Director: King Vidor
Year: 1925
Run time: 2 hr 31 min
Source: Youtube (paid)
The key scene of The Big Parade, a WWI film made 7 years after the events, is when the lead character, an American soldier, wounded in no-man's-land, crawls into a crater after a wounded German, seething with rage since he just watched his best friends die. With his bayonet in hand, he finds he can't finish the job. Instead, he shares a cigarette with his dying foe. It's a touching scene, but I have to imagine that The Big Parade is the first and only war film where such a moment would not be considered cliche.
Here it really works though, and that's because The Big Parade spends the previous two hours content with the patriotic fervor of its characters. But although this is not an anti-war film, it does try hard to be realistic about the effects of war, and that clearly resonated with its audience. The first world war was a bloodbath on a previously unknown scale, and this movie gets that scale right. The titular parade is the massive numbers of men being led to the front line: the brand new studio MGM had the resources to put that on display, and the director King Vidor frames it well.
There are some powerful images from this production that a war historian has to take note of. A line of troops being strafed by a biplane flying just twenty feet off the ground is appropriately terrifying (one wonders if Hitchcock was taking notes), and the incredible numbers of shells being fired between trenches is not an exaggeration - I was oddly reminded of a recent summer night full of fireflies.
However, the war scenes are just a small part of this movie, which mostly centers around a romance between the American and a young French woman he falls in love with while stationed in Europe. The couple have great chemistry. The peacefulness of these early scenes is, in its own way, the best argument the film has that peace should reign in the world.
Year: 1925
Run time: 2 hr 31 min
Source: Youtube (paid)
The key scene of The Big Parade, a WWI film made 7 years after the events, is when the lead character, an American soldier, wounded in no-man's-land, crawls into a crater after a wounded German, seething with rage since he just watched his best friends die. With his bayonet in hand, he finds he can't finish the job. Instead, he shares a cigarette with his dying foe. It's a touching scene, but I have to imagine that The Big Parade is the first and only war film where such a moment would not be considered cliche.
Here it really works though, and that's because The Big Parade spends the previous two hours content with the patriotic fervor of its characters. But although this is not an anti-war film, it does try hard to be realistic about the effects of war, and that clearly resonated with its audience. The first world war was a bloodbath on a previously unknown scale, and this movie gets that scale right. The titular parade is the massive numbers of men being led to the front line: the brand new studio MGM had the resources to put that on display, and the director King Vidor frames it well.
There are some powerful images from this production that a war historian has to take note of. A line of troops being strafed by a biplane flying just twenty feet off the ground is appropriately terrifying (one wonders if Hitchcock was taking notes), and the incredible numbers of shells being fired between trenches is not an exaggeration - I was oddly reminded of a recent summer night full of fireflies.
However, the war scenes are just a small part of this movie, which mostly centers around a romance between the American and a young French woman he falls in love with while stationed in Europe. The couple have great chemistry. The peacefulness of these early scenes is, in its own way, the best argument the film has that peace should reign in the world.
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