Just watched on TCM

I love this film but didn't catch the recent TCM broadcast. Interesting to know that it was a remaster; hopefully this means it might finally get a proper DVD/Blu-ray release.

This is a nice write-up of The Crowd, from a couple of years ago by the critic Geoff Pevere.

"Famous for so many things, King Vidor's towering classic of ambivalent populism is widely thought to be the first American movie with a role for a toilet, and that may be more significant than it first seems. For not only does the toilet — which appears, almost dead-centre in the screen framing the cramped little New York apartment uncomfortably shared by the young couple John (James Murray) and Mary (Eleanor Boardman) — indicate that we're striving for a certain nuts-and-bolts realism here, but that every surge must also flush, that everyone shares a basic biological inevitability, and that nothing is immune to going down the pipes. It's an apt and useful message to be conveyed anywhere, but it takes on an added urgency here, in a movie that really should be one of the all-time top-ten checklisted American Movie Classics, but which has never really been given the proper home-viewing dusting up and respectful release it deserves. (I have a so-so Chinese bootleg DVD, and would replace it with a proper, say, Criterion release in a heartbeat.) The Crowd, one of the most fascinating, stirring and internally stricken attempts by a Hollywood studio to illuminate the shadows lurking in the backalleys of the American Dream, has also been circling the toilet bowl for decades now, never quite plunging but never quite plucked out either. It was made by King Vidor for a reluctant MGM, a reward for all the money and prestige he'd raked in with movies like The Big Parade. Like a great many of his thoughtful contemporary cohorts, Vidor was concerned about the apparent devaluing of the individual in industrial society, and he told Irving Thalberg he wanted to make a movie about an ordinary Joe little guy who buys into the dream but waits for it to be delivered. And it isn't: that's the tragedy. Thalberg not only bought the idea, he gave Vidor almost complete control over its realization, and the result is one of the most remarkable movies of one of the most remarkable eras in movie history: the final years of the silent era, when sound would not only bring new stars and forms of spectacle but the crash of the stock market and a new demand for movies that made one feel good if only while sitting there. So The Crowd, with its brash blend of high naturalism and expressionist dynamics, its insistence on the presence of averageness in its casting and attention to daily detail, its fatalistic insistence on the dangerous lie that money tells, and its fascinating striving to situate a deterministic fairy tale in reverse in a realer New York than anyone had yet seen, emerged, and it was as powerful, moving and dramatically convincing as anything anyone had ever seen, but it left nobody feeling particularly good, and no one less so than MGM head Louis B. Mayer, who allegedly led a clandestine campaign to block the movie's Academy votes and wasn't convinced by any of the nine or so endings Vidor shot. Was it art Mayer hated or the message that striving is something for losers? Either way, The Crowd has remained a contested and battered-about masterpiece for almost ninety years now, and even the stories once told about it — and especially about the high-naturalist tragedy of its alcoholic, self-ruinous and possibly suicidal lead actor James Murray — aren't heard much anymore. But it's a corker, pure and simple, and a rare and shining example of what influence once got you if you had enough of it. Plus there's that toilet, a Rosebud of another kind."

http://www.directoryofintemperateenthusiasms.com/home/2013/03/08/the-crowd/