The Crowd is a 1928 American silent romance film directed by King Vidor and starring James Murray, Eleanor Boardman and Bert Roach. The feature film was nominated at the very first Academy Award presentation in 1929, for several awards, including Unique and Artistic Production for MGM and Best Director for Vidor. Kevin Brownlow and David Gill restored The Crowd in 1981, and it was released with a score by Carl Davis. In 1989, the film was one of the first 25 selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". In February 2020, the film was shown at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival, as part of a retrospective dedicated to Vidor's career. Plot Born on the Fourth of July, 1900, John Sims (James Murray) loses his father when he is twelve. At 21, he sets out for New York City, where he is sure he will become somebody important, just as his father had always believed. Another boat passenger tells him he will have to be good in order to stand out from the crowd. John gets a job as one of many office workers of the Atlas Insurance Company. Fellow employee Bert (Bert Roach) talks him into a double date to Coney Island. John is so smitten with Mary (Eleanor Boardman), he proposes to her at the end of the date; she accepts. Bert predicts the marriage will last a year or two. A Christmas Eve dinner in their tiny apartment with Mary's mother (Lucy Beaumont) and two brothers (Daniel G. Tomlinson and Dell Henderson), with whom John is not on friendly terms, ends badly. John goes to Bert's to get some liquor. A young woman there throws herself at him, complimenting him on his looks, and starts to dance with him. John returns home very late and very drunk. Mary's family has gone home, and she tells him that they do not understand him. They exchange Christmas gifts and John compliments her, but yells at her when she does something trivial. In April, they quarrel and Mary threatens to leave, and is shocked and hurt by John's apathy when he does not try to stop her. The couple reconciles when Mary tells John that she is pregnant. She gives birth to a son. Over the next five years, the couple have a daughter and