LYCOS RETRIEVER 
King Vidor: Big Parade
built 612 days ago
As the studio system began to harden into place, Vidor found an ally in producer Irving Thalberg at MGM, who gave him full control over The Big Parade (1925), his first major work. The granddaddy of all war movies, it's a still radical exploration of the many different techniques available to an artist working in film, from tranquil, patient observation with an unmoving camera to the most intense manipulation of editing, framing and montage. It opens with shots of skyscrapers climbing upwards, symbolising commerce and achievement (and reflecting forward on the phallus and capitalism glorifying edifices of The Fountainhead). As his three very different male leads go to war, Vidor accumulates mundane incidents to create a sense of life drifting by. He wanted to film ordinary existence, which included a sense of boredom and aimlessness (Vidor greatly influenced the Italian neo-realists). A sexy clash of cultures between French Melisande (Renee Adoree) and American doughboy James (John Gilbert) climaxes in his leaving for the front.
Source:
TCM's exploration of race and Hollywood continues tonight with two of the few big-budget movies from the Hollywood studio era to feature African-American casts: King Vidor's Hallelujah (8 ET/5 PT) and Marc Connelly's TheGreen Pastures (10 ET/PT). The sentiments have not all aged well, but they were very brave films for their time. And they offered employment to a host of performers whose gifts might otherwise have gone unrecorded.
Source:
Comic actress ZaSu Pitts got her first really big break when she starred in this King Vidor-directed feature. Ezra Scroggs (Jack McDonald) is a shiftless gambler who has let his hotel, the Lakeview, fall on hard times. Finally his daughter Nancy (Pitts)) gets fed up seeing all the business go to his rival, Si Whittaker (William Devaull) at the Majestic, and she decides to do something about it. She takes the old Lakeview jalopy to the station and grabs a potential guest who introduces himself as Peter (David Butler). When he explains that he's supposed to be on a special diet, Nancy poo-poos this with a Christian Science quote. He finds the meal he's served so delicious that he brags about it all over town and the Lakeview is once again in the money. What Peter doesn't tell Nancy before he leaves is that he has fallen for her.
Source:
[I]n 1975, late in life, age 81, Vidor was “excited” to receive a letter from Wyeth. Vidor had never met Wyeth but, he said, “I knew he felt about America the way I did.” (5) Indeed, Wyeth told Vidor he had seen Vidor’s The Big Parade (1925) “a hundred-and-eighty-times, literally” and that, in all sorts of abstract ways, it had been the strongest single influence on his painting. Now Wyeth asked permission to use clips from The Big Parade in a documentary film which the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art was proposing to accompany an exhibition of Wyeth’s many paintings of World War I veteran Karl Kuerner and his farm – including preliminary studies: thus The Big Parade. The exhibition took place a year later (Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons) but not the film. Meanwhile, however, Vidor went himself to Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, to make his own movie with Wyeth. Here in 1777, between Philadelphia and Wilmington, George Washington had lost the Battle of the Brandywine.
Source:
Vidor sold the idea for The Crowd to Irving Thalberg as a sequel to his hit epic 1925 WWI film The Big Parade, which was the first success for newly formed MGM. Both are about battles fought by masses of ordinary people, but The Crowd focuses on just one individual whose struggles are representative of the collective whole.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Big Parade