THE BIG PARADE (1925)

by Miguel E. Rodriguez

DIRECTOR: King Vidor
CAST: John Gilbert, Renée Adorée, Tom O’Brien, Karl Dane
MY RATING: 8/10
ROTTEN TOMATOMETER: 100% Fresh

PLOT: Wealthy James Apperson deploys as a soldier in World War I France and grows from a naive kid into a battle-hardened veteran as he and his two buddies are paraded to the front.


Films that incorporate tonal shift had better know what they’re doing, lest they become a thematic mess.  King Vidor’s The Big Parade toes that line by shifting from a nearly Keaton-esque “you’re-in-the-Army-now” military comedy to a terrifying war thriller almost on a dime, anticipating and surely influencing future war films like M*A*S*H, The Boys of Company C, and Three Kings.  I’m compelled to forgive the Hallmark Channel ending because, doggone it, I found myself rooting for it like a 1970’s housewife watching her soaps.

It’s 1917, and James Apperson (John Gilbert) is the layabout son of a wealthy family.  He’s engaged to a lovely girl, Justyn, but we don’t see too much of their relationship before the news breaks: America has officially entered World War I.  Justyn has a revealing line when she tells James how much more she’ll love him when he’s in uniform.

An effective scene shows an impromptu parade going down a city street, with flags flying, bands playing, and people holding banners and signs with things like, “GIVE ‘EM ‘L’ IN BERLIN”.  James starts to get carried away with the patriotic fervor on display and joins a carload of his buddies on their way to enlist.  James’s stern father is delighted that his laid-back son is doing something important, but his mother is naturally dismayed, Jim’s fiancé swears she’ll wait for him, and so on.

In Army basic training, Jim connects with two men whom we saw in an earlier prologue: Bull, a no-nonsense bartender, and Slim, a country-boy construction worker with a long, expressive face and a fondness for chewin’ tobacky.  This trio forms the framework for most of the rest of the film.  In fact, for about the first 90 minutes, even after they get shipped to France, the movie is more or less a military-themed comedy.  Jim’s squad is forced to de-manure a farmhouse before they can sack out, and they do so while singing “You’re in the Army Now.”  Bull, with his two stripes, bosses everyone around and cheerfully leads the singing without doing any of the work himself.  And so on.

There’s even the obligatory encounter with the local women, including a farmgirl named Melisande, with whom James is instantly smitten.  His first clumsy overtures are rebuffed, but she takes a shine to him when he somehow finds himself walking through her farmyard with a barrel over his head and body, looking for all the world like an ultra-primitive droid from Star Wars.  A charming scene where Jim teaches her the fine art of chewing gum was supposedly improvised on the spot by the two actors, and has an incredibly effective payoff much later in the film.

This is all handled nicely and even gently at times.  I could have done with a LITTLE less of the scenes involving Bull and Slim also trying to put the moves on Melisande.  The comic point is made early and then beaten into us a couple of times later, and I just wanted the movie to get on with the rest of the story.

Where The Big Parade really shines is in the next half/phase of the film, when the doughboys finally get their orders to the front.  They’re driven out to a forest somewhere as part of a massive truck convoy…another parade with a vastly different connotation.  The battle scenes that follow are as horrifying as anything from Platoon.  Jim’s squad is ordered into a forest reported to be full of snipers and machine gun nests.  The brilliant tactical strategy is for the men to simply walk slowly into the forest and let the German snipers pick them off until they give their positions away, at which point they can be killed by the Americans.

These scenes had me leaning forward in my seat.  The Americans are marching forward, and every so often one of them simply drops to the ground.  Then another, and another.  And still they march.  The soldiers in front don’t look behind them, and if anyone drops in front of them, they simply step over or around the bodies.

(Wasn’t this the kind of thing the British redcoats did in the Revolutionary War, marching in straight lines while the colonials made mincemeat of them?  I seem to remember reading that somewhere.)

Jim and his two buddies survive this death march (let’s call it what it was) only to arrive in a vast no-man’s land defended by German machine guns and artillery mortars.  I won’t go into great detail about this extended sequence, but it involves two things I didn’t expect from a movie made in 1925.  There’s a censored title card which conveys even more of an impact than if it had been spelled out: “Let’s get those b – – – – – – s!”  And also, in one scene, it’s absolutely clear that one soldier evades gunfire and mouths, “Son of a BITCH!”  We don’t get a title card for that one, but it’s unmistakable.  Such is the intensity of this sequence.  The Big Parade is worth watching for many reasons, but I would recommend that one sequence to any fans of modern war films.  There are some physical effects that are clearly more primitive than what we’re used to, but it captures all the horrors of war just as efficiently.

The last arc of the film involves Jim’s attempts to reconnect with Melisande and his eventual return home.  As I said before, these last scenes are overflowing with melodramatic flourishes – especially concerning Jim’s fiancé – but the movie has earned them, and I was on board with it all the way to the final fadeout.

The Big Parade made stars of its director and its lead actors, and it was the first big hit for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.  Indeed, it was MGM’s highest-grossing film until the colossal success of Gone with the Wind.  I can see why.