King Vidor - The Crowd [1928] torrent

As was the case with every film project that he cared deeply about, filmmaker King Vidor had to fight long and hard with his studio bosses to get The Crowd produced. Though Vidor's parent studio MGM was certain that this simple story of everyday people would take a bath at the box-office, the film earned back twice its cost. The story concentrates on John Sims, brilliantly played by James Murray, an extra boosted to stardom by Vidor. Born on the fourth of July in the year 1900, John convinced that he's destined to be a man of importance. 27 years later, however, Sims is merely one of the faceless crowd, an underpaid clerk in a huge New York office building. On a blind date, John meets Mary (Eleanor Boardman), a likeable if not overly attractive young lady (Boardman, the wife of director Vidor, balked at the notion of departing from her usual glamorous roles; Vidor prevailed, and as a result the actress delivered what is now considered her finest performance). John and Mary are eventually married, raising two children in their tiny New York tenement (complete with a balky toilet-the first time that this particular bathroom fixture ever appeared in an American film). As John's dreams of glory go unfulfilled, he becomes bitter and argumentative, while Mary grows old before her time. Just when John wins $500 in a slogan contest, tragedy strikes unexpectedly when the Sims' youngest child is killed in a traffic accident. Haunted by the memory of his child, John is unable to function properly at his job, and is soon fired. In despair, Sims contemplates suicide, only to be shaken back to reality by his son, who, oblivious to John's grief and disillusionment, declares proudly that he wants to be just like his daddy when he grows up. By chance, John gets a job as a street huckster for a local department store. Though both John and Mary know that this "triumph" is transitory, at least the family is together again, and at least they're reasonably happy. As the camera pulls back, back, back in a packed movie theatre, we leave John Sims just where we found him-one of The Crowd. At the behest of MGM, Vidor reluctantly filmed an idiotic alternate ending, wherein the Sims family, having inherited a fortune, are seen living in the lap of luxury. This finale was hooted off the screen wherever it was shown; thus, current prints of the film contain Vidor's original, ambivalent ending. A deceptively "small" film, The Crowd was assembled on as large a budget and with as much production polish as any "big" MGM picture. In 1934, Vidor produced a sequel with his own funds, Our Daily Bread. Alas, James Murray, the actor catapulted to the Big Time in The Crowd, was not a part of the project. A headstrong, irresponsible man, Murray had squandered the chance offered him by Vidor, and had descended into drunken dereliction. Unlike the hero in The Crowd, there was no one to pull James Murray back when, in 1936, he fell off a pier and drowned.

General
Complete name : The Crowd.avi
Format : AVI
Format/Info : Audio Video Interleave
File size : 1.20 GiB
Duration : 1h 43mn
Overall bit rate : 1 667 Kbps
Writing application : FairUse Wizard - http://fairusewizard.com
Writing library : The best and REALLY easy backup tool
Video #0
ID : 0
Format : MPEG-4 Visual
Format profile : AdvancedSimple@L5
Format settings, BVOP : Yes
Format settings, QPel : No
Format settings, GMC : No warppoints
Format settings, Matrix : Default (MPEG)
Muxing mode : Packed bitstream
Codec ID : XVID
Codec ID/Hint : XviD
Duration : 1h 43mn
Bit rate : 1 527 Kbps
Width : 608 pixels
Height : 448 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 4:3
Frame rate : 29.970 fps
Resolution : 24 bits
Colorimetry : 4:2:0
Scan type : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.187
Stream size : 1.10 GiB (92%)
Writing library : XviD 1.2.0.dev47 (UTC 2006-11-01)
Audio #1
ID : 1
Format : MPEG Audio
Format version : Version 1
Format profile : Layer 3
Codec ID : 55
Codec ID/Hint : MP3
Duration : 1h 43mn
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 128 Kbps
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Sampling rate : 48.0 KHz
Resolution : 16 bits
Stream size : 94.6 MiB (8%)
Alignment : Aligned on interleaves
Interleave, duration : 33 ms (1.00 video frame)
Interleave, preload duration : 504 ms
Writing library : LAME3.97
Encoding settings : -m j -V 4 -q 2 -lowpass 17 -b 128

IMDB: tt0018806

Silent with English intertitles; Spanish and Portuguese subtitles

My rip of a Chinese DVD