#681) The Big Parade (1925)

#681) The Big Parade (1925)

OR “All Silent on the Western Front”

Directed by King Vidor

Written by Laurence Stallings and Harry Behn. Titles by Joseph W. Farnham.

Class of 1992

The Plot: Jim Apperson (John Gilbert) has no interest in working for his wealthy businessman father (Hobart Bosworth) or for anyone. When World War I breaks out, Jim is initially indifferent, but is convinced by his friends to enlist. Jim soon finds himself in the U.S. Army’s 42^nd Infantry Division (aka the Rainbow Division), stationed near a farm in the French village of Champillon. Jim meets local farmer Melisande (Renée Adorée) and while there is some initial friction between the two, they begin to develop feelings for each other. When Jim’s unit is sent to the front, the couple tearfully part, with Jim vowing he will return. And that’s just the first half of this big, sprawling, war epic.

Why It Matters: The NFR write-up gives a rundown of the film’s significance, and quotes Moraunt Hall’s New York Times review of the film, in which he called it “an eloquent pictorial epic” that showed “all the artistry of which the camera is capable.”

But Does It Really?: This is definitely in the “historical significance” camp of NFR movies. On its own “The Big Parade” is a well-made epic that holds up reasonably fine almost a century later, but has more or less disappeared from the conversation of great movies. While I found the film a bit of a chore to sit through, I knew I was watching the silent film medium at the height of its artistry, with King Vidor successfully balancing the film’s blend of romance, light comedy, and grim warfare. “The Big Parade” is not the greatest movie ever made, but it is an undeniably important film that deserves to be brought up and reappraised every now and then, and its NFR induction is warranted and respected.

Everybody Gets One: Laurence Stallings was a journalist who served with the Marines in France during World War I. After the war, Stallings co-wrote the war play “What Price Glory” with Maxwell Anderson, and the play’s Broadway success allowed Stallings to write full-time, focusing primarily on his wartime experience. Shortly afterwards director King Vidor and producer Irving Thalberg of MGM approached Stallings about the film rights to “What Price Glory”, which had already been snatched up by Fox (and made into a movie there in 1926). Undeterred, Vidor and Thalberg commissioned Stallings to write another WWI screenplay, and the result was “The Big Parade”. Side note: Some sources say that “Big Parade” is an adaptation of Stallings’ 1924 autobiography “Plumes”, but I couldn’t find any official source that could corroborate that claim.

Title Track: According to the intertitles, the “big parade” is the march of soldiers off to war. “Men! Guns! Men! Men! Guns!”

Wow, That’s Dated: Mostly all of the WWI references sprinkled throughout, including a shoutout to General John “Black Jack” Pershing, as well as about 900 verses of “You’re in the Army Now“.

Other notes

The print I watched had a score composed by Carl Davis, the legendary composer we lost just last year. In addition to his film scores, Davis spent much of the ’80s and ’90s writing new scores for classic silent movies, giving them the grandiose, dream-like quality we associate with classic Hollywood. He also composed the score to the 1980 miniseries “Hollywood”, perhaps the definitive retrospective of silent films.
This is already head and shoulders above most of the silent films on this list. Even in the opening moments there’s a sophistication to the editing and cinematography that is a welcome reprieve from the sloppiness of most silent films. To be fair, “Big Parade” was made by a big Hollywood studio, an accomplished director, and on a budget that would equate to $6.5 million today.
Once war is declared and Jimmy enlists, one intertitle refers to patriotism as “life’s greatest emotion”. Oh boy.
I’ll say this up front: I don’t care for this movie’s comic relief. I get that you need them there to prevent this from going full-blown melodrama, but ultimately I found the antics of Bull and Slim distracting. And no offense to actor Karl Dane, but man alive is that a face that takes some getting used to. It doesn’t help that for most of his screentime he’s chewing a big wad of tobacco, an action that distorts his face even further.
For a silent movie there sure is a lot of singing. The intertitles favor us with several era-appropriate war songs, including the aforementioned “You’re in the Army Now”. We do, however, get some self-censorship on the lyric “You’ll never get rich/You son of a gun”.
So the meet-cute of our main couple involves shoveling manure and then getting stuck in a barrel? As the French say, “C’est la guerre”.

The good news: we get some good old fashioned pre-Code nudity in this film. The bad news: It’s the hindquarters of Bull and Slim.
Both John Gilbert and Renée Adorée are perfectly fine as the leads of this movie. Gilbert has this everyman charm to him that grounds the movie, and Adorée is appropriately feisty as the leading lady. These are not two glamorous movie stars falling madly in love with each other, but rather two regular people getting to know each other and falling in love bit by bit. Side note: John Gilbert was about a year away from meeting Garbo and the two of them starring in the kind of glamorous movie romance this film shies away from.
Best line in the movie: “French is Greek to me.” Runner-up is Bull in his butchered French calling Melisande his “Chevrolet Coupe”.
The best scene in the movie is when Jim’s division moves out of the village, and he and Melisande are both frantically trying to find each other in the crowd before he has to go. It’s a beautifully shot sequence (with an assist in my viewing from Carl Davis’ leitmotif mash-up) and surprisingly heartfelt. It’s such a powerful moment I was convinced there would be an intermission afterwards. There wasn’t, but I paused the film and took one anyway.

The second half of “Big Parade” is an almost entirely different film, stripping the first half’s glossy romance in favor of more realistic warfare. It’s a bit jarring, but I imagine that was the point.
The platoon’s walk through the woods to find enemy snipers is definitely another highlight. The trick seems to be having the soldiers killed off in the background, with our protagonists unaware of just how close the enemy is. It’s a wonderfully suspenseful sequence, apparently filmed with a metronome to give the scene its tempo.
Oh good, one more scene that hinders on Slim’s tobacco-spitting technique. They can’t kill him off fast enough for me.
Twice in this movie someone exclaims “For the love of Mike.” Who’s Mike? Is it St. Michael the Archangel?
The movie’s anti-war sentiment kicks into high gear with Jim’s monologue in the trenches. That all being said, it’s really hard to monologue in a silent movie. A few seconds of talking, a long intertitle, more talking, another long intertitle, and so on.
Speaking of intertitles and euphemisms, it’s interesting what this film chooses to censor or not in terms of language. There are a few instances of “hell”, one exclamation of “God Damn” (Two words); but when Jim declares the enemy to be bastards it’s written out as “b – – – – – – – – – s”. At least, I assume he meant bastards; that’s way too many dashes.
Once we get to the end of the war and Jim’s homecoming, we know the film has to get Jim and Melisande back together. Despite my overall indifference to the movie, I’ll be damned: I wanted these two to reunite, and was moved when they finally did. You stuck the landing, Vidor. Well done.

Legacy

“The Big Parade” opened in theaters November 1925, and was an instant hit, running in some theaters for as long as two years. It was the highest-grossing movie of the year, and possibly the highest-grossing movie of the silent era. Jury’s still out on whether “Birth of a Nation” grossed more. Early box office numbers are hard to find and not the most reliable.
Along with fellow NFR entry “Ben-Hur“, “Big Parade” helped new kid on the block MGM assert itself as a major motion picture company. “Big Parade” would be MGM’s biggest box office hit until “Gone with the Wind” 14 years later.
Both John Gilbert and Renée Adorée became big movie stars thanks to “The Big Parade”, though unfortunately neither of them made the successful transition to sound pictures, and both died within a few years of the film’s release.
Following the advent of talking pictures, “The Big Parade” was re-released in 1930 with a soundtrack: no spoken dialogue, but with a new score by William Axt. The surviving print of “The Big Parade” is this 1930 version, although most newer releases opt for the 1988 score by Carl Davis.
Laurence Stallings continued writing essays, plays, and screenplays for the rest of his life. Among his screenplays were John Ford’s “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon”, and fellow NFR entry “Show People“.

Although the legacy of “The Big Parade” has faded over the decades, you can see the influence its undoubtedly had on the other great WWI epics of the time, including “Wings” and “All Quiet on the Western Front“. If only the Oscars had started a few years earlier; “Big Parade” would have been a shoo-in for Best Picture.