Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

Gutsycurene Fanciful, disturbing, and wildly original, it announces the arrival of a fresh, bold voice in American cinema.

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Kimball Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Antonius Block I found it tough to rate this film, because the strength of its WWI action footage is offset by a weak build-up and silly romance. The film is commendable in showing us the horrors of war in a dramatic hellscape, but at 151 minutes, it's far too long, and would have been better if the 90 minute build-up had been edited down. It's to great fanfare that a rich young American (John Gilbert) enlists, and it is nice that the film (eventually) contrasts this tone of those scenes to the reality of war, since this is precisely the disillusionment the world went through. He befriends a couple of blue collar guys (Karl Dane and Tom O'Brien), and oddly enough, there's very little concept of military command early on. The men go to France, get settled into a village, and after inexplicably shoveling a manure pile the first night, they're free to carouse about and hit on the local women, one of whom is Renee Adoree. The film moves at a snail's pace, with drawn out scenes and gags that aren't funny, culminating in a highly melodramatic goodbye scene with Adoree when the men are finally called up to the front. Here is where the film gets interesting, though it's not until the 105 minute point before we see anything that resembles authenticity. At first our heroes are walking calmly through a forest while snipers shoot at them, advancing despite soldiers falling until they reach a tree line, at which point the Germans simply raise their hands in surrender. Good grief. Eventually they reach pockmarked, barren fields, and after facing explosions and chemical weapons, hunker down. The film's silly tone is finally broken when one of them is hit, and another screams out into the night "I came to fight - not to wait and rot in a lousy hole while they murder my pal! Waiting! Orders! Mud! Blood! Stinking stiffs! What the hell do we get out of this war anyway!" before crawling out and trying to save him. Upon finding him dead, he screams "They got him! They got him! GOD DAMN THEIR SOULS!" and then charges a machine gun nest. It's meant to have high emotional impact, and at least it's action, but it seems a little ridiculous.It does get better still though, and I have to give the film credit for showing the devastating impact of war. The cinematography is awe-inspiring and frightening. Men advance like ghostly zombies through smoke, gunfire, and explosions, emerging through haze in darkened scenes splashed with pyrotechnics. There is a touching scene with an enemy soldier in a pothole, impressive as it predates 'All Quiet on the Western Front'. The human empathy and feeling that we're all brothers resonates all the more, having come just moments after a murderous rage. The aftermath is also good. I loved the brief scene in the hospital, the shots of the French abandoning bombed out buildings, and later the family reunion. As mother and son embrace, director King Vidor overlays a powerful montage of maternal memories of the boy through the years, my favorite sequence.The last 45 minutes has gravitas, fantastic scenes, and a real message, and is easily 4 out of 5 stars. However, I can't overlook the first 105 minutes, and it's unlikely I would want to watch the film again because of them.

Larry41OnEbay-2 THE BIG PARADE was written by Laurence Stallings, a veteran of World War I. In his autobiography, director King Vidor wrote that he was tired of laboring for months on a feature only to see it play for one week in theaters. So in 1924 he asked M-G-M's head of production, Irving Thalberg for the opportunity to make a "serious" picture that would have legs. Thalberg was convinced that good art and good box office were not necessarily incompatible and the men began to search for an appropriate war story. When Stallings' play WHAT PRICE GLORY? caught Thalberg's attention, the writer was hired.THE BIG PARADE was first designed as a modest programmer concerning one young man's disillusionment in the face of war. When the MGM executives took a look at the rushes, they gave Vidor the go-ahead to film an all-out "spectacular", which ended up running 13 reels and costing a then-astronomical $382,000. It returned 5 million dollars in the days when tickets averaged less than $.25 each.There had been war films before it but Vidor wanted to capture the human dimension behind war from a grunt's point of view. Like Vidor's other masterpiece THE CROWD it shares his philosophy that we are basically anonymous and anti-heroic our destinies determined by events out of our control.The film opens on three young men from different walks of life: a Bowery bartender, Tom O'Brien as Bull; a gawky ironworker Karl Dane as Slim; and a rich man's son, John Gilbert as James or Jimmy. Where the story differs from wartime propaganda is seen in its careful attention to each individuals humanity.The first half of the film is taken up with the horsing around between the army buddies and a young French woman they meet played by Renee Adoree. Their experiences billeting in France are at first light-hearted. There was even some controversy at the time that lip readers could make out actual curse words actors used and later versions had some shots shortened to prevent offending viewers.Gilbert woos the beautiful village girl who looks just like his fiancé back home. Scenes between Gilbert and Adoree, as he shyly flirts and she shyly retreats, made the most of Gilbert's flair for understated acting.The second half of the film gives way to the shocking reality of the horrors of war.The film's many highlights include: the gum chewing lesson (something Vidor claimed he improvised on the set to add a more human dimension); then there is the famous shot of Adoree not letting go of Gilbert as he and his fellow soldiers march to the front with the endless straight-line of hundreds of trucks suggesting the endless amount of supplies and men, the big parade if you will marching off the end of the world.Vidor prepared himself for the subject by screening documentary films made by the U. S. Army Signal Corps during World War I. When viewing footage of a group of soldiers solemnly escorting a funeral cortege, Vidor was inspired to choreograph the filming of the American forces' march through Belleau Wood to the beat of a metronome amplified by a bass drum to heighten the sense of foreboding and death.Sound was used to emotional effect during the film's remarkably successful 2 year run (a little longer than the usual one week run) at New York's Astor Theatre on Broadway, where eighteen men with bugles and wagons filled with iron created sound effects to replicate the experience of actual battle.New York Times placed The Big Parade at the top of its list of best films for 1925, praising it as "the top-notch photoplay of the year" and "unusually original in detail." The Variety review called it "the best of the war pictures" and praised John Gilbert's performance as "superb" and a "triumph for director King Vidor." War films today are usually copies of earlier films influenced by this original, I invite you to see it through those innocent eyes. As if you had never seen a war film and had just walked into a theater in 1925 . . .

Michael_Elliott Big Parade, The (1925)**** (out of 4) One of the all-time great war movies made John Gilbert a star and rightfully so. In the film he plays a spoiled rich kid who joins the Army on a whim after WW1 starts. He gets shipped off to France where he meets two guys who will become his best friend but also a woman (Renee Adoree) who he will fall in love with before being sent to the front lines. This is yet another classic film that really delivers on its reputation and in my opinion it's even better than the actual reputation. This is known for being a great war film but I'd go a bit further and say it's easily one of the best films of the decade and one of the strongest anti-war films ever made. I've heard a few people say that the love story is too melodramatic but I'd disagree with that as Vidor really handles the material very well and I'm sure there were millions of women in 1925 who would disagree about the love story. I think Gilbert and Adoree are so great together that we can easily buy them together and buy their story together. I must admit that I really got caught up in their relationship and all the drama that went with it. Yes, it's fairly predictable but it's still effective and that's all that matters. The film has several unforgettable shots even before we get to the legendary battle scene but the one with Adoree trying to say goodbye is extremely powerful. As for the battle scene that lasts for nearly a half-hour; pure brilliance. This is where the film lives up to its reputation and more because this entire sequence is known to be great but I'd probably push it a bit further and say it's one of the greatest ever created. It's also a great example of why silent movies can be so effective because not hearing the gunshots, the explosions and the screams really makes the sequence all the more surreal and Hell-like. Vidor does a masterful job at building this sequence up over time and I loved the way how it started so small with the simple walk and then built up the human drama before going all out with the battle. The final moments of the battle scenes are incredibly effective and a real treat on the eyes. I sometimes have a problem with war movies that want to show off the "battle" yet preach that it's wrong but this film manages to get the message across with a lot of power. It's also easy to see why Gilbert became a star after this film because his character goes through a lot of changes throughout the film and he handles all of them perfectly and in the end you can't help but think you've witnessed a true character and changes. This film is certainly one of the best war movies out there but it also features a lot more than just battle scenes and in the end it's certainly one of the highlights of silent cinema.

theskulI42 King Vidor, like descendant such as Steven Spielberg, became the biggest, most famous directors of their time both for their willingness and desire to give the people what they wanted, across as many genres as possible, to as many people as possible, and The Big Parade depicts that desire in plentiful spades.The film is nominally a war film, taking place during World War I, where the wimpy, idle son of a rich businessman (John Gilbert) is forced by expectations to join the Army, and he is sent to the frontlines in France, where he befriends a few working-class soldiers, as well as finding a sweetheart, French cutie Renee Adoree. Their courtship features the second and third genres of the film, romance and comedy, as the sweet scenes where he teaches her how to chew gum is as charmingly endearing as the love scene where their attempts to whisper sweet nothings are hampered by their constant reliance on their separate translation books; and what is romance without its cousin melodrama, who shows up in chunks to make you weep, lest you be too happy and not affected. There's tragedy and reunions in perfectly modulated chunks, and although I might have rolled my eyes once or twice, it's mostly damn successful.A grand, populist epic, The Big Parade delivers on everything it promises (and it promises a lot), making it one of the better achievements of the entire silent era.{Grade: 8.5/10 (B+) / #2 (of 5) of 1925}