an MGM contract actress and also Vidor's second wife. Vidor's great financial success at MGM in the 1920s allowed him to sell the unusual scenario to production head Irving Thalberg as an experimental film. MGM chief Louis B. Mayer reportedly disliked the film for its bleak subject matter and lack of a happy ending, and the studio held the film from release for almost a year. At the studio's insistence, seven alternate upbeat endings were filmed, according to Vidor's autobiography, and previewed in small towns. The film was finally released with two endings, one Vidor's original ending, and another with the family gathered around a Christmas tree after John has gotten a job with an advertising agency. Exhibitors could choose which version to show, but, at least according to Vidor, the happy ending was rarely shown. One real-life unhappy ending was to the life of James Murray, who succumbed to alcoholism and became a Skid-Row bum. When Vidor saw him on the street, panhandling, he offered Murray a part in his upcoming film Our Daily Bread, but Murray angrily refused, saying "Just because I stop you on the street and try to borrow a buck, you think you can tell me what to do. As far as I am concerned, you know what you can do with your lousy part." In 1936, his body was found in the Hudson River, a possible suicide. Vidor was haunted by Murray's death, and in 1979 attempted to raise funds to film The Actor, a screenplay he had written based on Murray's story, but the film was never made. Critical reception and influence The Crowd was a modest financial and critical success upon its initial release. Mordaunt Hall, a reviewer for The New York Times in 1928, called it "substantial and worthy" and "a powerful analysis of a young couple's struggle for existence in this city"; but the trade publication Variety disagreed and described the film as "a drab actionless story of ungodly length and apparently telling nothing." Since then, The Crowd has been hailed as one of the greatest and most enduring American silent films – director Jean-Luc Godard was asked in the 1960s why more films were not made about ordinary people, and his response was "The Crowd had already been made, so why remake it?" – but at the time, it was released just as the Great Depression had hit, and