THE STRAIGHT STORY
LIKE THE BUSTLING COUNTRY HE PORTRAYED, KING VIDOR’S WORK SPEAKS FROM THE HEART AND PUTS ITS FAITH IN THE FORCE OF WILL, FOR GOOD OR FOR ILL
KING WALLIS VIDOR’S PRIMER-CUM-WORKING-AUTOBIOGRAPHY, On Film Making, his second book, appeared in 1972—a great year for world cinema, if an inauspicious one for the American Republic, then fast approaching an ignoble end to its second century of existence. Five White House operatives connected to Richard M. Nixon, reelected in a landslide in November, were arrested for burglarizing the offices of the Democratic National Committee in Washington’s Watergate Hotel. In the Easter Offensive, the People’s Army of Vietnam crossed into the South Vietnamese DMZ, while Haiphong Harbor was bombarded with U.S. mines, and photographer Nick Ut captured the image of Phan Thi Kim Phuc, a nude 9-year-old girl running down a dirt road, displaying her napalm burns. Jane Fonda, visiting North Vietnam, was snapped sitting on a North Vietnamese anti-aircraft gun.
Vidor was then nearing 80, born into the optimism that was the birthright of that last generation of electrified Victorians who lived in the sweet spot between devastating American wars, carrying with him a lived memory of stuffy middle-class parlors and horse-and-buggy rides through his hometown of Galveston, Texas—one of a very few “Golden Age” Hollywood auteurs to have been born in the Southlands. He had not directed a fiction feature film since the Spain-shot 1959 Technirama spectacular Solomon and Sheba, the production of which was marred by the death of its star, Tyrone Power, of fulminant angina pectoris, at age 44, en route to a hospital in Madrid. But Vidor’s semiretirement was not idle. He occupied himself with 16mm filmmaking endeavors, using a Beaulieu purchased in Paris, having completed a 25-minute short, Truth and Illusion: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1964). He was more and more often in Europe, a feted guest of film festivals, and On Film Making shows him, unusual among his contemporaries, as aware of and receptive to currents in the European “art film”: Antonioni and Fellini and the French New Wave. The book as a whole is a somewhat dry read, though there’s one moment where Vidor gets his dander up, discussing the reception by European audiences of what might be perceived as criticisms of American life in American films.
“For quite some time, I have been aware that one of the principal sources of subject matter for the screen has been found
