An American Romance

Vidor's major contribution to the war effort, a huge dynastic saga (reduced by MGM to 122 minutes) that charts the progress of a Czech immigrant (Donlevy) from his arrival on Ellis Island in 1898 to the wartime conversion of his car factory to aircraft production. The fifty-year span takes in everything from '30s union-bashing to the career of the son who becomes a great musician, and adds up to the acceptable face of right wing social history. No other American director ever matched Vidor's sense of personal struggle, or the muscular poetry he found to express it.