Vidor""s natural and uncompromising film tells the episodic, poignant story of the working and domestic life of an average, commonplace man in ""the crowd"" - John - with his wife Mary (played exquisitely by the director""s real-life wife Eleanor Boardman), chronicling their ups and downs, including their meeting, courtship, marriage, and family life.With an ensemble cast, the low-budget R-rated, Best Picture-winning hybrid film viewed a dysfunctional family""s angst and crisis in suburbia.The actress Bette Davis (in her mid-career at the age of 40) was miscast in the film as the young, beautiful and dissatisfied sexpot, playing one of the baddest, no-good, trashiest, and most warped of allfemme fatalesas she schemed and murdered to escape her oppressive small-town roots and get out of her stultifying marriage.To him it was a metaphor for he decay of contemporary culture.The same lack of individual integrity hat caused so many people to take the easy way out was rapidly turning he town of his dreams in.