King Wallis Vidor (; February 8, 1894 – November 1, 1982) was an American film director, film producer, and screenwriter whose 67-year film-making career successfully spanned the silent and sound eras. His works are distinguished by a vivid, humane, and sympathetic depiction of contemporary social issues. Considered an auteur director, Vidor approached multiple genres and allowed the subject matter to determine the style, often pressing the limits of film-making conventions.
His most acclaimed and successful film in the silent era is The Big Parade (1925). Vidor's sound films of the 1940s and early 1950s arguably represent his richest output. Among his finest works are Northwest Passage (1940), Comrade X (1940), An American Romance (1944), and Duel in the Sun (1946). His dramatic depictions of the American western landscape endow nature with a sinister force where his characters struggle for survival and redemption.
Vidor's earlier films tend to identify with the common people in a collective struggle, whereas his later works place individualists at the center of his narratives.
He was considered an "actors' director": many of his players received Academy Award nominations or awards, among them Wallace Beery, Robert Donat, Barbara Stanwyck, Jennifer Jones, Anne Shirley, and Lillian Gish.
Vidor was nominated five times by the Academy Awards for Best Director. In 1979, he was awarded an Honorary Academy Award for his "incomparable achievements as a cinematic creator and innovator." Additionally, he won eight national and international film awards during his career, including the Screen Directors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 1957.
In 1962, he was head of the jury at the 12th Berlin International Film Festival. In 1969, he was a member of the jury at the 6th Moscow International Film Festival.
Early life and career
Vidor was born into a well-to-do family in Galveston, Texas, the son of Kate (née Wallis) and Charles Shelton Vidor, a lumber importer and mill owner. His grandfather, Károly Charles Vidor, was a refugee of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, who settled in Galveston in the early 1850s. Vidor's mother, Kate Wallis, of Scotch-English descent, was a relative of the second wife of iconic frontiersman and politician Davy Crockett. The "King" in King Vidor is no sobriquet, but his given name in honor of his mother's favorite brother, King Wallis.
At the age of six, Vidor witnessed the devastation of the Galveston Hurricane of 1900. Based on that formative experience, he published an historical memoir of the disaster, titled "Southern Storm", for the May 1935 issue of Esquire magazine. In an interview with the Directors Guild of America (DGA) in 1980 Vidor recalled the horrors of the hurricane's effects:
In 1939, he would direct the cyclone scene for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's The Wizard of Oz.
Vidor was introduced to Mary Baker Eddy's Christian Science by his mother at a very early age. Vidor would endow his films with the moral precepts of the faith, a "blend of pragmatic self-help and religious mysticism."
Vidor attended grade school at the Peacock Military Academy.
Amateur apprenticeship in Galveston
As a boy, Vidor engaged in photographing and developing portraits of his relatives with a Box Brownie camera.
At the age of sixteen Vidor dropped out of a private high school in Maryland and returned to Galveston to work as a Nickelodeon ticket taker and projectionist. As an 18-year-old amateur newsreel cameraman Vidor began to acquire skills as a film documentarian. His first movie was based on footage taken of a local hurricane (not to be confused with the 1900 Galveston hurricane). He sold footage from a Houston army parade to a newsreel outfit (titled The Grand Military Parade) and made his first fictional movie, a semi-docucomedy concerning a local automobile race, In Tow (1913).
Hotex Motion Picture Company
Vidor, in a partnership with vaudevillian and movie entrepreneur Edward Sedgwick formed the Hotex Motion Picture Company in 1914 ("HO" for Houston, "TEX" for Texas) to produce low-budget one- or two-reelers. The enterprise garnered a national press release in Moving Picture World announcing its formation. Only still photos survive from these comedy-adventures, for which Hotex failed to collect any royalties.
In 1915, newlyweds Vidor and actress Florence Arto Vidor along with business partner Sedgwick, moved to California in search of employment in the emerging Hollywood movie industry, arriving on the West Coast virtually penniless.