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25
1925
fc ~\ MOTION Plt TLTtU
director
An Overseas Veterans
Tom O’Brien, John Gilbert and Karl Dane, as the “three musketeers” in “The Big Parade”
™E Big Parade
By Robert M. Finch
’EST LA GUERRE.
Despite the idiomatic significance which attaches to that phrase so commonly on the tongue of the Frenchman during the World War, its broad interpretation sums up so completely my impressions of The Bit/ Parade that I sat back in my seat during an advance showing of this really worth-while production of war-time France with but the one thought:
It is the war!
In every sense of the word, "It is the war!” — a realistic, vivid portrayal of wartime France and the A.E.F. that brings back a flood of memories and revives as has no other screen production that I have
seen anywhere those days of the “big push.”
The Big Parade to me is not just a war picture. It is in all reality, a picture of the world war.
Never have I seen the spirit of those war days caught and translated to either printed page or silver sheet with such fidelity, such accuracy of detail, such reminiscent touches of those little things that remain so vividly in the mind of every overseas veteran. Surely author, director and cast must have been there. It doesn’t seem possible that realism could have been obtained otherwise!
The Biff Parade is to me a dynamic, vital, gripping presentation of the war it
self— of the Great Experience. For the first time anywhere it brings the cataclysm of the age to the inner consciousness of all who view it, in all its awful majesty, its ruthless dominance of everything and the pitiful insignificance of the human atom engulfed in its tremendous eruption.
There have been numerous war pictures and war stories in which isolated fragments have been vividly reproduced, but in most of these the vital element of realism seemed to be lacking. The soldiers depicted on the screen seemed more like automatons — mere puppets in the hands of the director — than like men who had been there, who (Continued on Page 28)