingly positive response in the United States and internationally, praising Vidor’s stature as a film artist and as a humane social commentator. Vidor was nominated for Best Director at the Academy Awards of 1929.

The Stranger’s Return (1933) and Our Daily Bread (1934) are Vidor Depression era films which present protagonists who flee the social and economic perils of urban America; plagued by high unemployment and labor unrest to seek a lost rural identity or make a new start in the agrarian countryside.

Vidor continued his “back to the land” theme in his 1934 Our Daily Bread. The picture is the second film of a trilogy he referred to as “War, Wheat and Steel.” His 1925 film The Big Parade was “war” and his 1944 An American Romance was “steel.” Our Daily Bread – “wheat” – is a sequel to his silent masterpiece The Crowd (1928).

In 1937 Vidor made his final and most profitable picture with Samuel Goldwyn: Stella Dallas. A remake of Goldwyn’s most successful silent movie, the 1925 Stella Dallas, also an adaption of Olive Higgins Prouty’s popular novel. Barbara Stanwyck stars as the eponymous “martyr of motherhood” in the sound re-make. Stanwyck’s performance, reportedly without undue oversight by Vidor, is outstanding:

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Despite the success of the film it would be his last with Goldwyn, as Vidor had tired of the producer’s outbursts on the set. Vidor emphatically declined to ever work with the “mercurial” producer again.

In the 1930s Vidor became a leading advocate for the formation of the Screen Directors Guild (SDG). As the SDG’s first president. Vidor failed to bring the SDG into affiliation with the American Federation of Labor (AFL) which had already organized actors and screenwriters (deemed a “Bolshevik” political front by anti-communist critics).

In 1939, Vidor would also direct the final three weeks of primary filming for The Wizard of Oz (1939).

MGM enlisted Vidor to assume artistic and technical responsibilities, some of which went uncredited. The most outstanding of these was his shooting of the black-and-white “Kansas” sequences in The Wizard of Oz, including the notable musical production in which Dorothy Judy Garland sings “Over the Rainbow.”

Vidor’s three films for Warner Brothers Studios: The Fountainhead (1949), Beyond the Forest (1949) and Lightning Strikes Twice (1951), were crafted to reconcile the excessive and amoral violence displayed in his Duel in the Sun (1946) with a constructive presentation of American individualism that comported with his Christian Science precepts of morality.

In 1944 Vidor, a Republican, joined the anti-communist Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.

In 1953, Vidor’s autobiography entitled A Tree is a Tree was published and widely praised. Film critic Dan Callahan provides this excerpt the book:

“I believe that every one of us knows that his major job on earth is to make some contribution, no matter how small, to this inexorable movement of human progress. The march of man, as I see it, is not from the cradle to the grave. It is instead, from the animal or physical to the spiritual. The airplane, the atom bomb, radio, radar, television are all evidences of the urge to overcome the limitations of the physical in favor of the freedom of the spirit. Man, whether he is conscious of it or not, knows deep inside that he has a definite upward mission to perform during the time of his life span. He knows that the purpose of his life cannot be stated in terms of ultimate oblivion.”

Contrary to his aesthetic aversion to adapting historical spectaculars, in 1955 Vidor accepted independent Italian producer Dino De Laurentis’s offer to create a screen adaption of Leo Tolstoy’s vast historical romance of the late-Napoleonic era, War and Peace (1869). The final cut, at three hours, was necessarily a highly compressed version of the literary work.

In the mid-1960s Vidor crafted a 26-minute 16mm movie that sets forth his philosophy on the nature of individual perception. Narrated by the director, and quoting from theologian-philosophers Jonathan Edwards and Bishop Berkeley, the images serve to complement the abstract ideas he sets forth. The film is a discourse on subjective idealism, which maintains that the material world is an illusion, existing only in the human mind: humanity creates the world they experience.

Vidor’s documentary The Metaphor consists of a number of interviews between the director and painter Andrew Wyeth. Wyeth had contacted Vidor in the late 1970s expressing admiration for his work. Considering the film only a work in progress at the time of his death, the documentary had its premiere at the American Film Institute in 1980. It was never given a general release and is rarely screened.

In a 1970 interview he remarked, “I am a camera. I look at the world.” Nominated five times as best director, Vidor never won a competitive Oscar, though he received an honorary Academy Award in 1979. 

Vidor died at age 88 of a heart attack at his ranch in Paso Robles, California, on November 1, 1982.

His remains were cremated and scattered on the grounds of his ranch. ✪