Motion Picture News (Nov-Dec 1925)

A YOUNG man named \ V *r King Vidor burst upon /\ j^k I the New York film l\ X \| world last week like a comet in the sky. The occasion was the metropolitan opening of "The Big Parade," Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's picture of war as it is — vivid, compelling, a document not so much of realism as of reality and altogether one of the few really great films of all time. At one bound Vidor the director, leaps to a place beside Griffith, DeMille, Cruze and Ingram. If there are others who should be named in the Valhalla of triumphant directors, Vidor would stand beside them all, and yield in importance to none. "The Big Parade" is incomparably the finest war picture ever screened, and we forget none of them in making the assertion. It has everything, as they say in theatrical parlance. But there is something about it which makes it stand out for its own great, new, burning individuality. It has the imperishable humor of the doughboy, the moonlight and roses of romance against a background of gunfire and mud and pitiful death, and a tremendous indictment of war that never once becomes a sermon but is more powerful than spoken word or written document. * * * THE strategy — the composition — of this film was a stroke of genius. The first part is almost wholly comedy and romance. The young aristocrat, the ex-bartender, and the steel riveter become buddies in the cosmic disturbance known as the Great War. They are thrown into the maelstrom in France; but they are not immediately engaged in the struggle to keep alive in the midst of death. There is the girl Melisande — not a movie heroine but the veritable incarnation of womanhood in the wake of the storm of war; self-possessed and kindly and charming. A living human being, not a marionette moving across the screen. Well, the three buddies meet her; and, of course, the young aristocrat emerges as the chosen one. He plays fair with her. They fall in love; but always across the path of their romance is the shadow of the moment when he must go up to the mud-pits of the trenches. Thus the romance. Woven into it, in happy measure, is the comedy by-play. The spotlight is turned full upon the lowly doughboy — his miseries and his love affairs; his gifts from home and his inventive genius in improvising a shower-bath; wretchedness and laughter, incident piled upon incident in wonderfully effective contrast. EDITOR The Week in Review THE first part of the film builds steadily and ends upon a sequence which ranks with the Return of the Little Colonel in "The Birth of A Nation" for poignant appeal and stirring dramatic force. The moment comes for The Big Parade up to the front. The army trucks get under way, hundreds of them; scores of airplanes and artillery caissons ; movement everywhere ; utmost confusion in the little French village. And — Melisande, the heroine, separated from Jim, the young aristocrat, and running about wildly to find him. Just when the spectator has decided it will never happen, she discovers him on the army truck; there is a "clinch" from which he is torn away. She strives to hold back the truck; is finally left sitting in the road. And Vidor and Stallings givethis scene its last touch of the pathos of realism by having the hero throw a hob-nailed army shoe to her. This inadequate description by no means does justice to what is to us the finest single thing in the picture — more impressive even than the shellhole incident where a cigarette becomes the symbol of the brotherhood of man, or the sequence of the advance of the Americans through the woods — an amazing triumph of camera and direction. The second part of the film, incorporating the battle stuff, stands alone among achievements of its kind. It is magnificently done. As to the players, Renee Adoree, in our estimation, wins the chief honors. John Gilbert gives a splendid performance and Tom O'Brien and Karl Dane, as his buddies, are types and players long to be remembered. "The Big Parade" will be the talk of the industry and the talk of the public for a long, long time. * * * KING VIDOR will be given a lot of credit for "The Big Parade," and justly so. But let us not overlook the author, Laurence Stallings, who, we understand, worked hard and painstakingly on this picture. Authors do count enormously, you know. Stallings lived the World War and this picture is his brain-child. Moreover, as we say, he did more than create the structure : he worked on the details. And let us not by any means overlook the supervisor of the picture, Irving Thalberg; or shall we call him — the producer of it?