Just perfect...

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

John Gilbert (a favorite of mine) is so funny, tragic, and REAL in this film. I really felt for his character (Jimmy). The first night he's away from his comfortable home, I could see the loneliness and longing in his face. The battle scenes were extraordinary - the musical score really captured the chaos and destruction of war. The scenes with the fireworks and explosions with all those men dying were breathtaking and heart wrenching. My favorite scene is when Gilbert is hitting on the French girl by the creek and he keeps stroking his finger up and down her arm and trying to kiss her. He's so nonchalant about it as if it came naturally and was improvised. I found myself smiling and softly laughing at the tender scene. That's really fine acting when a performer can make a small scene stand out like that. To me it is more memorable than the highly dramatic scene when Jimmy is out on the battlefield screaming that the Germans have killed his friend and sets out to kill the enemy - still a wonderfully acted scene, but the former just help to enforce my opinion of Gilbert as one of the finest actors ever to grace the silver screen.One scene that tugs at my heart is when Jimmy returns home and sees his mother for the first time on crutches, minus his leg. Didn't you get tense too, as the young doughboys make the march through that field with all the snipers in the trees? I also like the scene where he gives gum to Renee Adoree and she's never chewed it before. Very cute! She was another who couldn't survive the transition to sound, not because of her voice, but because of tuberculosis with which she was diagnosed in 1930. She didn't follow doctor's orders and died of the disease in 1933.Highly recommended. It's one of the only silent films that Warner Brothers has bothered to press rather than burn to DVD in the post-DVD era, and I am grateful for that.

In its second year of existence the newly formed studio of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayern had two big budget items either of which had they flopped would have proved the end for that studio combine. Fortunately for Leo the Lion, Ben-Hur and The Big Parade proved resounding successes at the box office and became cinema classics.The Big Parade as cinema spectacle does fill the screen in a style that Cecil B. DeMille would have approved. But the accent here is not on heroics, rather on the horror of what was then called the Great War because no one could contemplate another one like it. Watching some of the crowd scenes and battle scenes I saw that The Big Parade set a standard for World War I films. Watch for example the battle scenes in The Fighting 69th and you'll see how much influence The Big Parade had on future films.John Gilbert is the central character of The Big Parade a rather aimless young man whom his father Hobart Bosworth could use a little discipline in his life. The army is just the thing for him. Usually those who advocate such a course don't anticipate the army ever getting in a real shooting war.We declared ourselves in on World War I in April of 1917, but few troops saw any action until a year later. We had no real standing army and Woodrow Wilson gave John Pershing one order, keep the American army separate, train it, and then send it into battle as its own entity. So those scenes of idleness where Gilbert develops his romance with Renee Adoree are quite true. The American Army was being trained in the hell that was trench warfare.The Big Parade is as much a love story as a war story and Gilbert and Adoree were quite the screen couple. This was before Gilbert had done any films with Greta Garbo. The Big Parade proved to be his breakout film and it Renee Adoree her career role on the silent screen as well.The Big Parade was also a tragedy ridden film. Its stars Gilbert, Adoree, and Karl Dane who played Gilbert's sidekick in the trenches all died before 1940 way too young for all of them.In those crowd scenes which did include some newsreel footage, my grandmother used to look at them eagerly when she saw them hoping to see my grand uncle in them. Her brother was part of The Big Parade in real life. William Fleischman was drafted at the age of 19 to serve in the American Expeditionary Force and he came back and lived until 1979 and came back in a lot better shape than John Gilbert was in this film.The Great War was the seminal event of his generation, no one who survived it ever was the same. The song My Buddy was used on the sound track and Uncle Bill had an aversion for that song. He said that in the trenches you did not worry about your buddy, in fact better it was him that was hit than you. Uncle Bill also developed a lifelong aversion to peaches as well. That was the main thing he remembers being given in his rations and after the war couldn't look at a canned peach for the rest of his life.Despite My Buddy on the soundtrack and that was added subsequently, King Vidor directed his masterpiece in The Big Parade. Although he directed for a little more than 30 years after this, Vidor never equaled The Big Parade. And to dough boy William Fleischman, part of The Big Parade this review is dedicated.

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.

What constitutes an "anti-war" movie is something I've been discussing with friends for years. I believe the words "futility of war" has to be included in the definition. If WW1 was "the war to end all wars" it was an obvious failure, a failure of massive proportions. And yet the carnage from that war was incredible. this movie was the first to show the war from the point of view of the "grunts" fighting it. But we don't get that until the movie is half over, and that is what I think constitutes the film's genius. King Vidor was a great director, one of the best of his time - others have already commented on his career. But what he and the writer Laurence Stallings gave us in this film was the human dimension; who were those people who fought the war? We meet John Gilbert's character Jim and see him as a spoiled rich kid. Yes, it's stereotypical, but when he watches a 'big parade' he gets bitten with the patriotic bug and joins up. I can relate to that - I joined the Army in 1967 at age 19, and so did a lot of my friends. The middle section of the movie takes place in a French village where Jim, his two buddies Slim and Bull, and the rest of the troops await activation. I was actually a bit disappointed the film didn't show them going through training and becoming soldiers. I think they could have done this and cut out a bit of the village sequences. But nonetheless this is where the love story develops between Jim and Melisande. It's touching, a bit corny, and heart wrenching when Jim finally has to leave for the front lines.The battle scenes were revolutionary for cinema. As snipers shoot at the advancing American troops, I'm sure audiences were sweating it out. I'm also sure that WW1 veterans watching this movie in 1925 were probably flashing back to their experiences, and probably suffering some PTSD attacks, as Vietnam combat veterans did when viewing Oliver Stone's movie "Platoon" more than 60 years later. I personally believe that All Quiet on the Western Front borrowed heavily from these scenes, particularly the scene where Jim finds himself in a foxhole with a wounded German troop and finds that he can't kill him, though the wound he gave him earlier ultimately causes the German's death.Yes, the ending is as corny as can be. But Jim's coming home scene was riveting - and with today's war in Iraq bringing many young Americans home without a limb or two, it is extremely relevant.I didn't find Jim's rant in the foxhole to be over the top at all. Again, I think All Quiet on the Western Front borrowed from it. Who is fighting the war? Why is the war being fought? And who better to ask these questions than the troops on the ground. Given what's transpired in the 82 years since the release of this movie, I find it a stirring anti-war film if for no other reason we know that the deaths of some of the film's characters did not lead to an end to war, as they were promised. And I think King Vidor and Laurence Stallings knew that to be true when the movie was made, some dozen years before the outbreak of war in Europe.