King Vidor Filmography

Hollywood

Synopsis: Produced for Britain's Thames television in 1979, Hollywood is a 13-part overview of the silent film era, lovingly assembled by historian Kevin Brownlow and David Gill. Each episode runs one hour, and each concentrates on a separate aspect of the art of the silent cinema. Chapter titles include Read More

Love and Money

Actors: Ray Sharkey, Ornella Muti, Klaus Kinski, Armand Assante, King Vidor

Synopsis: James Toback wrote and directed this typically intense and idiosyncratic satiric thriller. Byron Levin (Ray Sharkey) is an investment planner who has grown tired of his job and is bored by his relationship with his girlfriend Vicky (Susan Heldfond). When Frederick Stockheinz (Klaus Kinski), an Read More

Filmmakers: King Vidor

Synopsis: A video profile of director King Vidor--his works include The Big Parade, War and Peace and Our Daily Bread. ~ All Movie Guide Read More

30 Years of Fun

Synopsis: The fourth of Oscar-winning short-subject director Youngson's comedy compilations (the earlier ones were Golden Age of Comedy, When Comedy was King, and Days of Thrills and Laughter) is, amazingly, almost as full and fresh as those earlier efforts, containing highlights from such silent comedy Read More

Confessions of an Opium Eater

Synopsis: Very freely based upon the book by Thomas DeQuincey, Confessions of an Opium Eater is set in San Francisco during the Tong Wars of the 1800s. Lotus is one of a group of women kidnapped from China and brought to the United States, where they are to be traded in exchange for precious opium. Read More

Solomon and Sheba

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Yul Brynner, Gina Lollobrigida, George Sanders, Marisa Pavan, David Farrar

Synopsis: Romance, treachery, intrigue and spiritual awakenings abound in the Biblical film adaptation of Solomon and Sheba. Trouble begins between two brothers when poet Solomon (Yul Brenner) is chosen to be next in line to the throne by King David of Israel. His warrior brother Adonijah (George Sanders) Read More

War and Peace

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Mel Ferrer, Vittorio Gassman, Anita Ekberg

Synopsis: War and Peace is a commendable attempt to boil down Tolstoy's long, difficult novel into 208 minutes' screen time. In recreating the the social and personal upheavals attending Napoleon's 1812 invasion of Russia, $6 million was shelled out by coproducers Carlo Ponti, Dino de Laurentiis and Read More

Man Without a Star

Crew: Director

Actors: Kirk Douglas, Jeanne Crain, William Campbell, Claire Trevor, Richard Boone

Synopsis: In this deceptively titled and paced Western, Kirk Douglas shines in the hyper-macho role of Dempsey Rae, a good-natured drifter with a mysterious past up from Texas, a top hand with a gun, a horse, or a herd, who can even play the banjo and sing. He rides into a Wyoming town in a freight car, in Read More

Ruby Gentry

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Jennifer Jones, Charlton Heston, Karl Malden, Tom Tully, James Anderson, Bernard Phillips

Synopsis: Jennifer Jones offers a virtual reprise of her sultry performance in Duel in the Sun as the titular heroine of Ruby Gentry. Born into a poor-white-trash Southern family, Ruby intends to improve her lot by marrying into wealth. Her casual beau Boake Tackman (Charlton Heston) considers Ruby unfit Read More

Japanese War Bride

Crew: Director

Actors: Shirley Yamaguchi, Don Taylor, Cameron Mitchell, Marie Windsor, James Bell

Synopsis: Filmmaker King Vidor does wonders with the unpromising material at hand in Japanese War Bride. Don Taylor stars as Jim Sterling, a Korean war officer who is wounded and hospitalized in Japan. Sterling falls in love with his Japanese nurse Tae Shimizu (Shirley Yamaguchi), eventually marrying her. Read More

Lightning Strikes Twice

Crew: Director

Actors: Richard Todd, Ruth Roman, Mercedes McCambridge, Zachary Scott, Frank Conroy

Synopsis: In Lightning Strikes Twice, Ruth Roman stars a Shelley Carnes, a stage actress who champions the cause of Richard Trevelyan (Richard Todd), whom she believes has been falsely accused of murdering his wife. Freed on a technicality, Trevelyan is nonetheless adjudged guilty in the court of public Read More

Beyond the Forest

Crew: Director

Actors: Bette Davis, Joseph Cotten, David Brian, Ruth Roman, Regis Toomey, Minor Watson

Synopsis: "What a dump!" That's the classic line delivered by Bette Davis at the halfway point of Beyond the Forest, her final Warner Bros. effort of the 1940s. Some Davis devotees feel as though this vituperative utterance is the high point of an otherwise turgid melodrama; others consider the line a Read More

It's a Great Feeling

Actors: Dennis Morgan, Jack Carson, Bill Goodwin, Irving Bacon

Synopsis: Billy Wilder's future partner I.A.L. Diamond concocted the storyline for this Dennis Morgan/Jack Carson/Doris Day tunefest. Morgan and Carson, Warner Bros.' answer to Bing Crosby and Bob Hope, appear as themselves. Attempting to line up a director for their next picture, the boys find themselves Read More

The Fountainhead

Crew: Director

Actors: Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, Raymond Massey, Kent Smith, Henry Hull, Robert Douglas

Synopsis: The hero of Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead is Howard Roark (Gary Cooper), a fiercely independent architect obviously patterned after Frank Lloyd Wright. Rather than compromise his ideals, Roark takes menial work as a quarryman to finance his projects. He falls in love with heiress Dominique (Patricia Neal Read More

On Our Merry Way

Crew: Director

Actors: Burgess Meredith, Paulette Goddard, Fred MacMurray, James Stewart, Hugh Herbert, Dorothy Lamour

Synopsis: Also known as A Miracle Can Happen, On Our Merry Way is a multipart comedy linked by inquiring reporter Burgess Meredith. It is Meredith's job to interview several people, asking them what effect children have had on their lives. First he checks with two itinerant musicians (James Stewart and Henry Fonda Read More

Duel in the Sun

Crew: Director

Actors: Griff Barnett, Jennifer Jones, Gregory Peck, Charles Bickford, Joseph Cotten, Sidney Blackmer, Lionel Barrymore, Harry Carey, Lillian Gish

Synopsis: In David O. Selznick's Duel in the Sun, Jennifer Jones stars as half-breed Pearl Chavez, whom everyone has tagged as a "bad girl" foredoomed to an unhappy end. She is taken into the home of wealthy, greedy rancher McCanles (Lionel Barrymore) and his kindly wife Laura Belle (Lillian Gish), who'd Read More

An American Romance

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Brian Donlevy, Ann Richards, Walter Abel, John Qualen, Horace McNally

Synopsis: Director King Vidor intended An American Romance as the third entry in his "War, Wheat and Steel" trilogy (the War had been covered in The Big Parade, while Wheat was dispensed with in Our Daily Bread). Two years in production, the film cost nearly $3 million-little of which actually shows up on Read More

H.M. Pulham, Esq.

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Hedy Lamarr, Robert Young, Ruth Hussey, Charles Coburn, Van Heflin

Synopsis: MGM was doing so well in 1941 that it could afford the occasional "prestige" film with little box-office appeal. Based on the novel by J.P. Marquand, H.M. Pulham, Esq., stars Robert Young as a successful but stuffy Boston businessman. The glimmer of sadness in Young's eyes indicates that his Read More

Comrade X

Crew: Director

Actors: Clark Gable, Hedy Lamarr, Oscar Homolka, Felix Bressart, Eve Arden

Synopsis: A half-hearted derivation of Ninotchka, Comrade X stars Clark Gable as an American news reporter stationed in Russia. Gable is actually the mysterious Comrade X, who has been smuggling provocative stories about the crumbling Soviet government out of the country. Threatened with exposure by a hotel Read More

Northwest Passage

Crew: Director

Actors: Spencer Tracy, Robert Young, Walter Brennan, Ruth Hussey, Nat Pendleton

Synopsis:
Kenneth Roberts' fact-based novel Northwest Passage would seem too raw and explicit a book to be considered for an MGM film adaptation-much less one in Technicolor. Amazingly, MGM retained many of the grim episodes from the Roberts' novel, though - thanks to the Hays Code - most are discussed Read More

The Citadel

Crew: Director

Actors: Robert Donat, Rosalind Russell, Ralph Richardson, Rex Harrison, Emlyn Williams

Synopsis: Robert Donat stars as Dr. Andrew Manson in this adaptation of A.J. Cronin's best-selling novel. Manson devotes himself to treating the residents of a poverty-stricken Welsh mining community. Tuberculosis runs rampant in the village, and Manson is determined to help stem its tide and bring good Read More

Stella Dallas

Crew: Director

Actors: Barbara Stanwyck, John Boles, Anne Shirley, Barbara O'Neil, Alan Hale

Synopsis: Produced by Sam Goldwyn, this second film version of Olive Higgins Prouty's Stella Dallas is by far the best. The combined talents of Goldwyn, director King Vidor and star Barbara Stanwyck lift this property far above the level of mere soap opera. Stanwyck is perfectly cast as Stella Martin, the Read More

The Texas Rangers

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Fred MacMurray, Jack Oakie, Jean Parker, Lloyd Nolan, Edward Ellis

Synopsis: Made with the full cooperation of the real-life Texas Rangers (who never met a publicity gimmick they didn't like), this sprawling historical western stars Fred MacMurray as Jim Hawkins, one of three outlaws working the Lone Star State in the years following the Civil War. Both Hawkins and his Read More

The Wedding Night

Crew: Director

Actors: Gary Cooper, Anna Sten, Helen Vinson, Ralph Bellamy, Sig Rumann

Synopsis: In this Samuel Goldwyn production directed by King Vidor, the studio's intent was to make Russian-born Anna Sten a star, but it didn't succeed. Sten plays Manya Nowak, a Polish farm girl attracted to Tony Barrett (Gary Cooper), a novelist with writer's block who has retreated to a Connecticut Read More

So Red the Rose

Crew: Director

Actors: Margaret Sullavan, Walter Connolly, Janet Beecher, Harry Ellerbe, Robert Cummings

Synopsis: So Red the Rose is a Civil War drama that plays like a warm-up for Gone With the Wind--and, unlike Wind, has two genuine Southerners in the leading roles. Margaret Sullavan is the aristocratic mistress of a sprawling Southern plantation, whose sheltered lifestyle is rent asunder by the War. Read More

Our Daily Bread

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Karen Morley, Tom Keene, John Qualen, Barbara Pepper, Addison Richards

Synopsis: Unable to secure Hollywood-studio backing for his Depression-era agrarian drama Our Daily Bread, director King Vidor financed the picture himself, with the eleventh-hour assistance of Charles Chaplin. Intended as a sequel to Vidor's silent classic The Crowd (1928) the film casts Tom Keene and Karen Morley Read More

The Stranger's Return

Crew: Director

Actors: Lionel Barrymore, Miriam Hopkins, Franchot Tone, Stuart Erwin, Irene Hervey

Synopsis: Based on a novel by Phil (State Fair) Stong, The Stranger's Return is one of the most accomplished projects of director King Vidor, and one of the few MGM films of its period to display anything like a "personal touch." Miriam Hopkins stars as a bored Manhattanite who visits her family farm in Read More

Bird of Paradise

Crew: Director

Actors: Dolores Del Rio, Joel McCrea, John Halliday, Lon Chaney, Jr., Richard "Skeets" Gallagher

Synopsis: Having inherited the warhorse stage piece Bird of Paradise from his predecessor William LeBaron, RKO Radio production chief David O. Selznick opted to do the property up brown, hoping to transform the Richard Walton Tully original into RKO's "prestige" offering of 1932. Joel McCrea stars as a Read More

Cynara

Crew: Director

Actors: Ronald Colman, Kay Francis, Phyllis Barry, Henry Stephenson, Viva Tattersall

Synopsis: King Vidor directed this screen adaptation of the novel An Imperfect Lover by Robert Gore-Brown, which had also made the transition to the stage. Jim Warlock (Ronald Colman) is a successful British lawyer who has always displayed a solid and conservative nature in his business associations, his Read More

The Mask of Fu Manchu

Crew: Director

Actors: Boris Karloff, Lewis Stone, Karen Morley, Charles Starrett, Myrna Loy

Synopsis: Boris Karloff stars as the villainous Dr. Fu Manchu in this wild and wooly -- and wildly racist -- adventure yarn, based on Sax Rohmer's fiction about the personification of the "yellow peril." Sir Nayland Smith (Lewis Stone) of the British Secret Service recruits Sir Lionel Barton (Lawrence Read More

Street Scene

Crew: Director

Actors: Sylvia Sidney, William Collier, Jr., Estelle Taylor, Max Montor, Louis Natheaux, David Landau, Russell Hopton

Synopsis: Elmer Rice's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Street Scene was purchased for the screen by producer Samuel Goldwyn in 1931. The entire story takes place on the street in front of a foreboding old New York brownstone, between one evening and the next afternoon. The individual fates of eight neighboring Read More

The Champ

Crew: Director

Actors: Wallace Beery, Jackie Cooper, Irene Rich, Roscoe Ates, Edward S. Brophy

Synopsis: Wallace Beery won an Academy Award for his tour de force performance as a washed-up boxer. The bibulous Beery travels from one tank-town bout to another in the company of his faithful son Jackie Cooper and his stuttering manager Roscoe Ates. Hoping for a comeback in Tijuana, Beery is approached by Read More

Not So Dumb

Crew: Director

Actors: Marion Davies, Elliott Nugent, Raymond Hackett, Franklin Pangborn, George Davis

Synopsis: Previously filmed in 1923, the George S. Kaufman-Marc Connelly stage comedy Dulcy was remade as a talkie in 1929 under the new title Dulcy. Marion Davies stars as Dulcinea, the illogical, cliché-spouting young housewife created by newspaper humorist Franklin P. Adams. Hoping to help her fiance Read More

Billy the Kid

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Johnny Mack Brown, Wallace Beery, Kay Johnson, Karl Dane, Wyndham Standing

Synopsis: The tall and virile Johnny Mack Brown portrays the short and dyspeptic outlaw William Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid. Wallace Beery is more effectively cast as Pat Garrett, the sheriff who's sworn to bring in Billy dead or alive despite his grudging friendship for the young killer. Hardly the Read More

Hallelujah!

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Daniel L. Haynes, Nina Mae McKinney, William E. Fountaine, Harry Gray, Fannie Belle de Knight

Synopsis: Hallelujah! was, for its time, an impressive achievement. Director King Vidor, anxious to make a "personal" project for the impersonal MGM studios, proposed to film a spiritual story set in the deep South with blacks as the main characters. The Texas-born Vidor was familiar with certain Read More

Patsy

Crew: Director

Actors: Marion Davies, Orville Caldwell, Marie Dressler, Dell Henderson, Lawrence Gray

Synopsis: Next to Show People, The Patsy may well be Marion Davies' best silent vehicle. Based on a hit Broadway play, this modern Cinderella story casts Davies as Patsy Harrington, the drudge of her social-climbing family. Secretly in love with Tony Anderson (Orville Caldwell), the boyfriend of her Read More

The Crowd

Crew: Director, Producer, Screenwriter

Actors: Eleanor Boardman, James Murray, Bert Roach, Daniel G. Tomlinson, Dell Henderson

Synopsis: 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 Read More

Show People

Crew: Director

Actors: Marion Davies, William Haines, Dell Henderson, Paul Ralli, Tenen Holtz

Synopsis: This Marion Davies vehicle was loosely inspired by the career of Gloria Swanson. Davies plays would-be starlet Peggy Pepper, who arrives at the gates of MGM Studios with her dad Colonel Pepper (Dell Henderson) in hopes of becoming a great dramatic actress. Instead, she a scores a hit as an ingenue Read More

Bardelys the Magnificent

Crew: Director

Actors: John Gilbert, Eleanor Boardman, Roy D'Arcy, Lionel Belmore, Emily Fitzroy

Synopsis: The Rafael Sabatini swashbuckler Bardelys the Magnificent served as an excellent vehicle for MGM's top male star John Gilbert. Set during the regime of France's King Louis XIII, the story concerns a bold young braggart named Bardelys (Gilbert), whose sexual conquests have become legendary. When Read More

La Boheme

Crew: Director

Actors: Lillian Gish, John Gilbert, Renée Adorée, Edward Everett Horton, George Hassell, Roy D'Arcy

Synopsis: Amidst much fanfare, Lillian Gish was signed to a fabulous MGM contract in 1925 which not only assured her $400,000 per picture but also gave her complete control over her productions, including choice of co-stars and directors. For her inaugural MGM effort, Gish selected La Boheme, the theatrical Read More

Proud Flesh

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Eleanor Boardman, Pat O'Malley, Harrison Ford, Trixie Friganza, William J. Kelly

Synopsis: King Vidor does a nice job of making an insignificant novel by Lawrence Rising into a pleasant light comedy. Fernanda (Eleanor Boardman, who would become Vidor's second wife) is born in San Francisco during the 1906 earthquake and raised by aristocratic relatives in Spain. As a young woman she is Read More

The Big Parade

Crew: Director

Actors: John Gilbert, Renée Adorée, Hobart Bosworth, Claire McDowell, Claire Adams

Synopsis: The Big Parade was designed as a modest programmer concerning one young man's disillusionment in the face of war. When the MGM executives took a look at the projection-room rushes, they gave director King Vidor the go-ahead to film an all-out "spectacular", which ended up running 13 reels and Read More

Wine of Youth

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Eleanor Boardman, James Morrison, Johnny Walker, Niles Welch, Creighton Hale

Synopsis: Based on the play Mary the Third by Rachel Crothers, Wine of Youth concerns Mary (Eleanor Boardman), a flapper whose mother (Eulalie Jensen) and grandmother (Gertrude Claire) were also named Mary. The first two Marys worked all their feminine wiles to snare their husbands, but the youngest Mary Read More

Wild Oranges

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Frank Mayo, Virginia Valli, Ford Sterling, Charles A. Post

Synopsis: It's a pity that there are apparently no longer any public copies available of this suspense drama by King Vidor because at the time of its release, its sophisticated approach to filmmaking impressed critics and fans alike. It takes place at a bay near the Georgia swamps, where John Woolfolk Read More

Wife of the Centaur

Crew: Director

Actors: Eleanor Boardman, John Gilbert, Aileen Pringle, William Haines, Kate Price

Synopsis: John Gilbert was on the brink of superstardom when he appeared in this routine domestic drama -- his fame would explode within a year, when he starred in The Merry Widow and The Big Pararde back-to-back. Even though The Wife of the Centaur (based on the novel by Cyril Hume) wasn't a brilliant Read More

His Hour

Crew: Director, Intertitle Writer

Actors: Aileen Pringle, John Gilbert, Emily Fitzroy, Bertram Grassby

Synopsis: Gritzko, a prince of pre-World War I Russia (John Gilbert), is the ultimate ladies' man. Women fall at his feet -- all except for a young but cold British widow, Tamara Loraine (Aileen Pringle). While she's spurning his advances, Tamara is growing ever more fascinated with Gritzko. And for the Read More

Happiness

Crew: Director

Actors: Laurette Taylor, Pat O'Malley, Hedda Hopper, Cyril Chadwick, Edith Yorke

Synopsis: Although she was well over forty when Happiness was filmed, Laurette Taylor was still specializing in girlish charm. Director King Vidor helped translate this charm to film when he helmed the motion picture version of Peg O' My Heart. It came out so well that Taylor and Vidor teamed up again for Read More

Three Wise Fools

Crew: Director, Screenwriter

Actors: Eleanor Boardman, William H. Crane, Alec B. Francis

Synopsis: Eleanor Boardman and William Haines came to Hollywood when they were winners in the same contest held by the Goldwyn studios. While Boardman's star rose faster than Haines' (with Brown of Harvard, he would eventually catch up), they appeared together in this comedy-drama adapted from the play by Read More

Woman of Bronze

Crew: Director

Synopsis: In this drama based on the novel by Henry Kistaemaecher, Clara Kimball Young plays Vivian Hunt, a woman married to aspiring sculptor Leonard Hunt (Lloyd Whitlock), who is working on a memorial statue he plans to enter in a million-dollar competition. But when Leonard falls in love with his model Read More

Souls for Sale

Actors: Eleanor Boardman, Mae Busch, Barbara La Marr, Richard Dix, Frank Mayo

Synopsis: This comedy-melodrama, based on the novel by Rupert Hughes (who also directed), blends fiction and reality to tell the story of a young woman's rise in Hollywood; the film uses real stars and productions (even Charles Chaplin filming A Woman of Paris) as its backdrop. Eleanor Boardman plays Read More

Alice Adams

Crew: Producer

Actors: Florence Vidor, Vernon Steele

Synopsis: Almost an instant classic, Booth Tarkington's 1921 small-town morality tale reached the screen two years later courtesy of King Vidor and Encore Pictures. Vidor's wife, the beautiful Florence Vidor, played the title-role, a girl of modest means who pretends to be wealthy to her friends in general Read More

The Real Adventure

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Florence Vidor

Synopsis: The emancipation of women was still growing in fits and starts in 1922 (they had won the right to vote only a couple years earlier), as this drama illustrates. Not surprisingly, it's the work of director King Vidor (whose career was still on the rise), and stars then-wife, Florence Vidor. After a Read More

Conquering the Woman

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Florence Vidor

Synopsis: This is not one of the better collaborations between director King Vidor and his then-wife, Florence Vidor. She stars as Judith Stafford, who comes from a moneyed family. A recent trip to Europe has turned her into a snobby and pretentious young woman. She returns engaged to a count of no-accounts Read More

Dusk to Dawn

Crew: Director, Producer

Actors: Florence Vidor, James Neill, Lydia Knott, Truman van Dyke, Jack Mulhall

Synopsis: As a young director, King Vidor certainly wasn't adverse to taking chances -- this picture, based on Katherine Hill's novel, The Shuttle Soul, suggests that maybe a soul can live in two bodies at the same time. This was quite an odd concept, even in an era when spiritualism had become something of Read More

Peg O' My Heart

Crew: Director

Actors: Laurette Taylor, Mahlon Hamilton, Russell Simpson, Ethel Grey Terry, Nigel Barrie

Synopsis: Laurette Taylor played the orphan Peg for so long on stage that by the time she starred in the motion picture, she was undoubtedly too old for the part. But then, when Marion Davies starred in the 1933 talkie version, she was 36. The performances of both women in their respective pictures were Read More