The Big Parade

King Vidor, MGM, 1925. John Gilbert is Jim Apperson, a rich boy who enlists with two working-class friends, loves Melisande (Renée Adorée) in a French village, and walks into Belleau Wood. Vidor stages the advance through the trees as a slow count, men dropping on a rhythm. It was the year’s top grosser and the war picture Irving Thalberg wanted after Four Horsemen. Laurence Stallings, who had lost a leg in France, worked on the story. Gilbert without a saber, for once. The parade of the title is the one before they know.