In this moving study of a regular guy caught up in a system beyond his control, director King Vidor paints a downbeat and depressing picture of failed dreams and missed chances. His protagonist, Johnny Sims (James Murray), was born on the fourth of July, and his father knew that he would be somebody some day. Vidor is there to remind us that just about everybody's father thinks that, and that the American Dream doesn't work out for everybody.

The film is strongly influenced by the Naturalist school of literature. It's almost obsessively interested in the little details of life—for example, it was the first film to show an actual toilet—and it follows the main characters through years of ups and downs, hardships and successes (but mostly hardships). It wants to paint an accurate picture of the human condition, and its characters are likable Everypeople in whom the audience can see themselves and the people they know and love. It doesn't need overdramatized conflicts, epic romance, or artificial plot devices. Vidor and company believed that showing things as they really are would bring people in.

Johnny Sims fails to live up to his father's dreams. He gets lost in the crowd in the big city, stuck in a dead-end job as a clerk of some sort. Vidor uses wide shots of the office (quoted by Billy Wilder in The Apartment), with its endless rows of identical desks and identical young men, all facing the same direction and doing the same thing, to slam home the point that most people in modern society are simply cogs in a huge machine. Johnny wants to be something important, but he's not sure exactly how, and he does his best to do the things expected of a young man. He meets a charming young woman, Mary (Eleanor Boardman); they fall in love and get married; they rent an apartment in the city and have two children. They should be happy, but they're not. Johnny hates his job, and he'd rather be strumming on his ukulele than dealing with the grimy details of everyday life. He chafes at his situation, and he takes it out on Mary. Having children salves both of their unhappiness for a while, but it's still lurking beneath the surface.

One of the great things about the film is that Vidor basically stays out of it. He doesn't use his camera to editorialize; he simply records, much like in a newsreel. Naturalist artists were supposed to abstain from judgment, and Vidor does it admirably. Even when tragedy strikes, in the death of the couple's daughter (Alice Mildred Puter), he retains his almost documentary point of view. The tragedy destroys Johnny entirely; he's unable to work, and he rashly quits his job. Vidor doesn't tell you what to think of this—he lets you make up your own mind, even when things go downhill from there.

Vidor's picture of the city is still impressive after all these years. The montage of the busy city streets, enormous crowds, and speeding trains that is Johnny's introduction to New York City is frantic and a bit awe-inspiring, especially the great shot that climbs the side of the building where Johnny works. Many of the crowd shots were done with a hidden camera, and in one scene, when a traffic cop seems to tell us to move along, he was actually instructing Vidor and his crew to move. Vidor's camera seems alive, its elaborate movements a joy to watch; they reminded me what was lost, at least for several years, with the advent of sound and the immobile cameras that could record it.

The film has an irrationally upbeat ending, which prefigures that of Preston Sturges's classic Sullivan's Travels, in that it holds that the best cure for life's problems is the comedy of other people fall down. King Vidor apparently filmed a half-dozen different endings before the studio accepted the one we see today. It's too bad, really, because the waves of laughing people clash thematically with the downbeat, naturalist tone of the rest of the film. Vidor attempted to repeat his almost architectural high-angle shots of the crowd to make this ending mesh, but it fails. Perhaps part of it isn't the film's fault. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that things will only get worse for poor Johnny Sims and his family: a year after the film's release came the stock market crash and the Great Depression. Perhaps I shouldn't begrudge them their laughter.

Vidor was nominated as Best Director, and the film was nominated in the short-lived category of "Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production." They had it right back then: they split the Best Picture award into its logical halves, recognizing both the commerce—Best Production, which went to the epic Wings—and the art—this award, which went to F.W. Murnau's Sunrise.