We open this King Vidor retrospective with two of his best-known films-though they might look like products of two thoroughly antagonistic directors. The Crowd, a recognized silent masterwork, scrutinizes the ordinary man; The Fountainhead, from Vidor's "hysteric" postwar period, is interested only in the extraordinary one. The Crowd is the more personal, based on Vidor's story, "The Clerk," and crafted in a gritty style alien to MGM's usual high gloss. But after the box-office success of The Big Parade (coming Wednesday, September 7), MGM gave Vidor a relatively free hand. He chose for his everyman an unknown extra (James Murray) spotted in the studio commissary, and chronicled a clock-punching office and cramped Manhattan-apartment marriage (with Eleanor Boardman, Vidor's own wife). By turns optimistic, arrogant, and despairing, "John Sims" lives out tiny triumphs and commonplace tragedies. Vidor's tone toward his hero balances between sympathy and criticism, shifting from Germanic expressionism to hidden-camera documents of New York streets. How to end the piece without giving in to Hollywood hearts-and-flowers eluded Vidor. Release was delayed while he scripted at least six endings, then shot three, finally admitting defeat by offering the film to theaters with the choice of two. While even this surviving ending perhaps is not ideal, it feels unforced. This portrait of the stupefying routines of work and marriage, then the deepening despair of unemployment, has hardly been bettered in the sixty years of sound-era filmmaking. Scott Simmon