page_title: King Vidor
section_title: Early life and career
hierarchical_section_title: King Vidor / Early life and career
caption_attribution_description: English: Advertisement for the American film The Family Honor (1920) with film director King Vidor, on page 20 of the February 21, 1920 Exhibitors Herald.
context_page_description: King Wallis Vidor 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 movie-making conventions.
  His most outstanding and successful film in the silent era is The Big Parade. Vidor's sound films of the 1940s and early 1950s represent his richest output. Among his finest works are Northwest Passage, Comrade X, An American Romance and Duel in the Sun. 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.
context_section_description: 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 a historical memoir of the disaster, titled "Southern Storm", for the May 1935 issue of Esquire magazine. In an interview with the Director's 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. On the boat I went up into the bow and saw that the bay was filled with dead bodies, horses, animals, people, everything."
  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.
caption: Vidor featured in the February 21, 1920, issue of Exhibitors Herald
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