“Ibelieve in the motion picture that carries a message to humanity,” wrote King Vidor in 1920. He’d already directed and appeared in a good number of shorts and features, and then, in his midtwenties, he founded his own production company, Vidor Village, with a brief statement of principles that Variety found newsworthy enough to publish in full. The company lasted a mere two years, but the credo carried on ringing out loud and clear in the more than fifty features Vidor made in the decades that followed.
