Le Giornate del Cinema Muto 2006 Sommario / Contents

John Gilbert, Renée Adorée in The Big Parade.
anti-war films which included What Price Glory (1926, co-authored by
Big Parade scenarist Laurence Stallings), Wings (1927), and All Quiet
on the Western Front (1930). The film established King Vidor’s
reputation as a top Hollywood director, and elevated John Gilbert to
stardom as a romantic lead, seriously challenging Rudolph Valentino’s
“great lover” status.
The Big Parade topped the New York Times Best Films of 1925 list,
ahead of The Last Laugh, The Unholy Three, and The Gold Rush. Its
appeal lay in the public’s identification with the three doughboys played
by Gilbert,Tom O’Brien, and Karl Dane. In his year-end review of films
for 1925, Mordaunt Hall wrote: “There is a sound romance in this
narrative, one that holds you, softens your heart, one that may even
bring a tear to your eye or a lump in your throat. On the night this
picture was presented Slim, the tall one of the three buddies, played by
Karl Dane, caused a strong-looking man to get up in his seat muttering
‘I hope they don’t get him.’”
The authentic depiction of the war scenes was a triumph for the artists
and technical crews, who took their lead from Laurence Stallings, a
decorated veteran of the Great War who lost a leg in battle.Vidor always
credited Stallings for “telling me more about the war than I got out of
all the synopses and books. He had more stuff to tell – more knowledge
for my purpose – than the Committee on Public Information’s 750,000
49
feet of stored films, which my agent pored over
in Washington.” But they were all stymied when
challenged with setting the gun installations for a
German machine gun nest. The crew’s technical
director (also a veteran) had actually seen one,
but only after it had been blown up.At that point
a laborer who was digging postholes for the
barbed wire stepped forward, saluted, and said,
“May I suggest, please?” His name was Paul
Barth, and he had been a non-commissioned
officer in the 121st Regiment of the Third
Machine Gun Division of the German Army.
Barth set the guns, and then commanded the
machine gun nest during the filming.
The impetus for this restoration began with
Kevin Brownlow during his visit to George
Eastman House in the fall of 1997. While
discussing The Big Parade he learned from
Eastman House staff that the original camera
nitrate negative of the film was in the GEH
vaults. Under the direction of Edward Stratmann,
students of The L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film
Preservation carried out a comparative
inspection of the original camera negative and
the nitrate re-release duplicate negative, as well
as the MGM safety material. The results of the
inspection confirmed that the 1925 silent
version of The Big Parade was not completely preserved. In 2002, at
Brownlow’s urging, Warner Bros. and George Eastman House
collaborated on the restoration of both the 1925 silent version and the
1931 sound reissue version made from the original camera and
duplicate nitrate negatives. All the intertitles in the original camera
negative (1925) had been replaced with the intertitles created for the
1931 sound version.Those titles were framed for the sound aspect ratio,
and were off-center when projected in the full silent aperture. The
present restoration re-centered all of the titles. A 1925 continuity script
in the Warner Bros. archives provided the original color tinting scheme,
allowing the color to be restored to the film for the first time since the
1920s. The color restoration was supervised by Dick May, and colors
were verified with the assistance of Kevin Brownlow and Patrick
Stanbury, who were visiting Los Angeles at the time. Brownlow provided
samples of blue and night amber tinted film for matching purposes.The
color restoration also included work by the Warner Bros. digital
department, which recreated the Handschiegl process for the Red Cross
symbol on the side of an ambulance in one prominent scene. Now, more
than 80 years later, audiences are able to experience the power of this
great film in a visual brilliance close to that which greeted the first-night
audience at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood in November
1925. – ANTHONY L’ABBATE, CAROLINE YEAGER
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