Man With A Movie List

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 sca...