An American Romance. 1944. USA. Directed by King Vidor. Screenplay by Herbert Dalmas, William Ludwig. With Brian Donlevy, Ann Richards, Walter Abel. 35mm courtesy George Eastman House. 121 min.
Under King Vidor’s muscular direction, this sweeping story of a Czech immigrant ironworker who becomes an American success story achieves a kind of epic grandeur that places it alongside Vidor’s other great achievements The Big Parade and Our Daily Bread. (“My three big themes were war, wheat, and steel,” he later observed.) Though the film was subjected to extensive reedits by MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer, Vidor’s documentary ambitions remain strikingly intact, particularly in his poetic montages of “iron mining, the production of steel, the manufacture of automobiles, and the fabrication of four-engined bombers.” The film depicts the massive wartime effort as a giant colossus of man and machine, leading to the triumph of American capitalism.