Programme notes CH 01 — The Silent Signal
The Big Parade
A rich man’s idle son enlists because the band is playing, falls for a French farm girl behind the lines, and is marched to the front.
Jim Apperson joins up because his friends are going, and the war spends the rest of the picture teaching him what he signed. King Vidor gives the first hour to billets and a French farm, where John Gilbert teaches Renée Adorée to chew gum, then marches everyone into the wood. Laurence Stallings, who lost a leg after Belleau Wood, wrote the story; the film played one New York theatre for nearly two years and was MGM’s biggest silent success. Watch the advance through the trees: Vidor had the men walk to a steady beat, and they fall in time with it. Then watch Adorée when the trucks pull out.
Credits — follow anyone
- Directed by
- King Vidor · George W. Hill
- Photographed by
- John Arnold
- With
- Renée Adorée · Claire McDowell · John Gilbert · Karl Dane · Hobart Bosworth · Julanne Johnston
Every name is a door — each opens onto everything else that person made in the network.
The thread · every thread
The war from the mud and the war from the clouds, two years apart, both written by men who had been in it: Stallings walked into Belleau Wood, Saunders taught flying. Each sends a boy from a quiet American town to France, and each saves its battle for after the love story has had its hour.