village where their unit has been assigned lodging. In one of The Big Parades most tender scenes, she clutches the boot he has left with her as the soldiers make their way to the front. Once they arrive at the trenches, the battle of Belleau Wood commences. Attacking a machine gun nest, Jims two buddies are killed and he is wounded. Seeking refuge in a shell hole, he discovers a dying German soldier already occupying it and the two share a cigarette. Eventually, he is found and then taken to a field hospital. His attempts to reach the farmhouse fail as he falls unconscious.
Back in America, Jim is reunited with his family, but is bitterly unhappy because he has lost a leg. His fiancée, in any case, has now fallen in love with his brother. Finally, Jim accepts his mothers advice and returns to France, where in the films most moving scene he locates his lost love as she is helping her mother plow the fields. With its expert mixture of physical comedy (particularly in the French farmhouse scenes) and well-staged action, The Big Parade proved an immense successa testimony to producer Irving Thalbergs oversight of the projectand counts as one of the triumphs of the late silent era.
Gilbert turns in a fine performance as Jim, showing the box-office appeal that made him one of the eras biggest stars, and Adorée is appropriately appealing as his love interest. Because it shows the horrors of war, The Big Parade has often been thought a pacifist tract, but in truth its politics are muted. As Thalberg wanted, the film is much more of a comedy romance, with the war serving as the means through which Jim becomes a man and discovers the kind of life he really wants to live. RBP
See all movies from the 1920s
1920s
METROPOLIS (1927)
Germany (Universum/UFA) 120m Silent BW
Director: Fritz Lang
Producer: Erich Pommer
Screenplay: Fritz Lang, Thea von Harbou
Photography: Karl Freund, Günther Rittau
Music: Gottfried Huppertz
Cast: Alfred Abel, Gustav Fröhlich, Brigitte Helm, Rudolf Klein-Rogge, Fritz Rasp, Theodor Loos, Heinrich George
Originally clocking in at over two hours, Fritz Langs Metropolis is the first science-fiction epic, with huge sets, thousands of extras, then-state-of-the-art special effects, lots of sex and violence, a heavy-handed moral, big acting, a streak of Germanic gothicism, and groundbreaking fantasy sequences. Bankrolled by UFA, Germanys giant film studio, it was controversial in its day and proved a box-office disaster that nearly ruined the studio.
The plot is almost as simplistic as a fairy tale, with Freder Fredersen (Gustav Frölich), pampered son of the Master of Metropolis (Alfred Abel), learning of the wretched lives of the multitude of workers who keep the gleaming supercity going. Freder comes to understand the way things work by the saintly Maria (Brigitte Helm), a pacifist who constantly preaches mediation in industrial disputes, as well as by secretly working on a hellish ten-hour shift at one of the grinding machines. The Master consults with mad engineer Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge), who has created a feminoid robot he reshapes to be an evil double of Maria and unleashes on the city. The robotrix goes from dancing naked in a decadent nightspot to inciting a destructive riot, which allows Lang to get the most value out of the huge factory sets by blowing them up and/or flooding them, but Freder and the real Maria save the day by rescuing the citys children from a flood. Society is reunited when Maria decrees that the heart (Freder) must mediate between the brain (the Master) and the hands (the workers).
Shortly after its premiere, the expensive film was pulled from distribution and reedited against Langs wishes: this truncated, simplified form remained best-known, even in the colorized Giorgio Moroder remix of the 1980s, until the twenty-first century, when a partial restorationwith tactful linking titles to fill in the scenes that remain irretrievably missingmade it much closer to Langs original vision. This version not only adds many scenes that went unseen for decades, but also restores their order in the original version and puts in the proper intertitles. Up to that point rated as a spectacular but simplistic science-fiction film,
this new-old version reveals that the futuristic setting isnt intended as prophetic but mythical, with elements of 1920s architecture, industry, design, and politics mingled with the medieval and the Biblical to produce images of striking strangeness: a futuristic robot burned at the stake, a steel-handed mad scientist who is also a fifteenth-century alchemist, the trudging workers of a vast factory plodding into the jaws of a machine that is also the ancient god Moloch. Frölichs performance as the hero who represents the heart is still wildly overdone, but Klein-Rogges engineer Rotwang, Abels Master of Metropolis, and especially Helm in the dual role of saintly savior and metal femme fatale are astonishing. By restoring a great deal of story delving into the mixed motivations of the characters, the wild plot now makes more sense, and we can see it is as much a twisted family drama as an epic of repression, revolution, and reconciliation. KN