King Vidor's earliest surviving feature-his first five are lost-is a small-scale rural drama with the populist values of all his best work before The Big Parade. In 1920, Moving Picture World found The Jack-Knife Man's tale of a river-boat tramp "a pleasing reaction against the conventional stuff of which few directors seem to be able to rid themselves," although Vidor remembered his producers' dislike of the atmospheric landscapes (filmed on the Sacramento delta, standing in for the Mississippi). The tramp's self-satisfied drifting is wildly disrupted when a thunderstorm brings a raving, rainsoaked mother and child to the shelter of his boat. Her death, and the intrusion of moralistic meddlers, make for that variety of besieged, makeshift male family that Chaplin perfected six months later in The Kid. Indeed, while The Jack-Knife Man isn't passively derivative, it's closer to the previous decade's greats-Chaplin and the rural-life side of D.W. Griffith-than to much in Vidor to come. We open tonight with a clip from a rather less successful populist melodrama of class jealousies in a river town, Love Never Dies (1921). This sequence ends with a train wreck, convincingly filmed in miniature in the bankrupt independent studio "Vidor Village." But the wreck was sufficiently spectacular to lure financing from Thomas Ince for the remainder of the film. Scott Simmon