King Vidor

 

Film at Lincoln Center presents King Vidor, a retrospective of the Academy Award®-winning director’s work, from August 5–14.

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A fascinating and prolific figure whose career bridged the silent and sound eras of Hollywood, King Vidor completed over 50 feature films during a career that spanned nearly seven decades. Vidor’s cinema, rich with idiosyncratic takes on well-trod Hollywood forms, arced across a wide range of genres, from the Western to the musical to the maternal melodrama (late in his career, he even produced a philosophical primer on metaphysics). These movies also made a considerable impression on the critics-turned-directors of Cahiers du Cinéma and the French New Wave, namely Luc Moullet and Jean-Luc Godard. Yet, for all his on-screen achievements, Vidor is seldom given his due as one of the studio system’s enduringly great auteurs. Join us at FLC as we seek to change that with a long-awaited retrospective, a survey of his vast body of work that highlights his most celebrated pictures alongside undersung efforts.

Notable films include but are not limited to: Vidor’s most acclaimed film, The Big Parade, often considered a model for numerous future war movies; Vidor’s adaptation of Olive Higgins Prouty’s 1923 novel Stella Dallas, featuring Barbara Stanwyck as of one of the most indelible heroines of Hollywood’s Golden Age; Comrade X, part spy film, part screwball satire starring Clark Gable and Hedy Lamarr, which prophetically anticipated the invasion of Russia and Ukraine by Germany less than a year after its release; and Duel in the Sun, a Western staged as a grand, Freudian frenzy.

As a special treat for filmgoers and Vidor fans alike, there will be live musical accompaniment to select screenings of four silent films in the retrospective: La Bohème, The Crowd, The Patsy, and Show People, performed by Donald Sosin, well-known for creating and performing music for silent films.

https://www.filmlinc.org/series/king-vidor-retrospective/