The Big Parade

King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925) is an ambitious, if simple-minded and schematic, anti-war picture.  Vidor always claimed that he didn't care about the critical adulation lavished on the picture; he was more moved by the testimony of veterans to the film's essential truthfulness.

The Big Parade is a curious combination of very slow-moving pastoral scenes and spectacular, if clinical, war imagery.  The picture begins at a breakneck pace, using one or two shots per character, to establish it's three protagonists:  one man, Slim, a big gawky guy with his cheek full chewing tobacco, is a hayseed laborer -- we see him working on a skyscraper and, then, departing for war with his riveter left resting on a girder high over the city streets.  Another glum-faced fellow is a thuggish bartender named Bull.  The main character (played by John Garfield) is named Apperson.  He is the ne-er-do-well son of a great industrialist, a dour tycoon who owns steel mills.  (As in The Deer Hunter, there's a nod to peace-time industry in several showy scenes of steel boiling and fuming in great metal pots and enormous millwork structures leaking smoke into the air.)  Seized by war fever, the three men, who don't know one another, enlist.  Apperson ("everyman" or "a person") conceals his enlistment from his mother.  She grieves for him as his father and brother, who will assume management of the mills, shake his hand -- at last, the playboy has made good.  We see the three principals standing in a big field with guns while still dressed in civilian clothes, then, there is a montage of marching men and an intertitle tells us that the "smiling young men" have gone to France.  Unlike many other films of this is sort, there is no basic training sequence -- the men simply put on uniforms and are next seen marching along the shady lanes of France.

After a twenty mile march, our heroes reach a small French town,  Champillon, where they are billeted in a stable.  There is a lot of supposedly comical byplay -- in fact, it's not funny -- involving shoveling manure, but Vidor stages these scenes so ineptly we can't tell what is going on.  (The way the men do the task makes no sense -- they seem to be shoveling the shit in all different directions.)  The hero, who has a girlfriend state-side, falls in love with a mademoiselle in the village.  These scenes, which are very tedious, have not aged well -- again, there is a lot of groping and pawing from Bull and the hayseed riveter who are competing for the affections of the comely girl.  Apperson takes walks in the meadow with the girl, catches a frog to amuse her, and attends a patriotic meeting in which the Marseillaise is sung and old men posture with swords.  (While this is underway, Bull and the riveter have broken into the wine cellar and are getting drunk.).  This part of the film lasts about an hour and ends with the hero sulking when he receives a letter from his girlfriend in the States.  The bucolic scenes in The Big Parade are, more or less, tedious and seem disproportionately long for their inconsequential subject -- but, in fact, it turns out that this sequence is pivotal in the movie. Apperson's affection for the French girl is vitally important to the movie's climax -- although this may not be apparent to the viewer on first exposure to the film.  After these slow, pastoral sequences,  Vidor wakes up with a call to arms and there is a fantastic sequence of the mobilized troops moving toward the front while the French girl desperately seeks Apperson in masses of marching men and trucks kicking up plumes of dust.  The girl's panicked efforts to find Apperson in the armies of marching men seem disproportionate the rather casual-seeming liaison between them and it is startling to find this tour de force sequence ending with a desolate scene of the abandoned French girl kneeling in despair in the trampled mud and dust of the roadways.

The last third of the film is occupied by enormous battle scenes.  These are very unlike similar sequences in films like All Quiet on the Western Front and Pabst's Westfront 1918 although equally brutal and harrowing in their own right.  Vidor shows endless columns of troops moving toward the horizon on an arrow-straight road -- the titles interspersed in this section are dithyrambic:  wild ejaculations of enthusiasm like " Men! -- Guns! -- Guns! --The Big Parade! -- More men! -- More guns!"  The column containing our three protagonists comes under fire from machine guns mounted on the kite-like biplanes swooping overhead.  There are some puffs of dust on the road and a few men fall face-down but the columns keep moving.  It all seems weirdly dream-like, inconsequential, and the battle-scenes seems possessed of a vast Olympian indifference.  The troops spread out to march through an idyllic woods, but there are snipers and machine-guns and, now and then, we glimpse four or five men falling forward -- there's no sound and so we see muzzle-flashes, dust and litter hopping in the air where the bullets land, and, then, men simply toppling over like sacks of potatoes.  The troops move forward doggedly, leaning into the enemy fire, no one running or trying to dodge the bullets, just endless groups of advancing men.  Gradually, the machine gun fire gets more intense and people are throwing hand grenades to blow up nests of enemy soldiers and, then, gas shells burst on an empty field and the men have to pull goggle-eyed masks over their eyes.  As the scene progresses, the attack continues forward encountering ever more ordinance hurled in the face of slow-moving columns of men trudging into the explosions.  Ultimately, the whole screen collapses into a chaos of fire and smoke and we can no longer see anything.  Slim, Bull, and Apperson are next seen crouching in a shell-hole.  Night is falling and the Germans are raking the field with machine gun fire and lobbing mortar shells into the plowed-up fields ground of them.  Silent films were pre-Code and could be savagely violent -- one recalls "Battling Burrows" beating Lilian Gish to death in Broken Blossoms, the attack on the potato cart in Isn't Life Wonderful?, and various decapitated heads and smashed torsos in Abel Gance's Napoleon -- and, of course, the brutal fight in Death Valley that concludes von Stroheim's Greed.  King Vidor's approach to the small-unit fighting between the American and German lines is similar to von Stroheim's fight scenes in Greed and equally bestial.  An order is delivered by a man creeping like a worm into the shell-hole where our heroes are sheltering.  Someone has to knock out the German mortar.  Slim, the hayseed, volunteers to attack the mortar position, knocks it out with a hand grenade, but is shot.  Lying between the lines, he moans and Bull with Apperson can hear him crying out.  Bull can't tolerate his comrade's cries of anguish and runs forward to try to help him.  He's also shot and dies.  Apperson, then, crawls forward -- these scenes are all shot in deep blue with incandescent flares periodically illumining the cratered battlefield.  A German charges Apperson -- the two soldiers shoot at each other and both men are wounded.  Apperson, then, draws his bayonet and begins crawling laboriously after the German who is also wriggling away, writhing as he tries to escape the avenging  American.  The German topples headfirst into a deep shell-hole and Apperson plans to cut this throat but can't commit the act.  Instead, he gives the German a cigarette, but the man dies with the cigarette drooping out of his mouth.  It's 4 a.m, and the Americans launch a pre-dawn assault.  From a high angle, we see the soldiers swarming out of ruins and shell-holes -- they look like some kind vermin, cockroaches or rats, scampering frantically out of their hiding places.  The attack ends in total chaos with collapsing trenches full of men wriggling around as they hack each other apart and explosions bursting everywhere.  The next shot is color -- a huge red cross painted on the side of a black and white ambulance that is mired in mud.  This is a really extraordinary effect and the battle scene is truly horrific. A title announces:  Another Big  Parade! and we see a line of ambulances extending to the horizon transporting mangled soldiers to field hospitals.  We next see Apperson in a serene, neatly ordered hospital in a cathedral-like Church.  He's been shot in the knee.  Near him is a soldier driven mad by shell-shock trying to tear free of ropes tying him to a bed.  Apperson learns that the battle has surged back and forth over Champollin several times.  Concerned for the well-being of the French girl, he laboriously hauls himself out of bed, breaks through a window, and hops several miles to the ravaged village, now burning and in ruins.  He can't find the girl and collapses during a counter-attack with soldiers darting about the fiery village and shells falling.  A semi-documentary shot shows a long line of refugees staggering across a desolate landscape on a wet road, among them is Apperson's girlfriend, Melisande.

Peace:  Apperson is riding with his father in the family's huge limousine.  He looks haggard and distracted.  At the family's mansion, Apperson's brother is embracing Justyn, Apperson's fiance from before the war.  When Apperson enters the house, we're shocked to see that he's lost his leg.  He is indifferent to his former girlfriend and tells his mother he must return to France to find Melisande.  Cut to France, where Melisande and her mother are plowing -- the men in the village have all been killed.  Melisande is chewing gum, a vice taught to her by Apperson.  Melisande sees a lone figure limping atop a remote hillside.  She runs toward the man, descending out-of-control about a forty foot eroded bank, and essentially rolling down into a stony gulch.  Apperson limping grotesquely hurries toward her and the two embrace.

It's curious that The Big Parade is not more famous.  It broke box-office records and was the most profitable film of 1925.  Although the picture is very dull during the pastoral scenes in Champollin, those sequences are vital to the film's later development -- essentially Apperson sacrifices his leg to an attempt to find Melisande.  And the ending is both desolate and moving at the same time.  The battle scenes are surely among the best ever filmed and the haunting sequence in which all three protagonists are either killed or wounded is both terrifying and exciting.  Vidor's direction is generally subtle, naturalistic, and effective -- the manner in which the viewer is ushered into the hell of the battle, by stages as it were, is also extraordinary.  The is an excellent silent picture and, certainly, one of the finest war films ever made.