King Vidor Retrospective
Film at Lincoln Center presents King Vidor, a retrospective of the Academy Award®-winning director’s work, from August 5–14.
Tickets are now on sale! Save 20% on membership and get $5 off all tickets year-round.
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.
The Big Parade
La Bohème
Featuring live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin
La Bohème, a tragedy adapted from the same 19th-century source that inspired Puccini’s opera, begins on the first of the month. Rent is due, and the creative types of Paris’s Latin Quarter are frantically pawning their piccolos and scribbling sellable stories in an effort to spare themselves eviction.The Crowd
Featuring live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin on August 5
The Crowd is Vidor’s unflinching study of the American Dream, a supreme example of Vidor’s ability to punctuate a naturalistic style with sequences of searing visual expressiveness. His approach in this movie would prove highly influential on later directors, in particular the Italian neorealists and, later, the French New Wave.The Patsy
Featuring live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin on August 9
One of the great comedies of Hollywood’s silent era, The Patsy stars Marion Davies as Patricia Harrington, an awkward young woman who falls for her older sister’s boyfriend and sets about trying to attract the young man’s interest to hilarious effect.Show People
Featuring live musical accompaniment by Donald Sosin on August 6
A star, somewhat surprisingly, is born in Vidor’s showbiz satire. Replete with cameos by late-silent-era luminaries (Chaplin and Vidor himself among them), Show People is Vidor at his most metacinematic, and a hilarious look inside the machinery of celebrity.Hallelujah
Street Scene
The Champ
Bird of Paradise
Our Daily Bread
Stella Dallas
The Citadel
Please note: This film has French subtitles
In this adaptation of AJ Cronin’s politically charged 1937 novel, an idealistic young Scottish doctor with dreams of improving the health of the working class arrives in a Welsh mining village, only to learn firsthand the ethically fraught nature of what it takes to have a lucrative medical practice.Comrade X
Northwest Passage
H.M. Pulham, Esq.
An American Romance
Duel in the Sun
The Fountainhead
Ruby Gentry
War and Peace
Late Documentaries
Introduction from Catherine Berge on August 14
Later in his career, Vidor made a fascinating pair of documentaries: a primer on metaphysics and a conversation with painter Andrew Wyeth. Closing out our survey is Journey to Galveston, a tender and revealing portrait of Vidor, shot at his ranch in Paso Robles near the end of his life.Tickets are now on sale! Save 20% on membership and get $5 off all tickets year-round.
Tickets are $15; $12 for students, seniors (62+), and persons with disabilities; and $10 for Film at Lincoln Center members.
Save with the purchase of three tickets or more with the 3+ Film Package. Discount automatically applied when adding at least three tickets to your cart.
See more and save with All-Access Passes for $119 and Student All-Access Passes for $59.
Passes are available to pick up at the box office. Your pass will grant access to one (1) for every film in the series, with exceptions listed on our website where applicable. We recommend arriving at least 15 minutes prior to a screening as late seating cannot be guaranteed. Passes do not give access to any free events or talks.