Metrograph

Three young Americans—idle rich boy Jim (John Gilbert), construction worker Slim (Karl Dane), and barkeep Bull (Tom O’Brien)—set out for the battlefields of World War I with dreams of glory, only to discover a reality horrible beyond imagination, in Vidor’s tale of innocence and harrowing experience, by turns touching (as in Jim’s courtship of French farm girl Renée Adorée) and terrifying (as in the trio’s ominous march through the woods towards their first bitter taste of battle). Arguably the filmed war drama that set the standard for all to follow, with Gilbert giving one of the silent screen’s most devastating performances, The Big Parade was also a cultural phenomenon, among its many admirers the painter Andrew Wyeth, who claimed to have watched it 180 times and to have drawn profound inspiration from Vidor’s singular eye for composing landscape.