Live accompaniment by Music Box house organist Dennis Scott | Programmed and co-presented by the Chicago Film Society  John Sims’s life begins auspiciously enough, born on the fourth of July at the dawn of a new century, his father confidently predicting big things for his future. Just two scenes later, an adolescent John is grieving Dad’s premature death, an early sign of the pains and frustrations to come. In the entertainment industry, quotidian disappointment has never made for boffo business, and it was only thanks to the success of his war epic The Big Parade (one of the highest grossing films ever at the time) that director and writer King Vidor was able to get a project as decidedly unconventional as The Crowd bankrolled by a major studio. Vidor proceeds to follow his ostensible hero (James Murray, purposely selected like much of the cast for being unknown) through the kind of scattered milestones (marriage, children, fleeting professional success), squandered opportunities, and personal tragedies that make up most of our lives. Taking a page from his artier European contemporaries’ recent stylistic experiments, Vidor envisioned The Crowd’s comparatively mundane narrative as an expressionist tour de force, throwing in some proto-vérité location scenes and bombastic mobile camerawork to prove the common dramas of daily life make for cinema as compelling as anything out there. 35mm from Warner Bros | Not available on disc or streaming!Preceded by: “Canned Thrills” (John L. Hawkinson, 1927) – 7 min – 16mm