The Big Parade (1925)

 King Vidor's "The Big Parade"

By 1925, King Vidor had directed over twenty small-scale silent films dating back to 1913. This had established Vidor as a consistent and reliable director in the Hollywood industry. The Hollywood industry at the time was not the superpower it would come to be once the advent of talking pictures took hold. However, the American industry saw a rapid boost thanks in part to The Big Parade - which became the highest grossing silent film ever. The film was produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios, who had just formed in 1924. Irving Thalberg, who was a young production chief at MGM was frustrated with making films that didn't have any staying power at the cinemas. Rather than having a film play for a week and vanish, he wanted to make a film that could warrant attention and garnish an extended stay in theaters. King Vidor's ambitions seemed to be the ingredients needed to accomplish Thalberg's vision. Vidor wanted to tackle films that were larger in scope with more important subject matters. Thalberg and Vidor felt that enough time had passed to make a film reflecting the Great War, a subject matter that would fit the scope of what they wanted to accomplish. 

The Bid Parade opens on the idea of America - a hardworking nation moving forward in its progress. Vidor shows us individuals living out their lives in this American utopia. Slim - the Southern construction worker; Bull - the Bronx bartender; and Jim - the upper-class son of a businessman father. After the ringing of an alarm, it is apparent war is imminent. We see Slim eagerly leave the construction scaffold, as Vidor holds on the image of his rivet gun - suggesting that Slim will be exchanging this gun for a real weapon of war. Jim, on the other hand, has no intention on enlisting. That is until he runs into his patriotic friends at a send-off parade. The parade in this scene rings of patriotism, a unified and celebrated common goal for the American nation. This is the first 'big parade' of the film, and certainly not the last. 

Jim is the protagonist of the film. His characters is meant to represent the 'everyman' - even if his family does have great wealth. Vidor wanted the audience to identify and be in the shoes of this character. In the beginning, Jim seems disconnected and unsure of any direction for his life. The only reasons for joining the army were due to societal pressures. The enlisted friends pressure him to join, his girlfriend pressures him to join because she wants to swoon over him being a man in uniform, and his father pressures him to join by threatening to kick him out of the house if he does not contribute to the war efforts. The character of Jim lives an aimless life and eventually enlists because he is expected to. It is in this way that Jim becomes a cog in a machine. Because of his lack of ambitions and purpose, he is manipulated by the immediate society around him - and thereby manipulated and used by the concept of America.

This cog-in-a-machine concept is visually displayed by Vidor in Jim's first scene as an army man. He is marching with his soldiers as the chant and sing down a French country road. Vidor choreographed the movement of the soldiers to the beat of a metronome, using a bass drum on set to provide the rhythm of the soldiers' pace. The effect established the ominous mechanical rhythm of the soldiers' movements. 

Even if the point can be made regarding America stripping its civilians of their humanity for the purposes of using them as a cog in a war machine, Vidor does not utilize these broad themes as the nucleus of the film. Rather, Vidor saturated his piece with humanism. The viewer is not meant to draw heady conclusions about larger abstract concepts. Rather, Vidor wants us to zoom in to the microcosm of human experience. We the viewer are meant to live the life of Jim and draw conclusions about his relationship to the war and his place in it. Vidor does this by allowing the viewer time to spend with Jim and his companions. We spend time with them cracking jokes, eating cake together, creating a shower system, and living their daily experience. The viewer begins to focus in on the lived experience of the piece.

Jim ends up meeting and falling in love with Melisande, a French girl living on a rural farm. Even if the two do not speak the same language, the time they spend together while Jim is stationed there blossom into a full out romance. After the alarm sounds to head to the war front, the two find it difficult to separate. The viewer is able to feel the anguish of the lovers separating as Vidor surrounds the circumstance with the scope of the collective heading off to die. Melisande trails behind Jim's caranvan as he tosses her his dog-tags and left boot. She collapses in the road as the bustle of men fleeing in drones passes by her. The intimacy of the romance is paralleled by the larger events happening. Vidor uses this congruency to make the intimate feel larger and the larger feel more intimate. The love, heartbreak, and fear shared by the two lovers becomes more epic in scale thanks to the surrounding largescale scope of war. On the flipside, the largescale scope of war becomes far more intimate thanks to the microcosm of human emotion, provided by the intimate moments of Jim and Melisande. The mixing together of the 'big' and 'small' by Vidor creates this tableau of human experience, something the viewer can really emotionally grab on to. 

We are then shown another 'big parade' of the army men moving towards combat. This parade has a similar patriotism as the parade before, but this time dread seems to be simmering underneath. This parade is the point of the no return. Vidor shows an overhead shot of a vertical line of caravans moving single file down the road to an infinite horizon. The shot visually brings a sense of dread. We the viewer cannot see what lies beyond the horizon, but like the men, the uncertainty creates a sort of tension of unease, brought about by the image.

Jim and his comrades are then shown moving towards enemy lines. Vidor films the soldiers moving steadily through the trees. We see several shots of the long line of men horizontal to the frame, moving from left frame to right frame. This shot by Vidor creates suspense simply by eliminating the men's destination in the frame. We clearly see they are moving forward towards danger, but the visual lack of extension to the frame creates the uncertainty of the destination. This uncertainty explodes with suspense. This comes when we are shown shots of our men facing the camera, moving step for step towards and with it. We are then shown men behind them begin to fall. The lack of awareness of the men falling behind them creates fear. We the viewer are now aware of the immediate danger, and the lack of awareness by the protagonists compound that fear. 

After making their way through the enemy forests, Jim and his two companions find themselves in a shellhole, waiting out the night. After orders to go out and eliminate a mortar crew, Slim takes it upon himself to step up. This ends in tragic consequences as Slim is shot down while trying to make his way back. Jim wants to go and save his friend, but is given orders to hold. Jim responds with, "Orders! Who the hell is fighting this war? Men or orders?" With this, Jim takes it upon himself to try and rescue his comrade. Even if it is to no avail, this moment allows the viewer to reflect on Jim's passivity from the beginning. Where once Jim was told what to do due to his aimlessness, he is now disobeying what he is told to do and acts on his own desires. 

Jim decides to go out and fight. What follows is pandemonium. Vidor is able to create this pandemonium with his use of exploding lights surprising our visual senses, lights flashing from every direction indicating gunfire, men falling all around unexpectedly, and a musical accompaniment that adds to the terror. Jim's panic is fully expressive and felt by the viewer. One can almost equate Jim's behavior to an emotional breakdown. His visual expressions are expertly acted by John Gilbert. He also begins to shout into the void as he cannot grasp the terror of what's happening around him. Once again, Vidor is expertly able to blend the 'big' and 'small' - the scale of chaos and terror amplify Jim's emotional state, while also allowing his palpable terror to create emotional context for the large-scale horrors. 

After watching Slim die as his head spews with dark blood, Jim is also shot. A bullet hits his leg and he collapses. He begins to crawl towards an enemy soldier who is also shot down. Jim is fuming with anger over the death of Slim and seeks revenge. He tackles a German soldier and holds a knife up to his neck. However, the pure fear of the face of the enemy solider creates a hesitation in Jim. He pauses, and the viewer is able to visually see his vacillations. He moves like he is going to make the final blow, then relaxes. After this, he solemnly pouts, then shoves the man's head a few times. Jim is caught between satiating his need for revenge and the obvious humanity of the German soldier. He gives the dying man a cigarette as the two of them are exhausted from the events unfolding around him. The German man smokes his last cigarette before his death.

The next parade that happens has a far more solemn tone than the previous. This parade echoes the one in which the caravans were moving towards the infinite horizon. However, this time, ambulances are moving dead or wounded men back towards camera away from that horizon. The parade is no longer a celebration or even  patriotic. Rather, it is a defeat of sorts. War creates an inevitable mechanism for loss of men, and a loss of humanity. 

After the war, Jim comes back home. In the beginning, his family was angry with him for not being patriotic. They were then ecstatic once he enlisted. Now, however, they appear as seemingly neither. Jim comes in with his uniform and only one leg. Jim becames the man they wanted him to be, but at the cost of his own body and soul. He is now a bitter person with one less leg. Instead of the celebratory temperament from the beginning, there is now an air of disquiet emptiness. In the immediate human world of the characters, nothing has been gained - only lost. 

Jim has now been changed forever. His aimlessness from before has now been abused. The abuse and misuse of his amotivation has now morphed him psychologically. This comes at both a great cost and benefit. The terror and horror of what he endured has now broken him and made him cynical and contemptuous. On the flipside, he now has taken back his autonomy. With this new autonomy, he decides to go back to France to be with Melisande. He has separated himself from the machines of society to regain his humanity once again.

King Vidor's "The Big Parade" was a massive critical and commercial success. It became the highest grossing silent film in history, making nearly 22 million dollars. The apparent reason for the film's acclaim was Vidor's grand ideas of filmmaking. By combining the largescale scope of our world with the intimate humanist experience, Vidor was able to infuse a film with an emotional, lived experience of a man going through the fraught of a world at war.