Bill Slocum A lot of old movies work despite the fact they are silent. "The Big Parade" is unique to me in that it is hard to imagine it working so wonderfully if it wasn't a silent.There's no gainsaying the greatness of silent comedies, like those of Keaton or Lloyd. Silent horror films like "Nosferatu" pack an eerie power. But dramas usually work for me when I can hear the actors talking. Not so "The Big Parade."Here you see American soldier James Apperson (John Gilbert) and French farm girl Melisande (Renée Adorée) struggle to build a connection despite not speaking each other's language. With no sound, their pantomime becomes more engaging, more amusing, and cuts to the heart of what their relationship is about."I don't know a word you say," Apperson says, "but I know what you mean."Watching Apperson's unit walk into action, we hear nothing but the tick-tock of a metronome, broken only by an odd pling of string whenever a flying bullet connects with one of his comrades. We see officers and non-coms give direction, but have no idea what they are saying. Everything about the battle is surreal.Apperson's comrade, Cpl. Slim (Karl Dane), gives us the only hint of strategy: "We're gonna keep going' till we can't go no more.""The Big Parade" is a film that draws on various tangents of wartime experience, from pathos to terror to humor. A long opening section has Apperson, Slim, and their buddy Bull (Tom O'Brien) bonding over mail calls and wine cellar raids. You are encouraged to relax and enjoy their company, but you pull back. It's like bonding with a puppy in a kennel you know you can't take home.King Vidor makes a nearly perfect movie. There are slower stretches, and a late bout of overacting from Gilbert, but "The Big Parade" has a solidity to it that rewards watching over and over, a tough-nosed story buttressed by a clear sense of mission. At the same time Vidor avoids making too much of a Big Statement. His focus is on war's dislocation, not its folly.Vidor based his film on a treatment by a World War I veteran, Laurence Stallings, for whom the emotional toll was at least as important as the physical. According to Jeffrey Vance's illuminating DVD commentary, Stallings was focused more on military life behind the lines. It's here the film pulls you in, before any violence sets in, with the cooties and the way the soldiers settle in to their new environment.Gilbert is terrific to watch, whether he's walking around a village wearing a barrel or trying to teach Melisande how to chew gum. Usually love scenes kill a good war movie, but Gilbert and Adorée are such fine company you enjoy their lulls together. I don't know if Gilbert had a real issue with his voice when sound came in, or if its myth, but his scenes remind me of Norma Desmond's claim about the superiority of silents: "They had faces then."If I had to recommend a silent movie to a person wary of them, and I didn't want to stack the deck with one of the great clowns or a horror film, I would choose this. It may not be the greatest silent movie, but "The Big Parade" draws upon the unique strengths of the form to create a multi-layered, involving entertainment that holds its value a hundred years later.

Edgar Allan Pooh . . . are three of the floats I noticed in director King Vidor's bizarre BIG PARADE. How many war flicks take 88 minutes to get to the Front? At the center of this movie is the longest lovers' goodbye in film history. As the composer of the 1988 score goes berserk with clashing musical motifs and a crescendo of dissonant chords, Doughboy Jim stretches out a parting already surpassing marathon length by throwing stuff at his French peasant gal lover Melisande. When Jim runs out of traditional Forget-Me-Nots, he flings her his left boot (foreshadowing, of course, the flick's lame finale). WWII may have given rise to NO TIME FOR SERGEANTS, but it's the corporals who are the doomed Short-Termers on PARADE. Cigarettes famously earned their "coffin nails" nickname during WWI. In one of the most literal takes on product placement ever, Mr. Vidor has Jim offer his German P.O.W. a smoke near the end of THE BIG PARADE. Naturally, the enemy soldier drops dead a few moments later!

bkoganbing In its second year of existence the newly formed studio of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayern had two big budget items either of which had they flopped would have proved the end for that studio combine. Fortunately for Leo the Lion, Ben-Hur and The Big Parade proved resounding successes at the box office and became cinema classics.The Big Parade as cinema spectacle does fill the screen in a style that Cecil B. DeMille would have approved. But the accent here is not on heroics, rather on the horror of what was then called the Great War because no one could contemplate another one like it. Watching some of the crowd scenes and battle scenes I saw that The Big Parade set a standard for World War I films. Watch for example the battle scenes in The Fighting 69th and you'll see how much influence The Big Parade had on future films.John Gilbert is the central character of The Big Parade a rather aimless young man whom his father Hobart Bosworth could use a little discipline in his life. The army is just the thing for him. Usually those who advocate such a course don't anticipate the army ever getting in a real shooting war.We declared ourselves in on World War I in April of 1917, but few troops saw any action until a year later. We had no real standing army and Woodrow Wilson gave John Pershing one order, keep the American army separate, train it, and then send it into battle as its own entity. So those scenes of idleness where Gilbert develops his romance with Renee Adoree are quite true. The American Army was being trained in the hell that was trench warfare.The Big Parade is as much a love story as a war story and Gilbert and Adoree were quite the screen couple. This was before Gilbert had done any films with Greta Garbo. The Big Parade proved to be his breakout film and it Renee Adoree her career role on the silent screen as well.The Big Parade was also a tragedy ridden film. Its stars Gilbert, Adoree, and Karl Dane who played Gilbert's sidekick in the trenches all died before 1940 way too young for all of them.In those crowd scenes which did include some newsreel footage, my grandmother used to look at them eagerly when she saw them hoping to see my grand uncle in them. Her brother was part of The Big Parade in real life. William Fleischman was drafted at the age of 19 to serve in the American Expeditionary Force and he came back and lived until 1979 and came back in a lot better shape than John Gilbert was in this film.The Great War was the seminal event of his generation, no one who survived it ever was the same. The song My Buddy was used on the sound track and Uncle Bill had an aversion for that song. He said that in the trenches you did not worry about your buddy, in fact better it was him that was hit than you. Uncle Bill also developed a lifelong aversion to peaches as well. That was the main thing he remembers being given in his rations and after the war couldn't look at a canned peach for the rest of his life.Despite My Buddy on the soundtrack and that was added subsequently, King Vidor directed his masterpiece in The Big Parade. Although he directed for a little more than 30 years after this, Vidor never equaled The Big Parade. And to dough boy William Fleischman, part of The Big Parade this review is dedicated.

theskulI42 King Vidor, like descendant such as Steven Spielberg, became the biggest, most famous directors of their time both for their willingness and desire to give the people what they wanted, across as many genres as possible, to as many people as possible, and The Big Parade depicts that desire in plentiful spades.The film is nominally a war film, taking place during World War I, where the wimpy, idle son of a rich businessman (John Gilbert) is forced by expectations to join the Army, and he is sent to the frontlines in France, where he befriends a few working-class soldiers, as well as finding a sweetheart, French cutie Renee Adoree. Their courtship features the second and third genres of the film, romance and comedy, as the sweet scenes where he teaches her how to chew gum is as charmingly endearing as the love scene where their attempts to whisper sweet nothings are hampered by their constant reliance on their separate translation books; and what is romance without its cousin melodrama, who shows up in chunks to make you weep, lest you be too happy and not affected. There's tragedy and reunions in perfectly modulated chunks, and although I might have rolled my eyes once or twice, it's mostly damn successful.A grand, populist epic, The Big Parade delivers on everything it promises (and it promises a lot), making it one of the better achievements of the entire silent era.{Grade: 8.5/10 (B+) / #2 (of 5) of 1925}