Director King Vidor always yearned to make a movie that played more than just one week in the theaters. The fashion at the time was to show a movie for a handful of days and then immediately return the reels to the distributor for another movie. His desire to create an epic on the recent Great War (World War One), just seven years removed, was enthusiastically endorsed by MGM head of production, Irving Thalberg. The studio contracted writer Laurence Stallings, a Marine veteran, to compose a story adhering to Vidor's vision. Stallings had fought in the Battle of Belleau Wood and was wounded in the leg, which was eventually amputated. Emerging from Stallings' typewriter was the screenplay for November 1925's "The Big Parade." Not only did the motion picture play longer than one week in theaters (a New York City movie house, Astor Theater, projected the film for almost two straight years, pulling in over $1.5 million), but the MGM film became its most lucrative production until 1939's "Gone With The Wind." In fact, besides D. W. Griffith's "The Birth of a Nation," "The Big Parade" is the highest grossing silent movie.
"The Big Parade's" primary attraction is its combat scenes. The anti-war film was the first in cinema to look at the war through the prism of the common GI. It follows three privates as they undergo training, travel to the front, and fight in the trenches. One of them, James (John Gilbert), falls in love with a local French woman, Melisande (Renee Adoree).
The movie is labeled as an anti-war movie for a variety of reasons. James enlists in the Army in 1917 because of the jingoistic atmosphere permeating the members of his community, especially his father and his girlfriend. The graphic carnage of the war is seen by viewers as the battle tactics of both armies show the barbaric methods involved in the face of modern armaments. Vidor has his soldiers march shoulder to shoulder in straight lines in front of blazing German machine guns. At war's end, when James returns home, he finds his old girlfriend has fallen for his brother. His parents, meanwhile, greet him proudly embracing him, but the two understandably fail to fully comprehend the horrors he had experienced in France.
Today's viewers may miss the ear piercing sounds of battle which would otherwise emphasize the extreme chaos of war. Astor Theater employed an 18-member orchestra to play martial music while small wagons filled with iron spikes clanging together were pushed backstage to reproduce the sounds of battle. In fact, on the set during the filming of the battle scenes in the woods, Vidor had a base drum banging to synchronize the men's cadence marching towards the German lines.
What's most ironic about "The Big Parade" is the four main actors all died an early death. Gilbert was stricken by a fatal heart attack at 38 from years of heavy drinking early in 1936. His on screen French sweetheart, Adoree, passed away from tuberculosis in 1933 at the age of 35. Karl Dane, the lanky soldier who volunteered to attack the German machine gun nest, died in utter poverty as one of many actors who failed to make the transition to sound, committing suicide in 1934 at 47. And Tom O'Brien, as Corporal Bull O'Hara, was the longest-lived of the four, dying at 56.
"The Big Parade" ushered in a series of World War One movies during the late 1920's, one winning the Academy Awards first Best Picture (1927's "Wings"). The film was the first realistic war drama in cinema, and inspired a number of scenes in other motions pictures reminiscent of Vidor's battle set pieces. The two enemy soldiers finding themselves in the same shell hole where they share a cigarette is replicated in 1930's "All Quiet on the Western Front." "The Big Parade" contains the first swear words in a dialogue inter-title ("G.. D... their souls," says Gilbert) and was one of 400 movies nominated for American Film Institute's 100 America's Greatest Love Stories motion picture. "The Big Parade" is included in the "1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die' reference book.
