The Big Parade (1925)

directed by King Vidor
Frames in this review are taken from the VHS tape from MGM/UA Home Video; the film is part of the Turner library and video release is now controlled by Warner Home Video.

Jump to section: Mood | Technical

There's such a contrast between the first and the second half of The Big Parade that it's almost two films. If we were to give titles to the two halves, we might call the first half Life in the Army, a warm and nostalgic look at life as a soldier. The second half, then, would be War is Hell, an intense, alternately stirring and melancholic account of the nightmarish trench warfare that characterized much of World War I on the Western Front.

This dichotomy gives the film a distinctive perspective which 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 it was all over. In contrast, the main European combatants endured four years of losses. Great privation wore down civilians in blockaded Germany, mutiny replaced élan in the French Army, and revolution swept Russia into an uncertain future. The exhaustion is captured in that other great anti-war film All Quiet on the Western Front, which entered combat much sooner, stayed the course through attacks and counterattacks, spent a painful stretch in a field hospital, and went home on leave to an uncomprehending world.

But though The Big Parade may be less comprehensive, it is just as powerful an account of the war. While All Quiet on the Western Front achieved its impact by soaking up the desperation as it developed over four long years, The Big Parade shocks and stuns with its rapid change of tone and loss of naïveté about war. We first are treated to half a film of horsing around and chasing French girls, are lulled into a false sense of security. The suddenness with which that paradisaical world comes crashing down, and the relentless whirlwind of combat that follows, is wholly unexpected. That so much bitterness develops from even a brief exposure to combat makes a different and forceful statement on war. (Half a century later, Peter Weir's Gallipoli takes this approach even further — one valiant attack and the characters get slaughtered: climax in the last reel of film, and denouement outside the cinema as the audience staggers back home.)

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 for the shallowest form of patriotism, of flags and parades, of peer pressure to join up, nothing remotely resembling the sentiments of "Let's make the world safe for Democracy." Military training boils down to a quick montage of marching, at most a couple dozen feet of film as the civilian-clad volunteers dissolve into a sharply uniformed body of troops. In France, the soldierly life is fun and games — 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. Except for the uniforms they're wearing, it 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 is played for maximum hilarity, 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 comprised of a series of cute episodes. Of course great love has to start with someone making a fool of himself, as Jim meets Melisande while carrying a barrel from the inside. The Franco-American cultural rift is illustrated with the famous scene where Melisande is introduced to bubble gum and promptly swallows it, and 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, which allows for a tearful change of heart and a joyous reunion.

But the reunion which happily concludes the first half is fleeting, as it coincides with the unit's deployment into battle. A few words in a telegraphed order and a blast of bugles brings the a flurry of activity: thousands of men, horses, carts, and trucks kicking up a storm of dust, and Melisande frantically searching for her man amidst all this commotion. It's like a needle in the proverbial haystack, and MGM gets to show off the breadth of its investment as we see practically every soldier in an entire division of U.S. Artillery, which provided the manpower for this film. The intertitles add to this urgency with repetitive phrasing, all-caps, and exclamation points, and finally we get the Big Parade, a seemingly endless line of trucks carrying men to the front along a narrow road.

It is majestic, exciting, and stirring, but that's the last of it to be found in the film. Oh, there'll be plenty of excitement, but none of it happy. On foot, the marching column is strafed by a German fighter plane, then pass a line of ragged French wounded heading the other way. They got their first taste of battle advancing slowly through sniper-infested woods in battle lines, perfect targets for machine guns. Later, there's an agonizing night patrol illuminated with flares, where brave soldiers scream in agony as their comrades helplessly listen 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, though a Hollywood film always has to have a happy ending and it's not hard to guess what happens to the lovers.

Mood

The Big Parade is fairly sparse in its use of intertitles. There's a bit of superfluity, as in the entirely self-explanatory frog scene. But the non-conversational intertitles serve to complement the images — the reflections on patriotism set up Jim's enlistment during the parade, and the excited repetition add urgency to the departure for the front. Perhaps the best is the "BIG PARADE" which accompanies the proud army heading to the front, then after the battle, a shot of a wheel in the mud, a pullback to show the red cross on the vehicle's side, and a seemingly endless line of ambulances on the same road heading to the rear, introduced by the title "Another Big Parade." The ironic repetition of the title bookends the fighting, and conjures up a forlornness that is difficult to create with images alone.

The acting is superb, restrained and at ease in silent film at its height. John Gilbert glares in a way that covers both insouciance, when he's chewing gum with Melisande, and an acerbic alienation, in the hospital as he tells a babbling wounded man to shut up (phew, no intertitles here), and when he's sitting in the car with his father on the 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. It makes for an interesting contrast between Jim and Bull when they go into battle for the first time — Jim tense and frightened, Bull delighted at the change of scenery, nonchalantly beating a sniper to the trigger and unconcerned about advancing into an artillery barrage. Renée Adorée presents a charming Melisande, reluctant then agreeable then angry then fevered and finally longing, somehow managing to convey her Gallic background to create an awkwardness in the early scenes between Jim and Melisande.

Camera motion 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. Lots of static setups in the romance scenes, for example. It's the night battle scenes that are the most spectacular, the staccato lighting adding tension and the constrained viewpoints conveying a lack of mobility for the trench occupants. The double-exposures of the big night attack are astounding, with a dynamism created from the unrestrained explosions overlaid on the relentlessly advancing men. There's debris flying everywhere, smoke all around, and constantly changing lighting. And the lightness of the figures created by the double-exposure make the soldiers seem like the already dead, marching onward and onward. Staging the scenes for real with explosions and soldiers would've required margins of safety and led to a more cautious and less intense battle, yet another example of technical limitations forcing an artistic effect. (On the other hand, Kubrick's long tracking shots across the enormous Paths of Glory trench location are breathtaking despite being shot live, but Kubrick was notorious for his technical brilliance and perfectionism.)

The montage of Jim's mother thinking back over his childhood as they embrace at the homecoming is now the oldest cliche in the book, but in a film without spoken words, the images are quite potent, and the flashback seems to dwell for just the right amount of time. Hugh Wynn, who also edited Vidor's The Crowd and La Boheme, put together The Big Parade. Of course, Vidor himself has an impeccable sense of timing, the best-known example being that rhythmic advance through Belleau Wood, set to a drum like a funeral march.

Also interesting about this film is the diegetic music. Diegetic music in a silent film? Sure, in the intertitles. The lyrics of songs such as "You're in the Army Now" punctuate scenes of army life, often as the soldiers are actually singing. Likely most accompanists of the day would have picked up on these cues, and modern-day composer Carl Davis is no exception. Much of the music comes from recognizable songs: "Over There" in the American cities as armies are raised, "La Marseillaise" in Melisande's house as the grandfather fights off the imaginary Prussians, and of course, "Mademoiselle from Armentières." Davis' score is best in the frantic goodbye scene, the military theme battling the love theme with cymbals crashing as Melisande searches desperately, trapped in the middle of the road between a column of marching infantry and a column of cavalry.

Technical

Like the other films in the Thames Silents series, The Big Parade hasn't made its way to DVD yet. But the VHS tape, released by MGM/UA in 1988, is quite good, as series producer Kevin Brownlow's love of silent film drove him to get the best transfers he could. Unfortunately, much of this film takes place at night, and videotapes generally have trouble with dark scenes — either crunch down the brightness and lose the shadow details, or crank up the brightness and pick up video noise. But most of the film is well-balanced and in good condition; a few opticals have some contrast build-up. Caught up in the action by the compelling story, acting, and direction, and aided by the music, it's easily ignorable. A few scenes have a mass of scratches that are barely visible even on VHS, undoubtedly they'd have looked worse in a higher-resolution format.

Most of the film looks to have been transferred off a later Movietone print, with windowboxing to keep as much of the frame visible as possible. The 1.2 aspect ratio isn't a significant amount of cropping, but occasionally it becomes obvious, as in a marching scene where 2.5 instead of 3 people are in the frame, or a wide shot with vignetting on the right but not on the left. Occasionally, there'll be a shot without the windowboxing, at the full 1.33 silent aspect ratio, but these tend to be the more damaged scenes. The source print has no tints, but most night scenes work just fine since they were shot at nighttime. However, there is one glaring airplane shot against a bright day sky in a night sequence; it might've passed if tinted blue.

The original negative for The Big Parade has been found since the late-1980s videotape release, so many of these problems will hopefully not show up on the eventual DVD release. For now, the video is quite acceptable, and it's too great a film to wait. All Quiet feels dated now with its early sound awkwardness, but The Big Parade with a great hi-fi stereo score is a moving experience even today despite countless imitators over the decades.