Critics reviews

Apart from its success and influence, The Big Parade remains an entertaining, funny, and moving film. Vidor's scenes often run a remarkably long time, suggesting the rhythms of everyday life.

A blockbuster in its day, it earns its legend status because of the startling WWI battle scenes, which are able to stun even modern, violence-saturated viewers with their frankness. The staged combat here influenced every war movie to follow, and traces can also be seen in everything from Ivan the Terrible to The Pianist, in a long shot of Gilbert hobbling around a blitzed French village.

The soldier's homecoming is from Griffith and goes right into Renoir (The River), the mother's tearful recollection of her maimed boy's life is Vidor's alone. Wyeth's Winter 1946 and Christina's World comprise the ultimate analysis.

That Jim and Melisande will be reunited goes without saying. The power and delicacy with which that reunion is staged can barely be put into words — that is what movies are for. Spoken dialogue would only be an intrusion in a scene as precisely visualized as this... It is a perfect silent-movie moment, overflowing with emotions that are bigger than speech.

For all its grandeur, The Big Parade concerns the individual response to forces bigger than any one person, be it war or its attendant clichés, and if so many films have copped various elements since the film's release, few have managed to replicate its soft touch.

Viewing The Big Parade 88 years after its initial release, and 25 years following its inclusion in my upper-level course on the war film, elicited complex feelings. On the one hand, although the film still stands as a great achievement of classical Hollywood silent cinema, it, like many others, has become dated by the inclusion of elements that were once fresh but have since appeared in so many other war films.