When the Coen Brothers followed “No Country for Old Men” (2007) with “Burn After Reading” (2008) and “A Serious Man” (2009)—their darkly brilliant but aggressively anti-glamorous meditation on the Book of Job and Schrödinger’s Cat—the Variety critic Todd McCarthy summed up the last as “the sort of film you get to make once you’ve won an Oscar.” Eight decades earlier, the director King Vidor had done something similar when he went from his 1925 World War I drama “The Big Parade” (which predated the Oscars but was one of the two or three most financially successful productions in silent film’s short history) to “The Crowd” (1928), an unsparing study of an impoverished and unhappy couple struggling to get by and get along in a tiny apartment in New York.

Although “The Crowd” turned a small profit—it came out, after all, in the last “boom year” of the 1920s—the film’s lack of bankable stars and its unremitting realism (complete with what is generally agreed to have been the first appearance of a toilet in American film) guaranteed that it would never be a hit. The Standard Union, a Brooklyn, N.Y., newspaper, spoke for the disappointed with a column that asked, “Why should folks delight to pay to see a drama or a photoplay that throws back to them the ordinary familiar exasperations and vicissitudes, hopes and fears of their own troubled existence?”

The answer, at least in the case of “The Crowd,” is that it was and remains a classic of the first order—perhaps the most powerful silent drama made in the U.S., with tender and vivid performances by the lead actors and Expressionist cinematography that rivaled the best of the European avant-garde.

Vidor chose a deeply American story, one that could have been fashioned by Theodore Dreiser with its concentration on naïve pride and stifled expectations. It even begins on Independence Day 1900 as a baby boy is born at home in a nameless small town. Johnny Sims (played as an adult with a volatile mixture of bluster and frailty by James Murray ) was left fatherless at a young age and ran away as soon as he reached his majority, off to follow the American dream of making it in the big city. Or, as one of the film’s sparse but eloquent titles puts it, “When John was 21, he became one of the seven million that believe New York depends on them.”

It doesn’t depend on him, of course, a point made increasingly clear as he bungles his way through everything. Still, there are rewards: Johnny finds a job, marries an unusually patient wife (played by the exquisite Eleanor Boardman ), and soon there are two children. Their lives play out among panoramic views of early skyscrapers and Niagara Falls, with detours to the New York subway and out to a Coney Island “Tunnel of Love.”

There is no better introduction to silent film. While teaching a master class in writing about the arts, I discovered that most of my college students had never seen a full silent drama, their experience limited to snippets of Chaplin or Keaton or the same old Keystone Kops footage. A majority of them had never even seen a film made in black and white except for the opening minutes of “The Wizard of Oz.”

And now I was presenting them with 100 minutes of a medium that was both very old and utterly new to them. There was sometimes grumbling as I made even surer than usual that cellphones were silenced and computers powered off. But the students soon found that nothing was missing, and when they all gasped aloud during a particularly powerful scene—involving a shocking incident with the couple’s daughter—I knew that they had been captured.

It takes some effort to see “The Crowd.” The composer Carl Davis wrote a stirring and effective score for a revival in London in 1981, and the results were issued on VHS early in the days of home video. There has never been an official release on DVD, but the film plays regularly on Turner Classic Movies and was shown last summer as part of Film at Lincoln Center’s comprehensive King Vidor Retrospective. Jordan R. Young’s book “King Vidor’s The Crowd: The Making of a Silent Classic” is a valuable resource, containing extensive interviews with Vidor and Boardman, who were married when the film was released.

“The Crowd” came out immediately before the first Academy Awards ceremony: Vidor was one of five nominees for that year’s Best Director. He did not win, nor did he win the other four times he was up for the award. In 1979, however, he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award Oscar for all that he had created since he started in the business in 1914. He would have deserved it for “The Crowd” alone.

—Mr. Page is a professor emeritus of musicology at the University of Southern California. His childhood efforts in homemade silent film are chronicled in the short “A Day With Timmy Page ” (1968) by David and Iris Hoffman.