[19][20] In an interview with the Directors Guild of America (DGA) in 1980 Vidor recalled the horrors of the hurricane's effects: All the wooden structures of the town were flattened ... [t]he streets were piled high with dead people, and I took the first tugboat out.

[25] 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.

[27] Based on a screen test arranged by Texas actress Corinne Griffith and shot by Charles Rosher in Hollywood, Florence Vidor procured a contract with Vitagraph Studios, marking the start of her successful movie career.

[37] The first production from Vidor Village was his The Jack Knife Man (1920), a bleak and bitter story of an orphaned boy raised by an impoverished yet kindly hermit, performed by former stage actor Fred Turner.

[54] Vidor's typically "routine" movies of this period include Wine of Youth (1924) and Proud Flesh (1925) emphasize the "time-honored virtues" of familial and matrimonial loyalty, even among the liberated Jazz Age flappers.

The scenes on the Western Front look trivial alongside contemporary photographs: the lice, the rats, and roaches, the urine and blood, the disease, fear, and horror of the true events are altogether lost in this version.

Vidor's The Crowd resonates with these populist films, a "pitiless study" of a young working man's descent into isolation and loss of morale who is ultimately crushed by the urban "assembly line", while his wife struggles to maintain some order in their relationship.

Davies performs a number of amusing celebrity imitations she was known for at social gatherings at Hearst's San Simeon estate, including Gloria Swanson, Lillian Gish, Pola Negri and Mae Murray.

Starring former football champion Johnny Mack Brown as Billy and Wallace Beery as his nemesis Sheriff Pat Garrett, the protagonists display a gratuitous violence that anticipates Vidor's 1946 masterpiece Duel in the Sun (1946).

Based on a story by Francis Marion, Vidor adapts a standard plot about a socially and economically impaired parent who relinquishes a child to insure his/her escape from squalid conditions to achieve an upwardly mobile future.

[80] After finishing the sentimental vehicle starring Wallace Beery, in The Champ, Vidor was loaned to Radio-Keith-Orpheum (RKO) to make a "South Seas" romance for producer David Selznick filmed in the US territory of Hawaii.

[82][83] The Stranger's Return (1933) and Our Daily Bread (1934) are Depression era films that present protagonists who flee the social and economic perils of urban America, plagued by high unemployment and labor unrest to seek a lost rural identity or make a new start in the agrarian countryside.

The first of their collaborations since the silent era was Street Scene (1931)[93] The adoption of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Elmer Rice depicts a microcosm in a major American metropolis and its social and economic inequalities.

The cinematic limitations imposed by a single set restricted to a New York City block of tenements building and its ethnically diverse inhabitants presented Vidor with unique technical challenges.

Vidor presents a morality play where the low-cunning of the outlaws cum vigilantes heroes is turned to the service of law-and-order when they kill their erstwhile accomplice in crime – the "Polka Dot Bandit.".

[122] Northwest Passage: Based on an American colonial-era epic novel, the film describes a punitive expedition against an Abenaki (Iroquois) village by a unit of British Army irregulars during the French and Indian Wars.

Vidor examines Pulham's past in a series of flashbacks that reveal a youthful affair Harry had with an ambitious German immigrant, Marvin Myles (Hedy Lamarr) at a New York advertising agency.

[150][151] The "unbridled sexuality" portrayed by Vidor between Pearl and Lewt created a furor that drew criticism from the US Congressmen and film censors, which led to the studio cutting several minutes before its final release.

"[154][155]In the aftermath of his critical failures in An American Romance (1944) and Duel in the Sun (1946), Vidor disengaged from Hollywood film production to purchase his Willow Creek Ranch in Paso Robles, California.

A "low-budget" Universal Studios release of the early baby boom era, this "omnibus" presents vignettes filmed or performed by an array of actors and directors (some of them returning from service in the armed forces) among them Burgess Meredith, Paulette Goddard, Dorothy Lamour, James Stewart, John Huston and George Stevens.

[157] In 1948 Vidor was diverted from making a series of 16mm Westerns for television and produced on his ranch when Warner Brothers studios approached him to direct an adaption of author Ayn Rand's controversial novel The Fountainhead.

[158] Vidor's three films for Warner Brothers studios—The Fountainhead (1949), Beyond the Forest (1949) and Lightning Strikes Twice (1951)—were crafted to reconcile the excessive and amoral violence displayed in his Duel in the Sun (1946) with a constructive presentation of American individualism that comported with his Christian Science precepts of morality.

[165][166] Beyond the Forest (1949): A lurid noir melodrama that tracks the descent of a petty-bourgeois Madame Bovary-like character, Rosa Moline (Bette Davis) into marital infidelity, murder and a sordid death, the picture has earned a reputation as a "Camp" classic.

[173] The story by co-producer Anson Bond concerns wounded Korean War veteran Jim Sterling (Don Taylor), who returns with his bride, Japanese nurse Tae (Shirley Yamaguchi), to his parents' farm in California's Central Valley.

She is harried by her evangelical preacher-sibling (James Anderson) and her love affair with the son of a local land-owing scion (Charlton Heston) leads to a deadly shootout, a climax that recalls Vidor's violent 1946 Western.

Film critic Dan Callahan provides this excerpt the book: "I believe that every one of us knows that his major job on earth is to make some contribution, no matter how small, to this inexorable movement of human progress.

[183] Vidor's contributions included "A Kiss for the Lieutenant" by author Arthur Gordon starring Kim Novak, an amusing romantic vignette, as well as an adaption of novelist John Steinbeck's short story "Leader of the People" (1937) (from his novella The Red Pony) in which a retired wagon-master, Walter Brennan, rebuffed by his son Harry Morgan, finds a sympathetic audience for his War Horse reminiscences about the Old West in his grandson Brandon deWilde.

[185] Based on a story by Dee Linford of the same name and scripted by Borden Chase, Man Without a Star is an iconographic Western tale of remorseless struggle between a wealthy rancher Reed Bowman (Jeanne Crain) and small homesteaders.

"[198]Cinematographer Jack Cardiff devised one of the film's most visually striking sequences, the sunrise duel between Pierre (Henry Fonda) and Kuragin (Tullio Carminati), shot entirely on a sound-stage.

[219] The Crowd: Vidor developed revisions of his 1928 silent masterpiece, including a 1960s sequel of Ann Head's 1967 novel Mr and Mrs Bo Jo Jones (made as a TV feature without his input), and in the early 1970s another effort, Brother Jon.