When the Coen Brothers followed “No Country for Old Men” (2007) with “Burn After Reading” (2008) and “A Serious Man” (2009)—their darkly brilliant but aggressively anti-glamorous meditation on the Book of Job and Schrödinger’s Cat—the Variety critic Todd McCarthy summed up the last as “the sort of film you get to make once you’ve won an Oscar.” Eight decades earlier, the director King Vidor had done something similar when he went from his 1925 World War I drama “The Big Parade” (which predated the Oscars but was one of the two or three most financially successful productions in silent film’s short history) to “The Crowd” (1928), an unsparing study of an impoverished and unhappy couple struggling to get by and get along in a tiny apartment in New York.
