Film Review: The Big Parade (1925)
The Big Parade (1925)
directed by King Vidor
Not available on DVD as of January 2011.
Frames in this review are taken from the VHS tape from MGM/UA Home Video.
There two halves of The Big Parade are so different in style that it might as well be two films. If we were to give them titles, the first half could be called Life in the Army: a nostalgic look at the camaraderie of basic training and garrison duty. The second half could be entitled War is Hell: an intense experienced of the nightmarish trench warfare that characterized most of World War I on the Western Front. This dichotomy gives the film a distinctive perspective that mirrors that of the American forces in the Great War. A quick transition from war to peace, a burst of patriotism, a baptism of fire in intense combat, and then the end of the war, a mere 19 months later.
In contrast, the main European combatants endured four years of grievous
losses, as their young men were cut down in the millions. Food shortages
ravages civilians in blockaded Germany and Austria-Hungary, mutiny took
the place of élan in the French Army, and revolution swept Russia into an
untried and uncertain future. The long exhaustion of the First World War
is better captured in that other great anti-war film
All Quiet on the Western Front
Although The Big Parade is less comprehensive due to its focus on the American experience of the war, it is nevertheless a powerful account of the war. While All Quiet on the Western Front achieved its impact by soaking up the desperation as it built up over four long years, The Big Parade shocks and stuns the viewer with its rapid change of tone that quickly drives out the naïveté about war. We are first treated to an hour of horsing around and chasing French girls, getting lulled into a false sense of security. Then WHAM! The paradisiacal world comes crashing down, and the protagonist is thrown into the relentless whirlwind of combat.
That so much bitterness can develop from a (comparatively) brief exposure to combat makes a rather different and even more forceful statement on the horrors of war. Half a century later, Peter Weir's Gallipoli would take this approach even further — the characters would not get thrown into combat until the very end of the war. Then, at the climax of the film, the characters are cut down by machine gun fire as they make their one valiant attack for God, King, and Empire. Denouement comes outside the cinema as the stunned audience staggers back home.
Summary
To create this false sense of well-being, The Big Parade takes care to keep the war far, far away in its first half. The young protagonist James Apperson (played by John Gilbert) enlists in the army out of the shallowest sense of patriotism. He’s swept along by the flags and the parades, by the peer pressure to join up, certainly no sentiments of "Let's make the world safe for Democracy." Basic training is swiftly dealt with in a quick montage of marching, less than a hundred feet of film as the civilian-clad volunteers dissolve into a sharply uniformed body of troops.
In France, the soldierly life is bucolic and fun — washing clothes along a stream, raising hell in town, running from MPs, receiving letters and cakes in the mail, juggling the French girl Melisande (Renée Adorée) with the Girl Back Home. If it were not for the uniforms they're wearing, the characters might as well be a group of students visiting on holiday. The only link to the war is a scene in Melisande's home as her extended family reads letters from the front, but this scene is played comically, with the grandfather striking poses and stabbing a sword, as though he were marching "On to Berlin!" in the confident army of Napoleon III.
The romance between Jim and Melisande is told in a series of too-cute episodes. Of course it has to start with Jim making a fool of himself, as he first encounters Melisande while carrying a barrel – from the inside. The Franco-American cultural rift is illustrated when Jim introduces Melisande to bubble gum – and she promptly swallows it. Later Jim sees a frog and points it out: He frog, you frog, ha ha ha! But a letter from the Girl Back Home introduces a kink into their relationship. Nevertheless, Jim decides to stick with the French girl, leading to a joyous reunion.
But the reunion is fleeting, as it happens just as the unit is deployed into battle. After a few words in a telegraphed order, a blast of bugles brings about a flurry of activity. Thousands of men, horses, carts, and trucks kick up a storm of dust on the streets, as Melisande frantically searches for her man amidst the commotion. MGM gets to show off the vast scope of the production as we see practically an entire division of troops roll by (the U.S. Artillery provided the manpower for this film). The intertitles play up the urgency with repetitive phrasing, all-caps, and exclamation points. Finally, we get the titular Big Parade, a seemingly endless line of trucks carrying men to the front along a narrow road.
The massive column is is majestic, exciting, and stirring, but it’s also the last such scene in the film. There will be plenty of excitement later on, but it will not be the happy kind. There is no glory to be found in this war. As the soldiers march to the front on foot, the column is welcomed by a strafing German fighter plane. They then pass a line of ragged French wounded heading the other way. Their first taste of battle is occurs as they advance slowly through sniper-infested woods in skirmish lines, getting picked off one by one.
Later, there's an agonizing night patrol harshly illuminated with flares, as brave soldiers scream in agony while their comrades listen helplessly from trenches mere yards away. A wounded Jim ends up in a shell crater with a wounded German soldier, an all-out night assault is lighted with explosions and gunfire, towns are taken and retaken, civilians turn into refugees, and hospitals are filled with the shattered bodies of the barely alive. Even the homecoming is bitter, although a Hollywood film ultimately has to have a happy ending. At least Jim manages to be reunited with Melisande.
Mood
The Big Parade is fairly sparse in its use of intertitles. Many of them are superfluous, as in the entirely self-explanatory frog scene. But the non-conversational intertitles help to set the mood for the images. For example, the reflections on patriotism ultimately motivate Jim's enlistment during the parade, and the excited large-type repetition adds urgency to the division’s departure for the front.
The two most memorable intertitles are the two that include the title of the film, and they are eloquent indeed in their brevity. First, there is the all-caps "BIG PARADE" that accompanies the proud army heading to the front. Then after the battle, there is a shot of a wheel stuck in the mud, a pullback to show the red cross on the ambulance’s side, and then a seemingly endless line of ambulances on the same road, this time heading away from the front. This scene is introduced by the title "Another Big Parade." The ironic repetition of the title bookends the combat scenes in the film, and the sparing use of words conjures up a forlornness that is difficult to create with images alone.
The acting is superb, restrained and confident in an example of silent film at its height. John Gilbert can stare into the camera with insouciance, as when he's chewing gum with Melisande. But he can also stare with alienation, as when he is stuck in hospital and aggressively yells at a babbling wounded man to shut up (fortunately, this agonizing scene is not accompanied by intertitles), or when he's sitting wordless in the car with his father on his way home. The character actors playing his pals open up in free-ranging performances, the corporal (Tom O'Brien) being the constant butt of the privates' pranks, and Bull (Karl Dane) the simpleminded and happy-go-lucky type. This sets up an interesting contrast between Jim and Bull when they go into battle for the first time — Jim is tense and frightened, while Bull is delighted at the change of pace, nonchalantly shooting a sniper and blissfully unconcerned about advancing into an artillery barrage. Renée Adorée presents a charming Melisande, at first reluctant, then agreeable, then angry, then feverishly desperate, and finally longing. You don’t need synchronized sound to convey deep human emotions.
The camera work in the film is fairly unobtrusive. There are lots of tracking shots — dollying across soldier's faces, keeping up with moving vehicles, staying in front of the advancing soldiers in the forest — but no dramatic camera tricks. Many of the romance scenes are shot in static setups. But the night battle scenes are very spectacular, the staccato lighting of the flares adding tension to the sleepless night, and the constrained camera viewpoints conveying the trench occupants’ lack of mobility.
The double-exposures of the big night attack are used to astonishing
effect, creating a dynamism from the unrestrained explosions overlaid
onto the relentlessly advancing men. There's debris flying everywhere,
smoke all around, and constantly changing lighting. And the
double-exposure also has the effect of reducing the contrast in the
scene, making the soldiers’ figures look like ghosts, like men already
dead but still marching onward and onward. Yet again, technical
limitations are actually used for artistic effect. (The scene is not as
compelling as Kubrick's breathtaking tracking shots across the enormous
Paths of Glory
The montage of Jim's mother thinking back over his childhood as they
embrace at the homecoming is now the oldest cliché in the book. But in a
film with no spoken dialog, the images are quite potent, and the
flashback seems to dwell for just the right amount of time. Hugh Wynn,
who would later also edit Vidor's
The Crowd
Another interesting point about this film is the diegetic music. Diegetic music in a silent film? Sure, in the intertitles. The lyrics of songs like "You're in the Army Now" punctuate scenes of army life, often as the soldiers are actually singing. This gives the accompanists of the day a strong hint about the music that they should be playing, and modern-day composer Carl Davis has of course also done so. Much of the music comes from recognizable songs: "Over There" in the American cities as the armies are raised, "La Marseillaise" in Melisande's house as the grandfather fights off the imaginary Prussians, and of course, "Mademoiselle from Armentières." Carl Davis' score is at its best in the frantic goodbye scene, in which the military theme fights the love theme for supremacy, with cymbals crashing as Melisande searches desperately for her love, trapped in the middle of the road between a column of marching infantry and a column of cavalry.
Technical
Like many other films in the Thames Silents series, The Big Parade has not yet made its way to DVD. A VHS tape was released by MGM/UA in 1988 and looks quite acceptable. Most of the film is well-balanced and in good condition; a few opticals have some contrast build-up. Unfortunately, much of this film takes place at night, and videotapes don’t do too well with dark scenes. Caught up in the action by the compelling story, acting, and direction, and aided by the music, any flaws can easily be ignored. A few scenes have a mass of scratches that are barely visible on VHS.
Most of the film appears to have been transferred from a later synchronized-sound Movietone print. The film has been windowboxed to the 1.2 aspect ratio, and vignetted shots make it obvious that the optical soundtrack has cut into the left side of the frame. It does become obvious on occasion – for example, there is a scene with three soldiers, but the soldier on the left side of the frame is cropped in half. Occasionally, there will be a shot without any windowboxing, at the full 1.33 silent aspect ratio, but these tend to be the more damaged scenes and look to have come from a different print.
Because the source print was the 1931 optical-sound rerelease, none of the scenes are tinted. The tints have not been recreated, but most of the night scenes work just fine since they were shot at nighttime. However, there is one glaring exception: an airplane shot against a bright day sky that really need the blue tinting of day-for-night. It comes at an inconvenient point, too.
The original negative for the film was believed to have been lost, but was discovered accidentally by Kevin Brownlow in the vaults at George Eastman House. The film was restored from the original negative between 2003-2005, undoing the cropping from the sound prints. The color tints were recreated based on the continuity records, and a crucial hand-colored scene was recreated digitally. [Link to article on the restoration by Warner Brothers Vice President Richard P. May] The restoration has been slated for DVD release several times in the years since, but has never made it. As of August 2010, Turner Classic Movies is still showing the video transfer from 1988. [Nitrateville discussion on The Big Parade]
