Critics reviews

This is why the best [movies] can bond us together. We go into this dark space together, we don't know each other, but we are there to have some kind of collective experience. Together. That's the key. It's also great to have the technology to watch movies at home, in privacy, and I see a lot of movies that way. But watching The Crowd, with no music, and hearing that gasp of horror and empathy and sadness from a group of strangers … It just doesn't get any better than that.

The Crowd is not only the Siren's favorite silent, but one of her favorite films, period... "Daring" means a number of different things these days. Sometimes it's used as a synonym for "impenetrable," but in American film it's often something to do with taste. Is it cynical, is it dark, will it make Grandma stomp out of the theater to ask the manager if his mother knows he's showing this filth. The Crowd is its own kind of daring...

The film is moving without being unequivocally happy or tragic, the theme summed up by one of the film's intertitles: "the crowd laughs with you always… but will cry with you for only a day".

The Crowd suggests an inversion of the Randian success story, its "tragedy" being that the hero fails to rise above the undistinguished mass of working saps. That more people don't find this offensive is a testament to Vidor's impeccable artistry, which succeeds in making the director's antihumanist sentiments feel universal.

Determined to "be somebody," John becomes a faceless cog in a colossal machine and puts his ambitions aside to marry and start a family. John's choice is explained by the agonized tenderness of the love scenes (featuring the willowy Eleanor Boardman as Mary Sims) with which Vidor balances his monumental realism—famously, the shot, through a skyscraper window, of a seemingly endless grid of desks where Sims scribbles endless columns of numbers.