Jim is a carefree lad who does not work and lives at the expense of his rich father. However, when the US enters World War I, Jim’s fiancée claims he would look good in military uniform, and upon seeing a big patriotic parade, he finally decides to enlist into the army. Jim’s unit arrives to the French village of Champillon, where he meets bartender Bull and construction worker Slim. Their tasks are boring and they wait for weeks for anything to happen. Jim falls in love with a local girl, Melisande, though he does not speak French. Finally, their unit is called to march into the Western Front: hundreds of soldiers are wounded or machine-gunned to death. In a trench, Slim tries to sneak in into the German trench, but is killed, and Bull too. Jim is wounded in the leg, and it is amputated in the hospital. Returning back home after the end of the war, Jim finds out his fiancée fell in love with someone else. He returns to Europe and meets Melisande again, and they embrace.
One of the early blockbusters of the silent movie era (it was either the first or the second highest grossing film of the 1 9 2 0s, contesting the position with "Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ"), King Vidor’s "The Big Parade" is at the same time an early prototype of a brutal war film, displaying naturalistic violence that startled the audiences back at the time. The film consists out of two seemingly disparate, yet in the end still consistent halves, though the second one, showing actual combat, seems much fresher today. The first part shows a realistic routine of a soldier: endless waiting for a battle to start. The protagonist Jim is annoyed that he has to do unglamorous tasks, including digging a trench, washing clothes in a creek or sleeping in a barn at a farm. Yet this rings true, since a war includes a long, boring wait of the soldiers between battles. Several episodes drag here and should have been trimmed, and some of them are directed as a burlesque, almost as if it were a comedy at times, such as the sequence where Jim rolls a barrel on the ground until he decides to carry it over his upper body, with only a hole for him to see where he is going, or the 10-minute sequence of Jim stretching a bubble gum in front of girl Melisande, which ironically overstretches itself, congruently. 90 minutes into the film, the long anticipated battle finally starts, and this is where "The Big Parade" rises to the occasion, since it is directed with far more elan, energy and inspiration that the first half. The image of Melisande holding on to Jim’s leg while he is about to drive off in a military vehicle to the battle front is strong and symbolic (especially when one has in mind what will happen to Jim in the end) whereas the shot composition of a column of hundreds of military vehicles stretching all the way from the foreground to over the hill on the horizon is impressive. The situations slowly raise the suspense, especially in the march through the forest, where every once in a while a soldier suddenly falls down on the ground, since snipers are hidden on the trees. This dark and unflinching second half improves the film’s impression. "The Big Parade" is very good, though it would have been better if its first half was shorter, and second half longer.
Grade:+++
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