RetroClips

The Big Parade was the film that made King Vidor a top-tier director and John Gilbert a superstar, and it stayed MGM's highest-grossing silent picture for years. Vidor shot the farewell sequence, a French village girl clinging to a departing supply truck as her soldier sweetheart is hauled away to the front, almost entirely with actors and extras rather than trick photography, and it became one of the most reproduced images of the silent era. The film's unsentimental battle scenes, filmed with Army cooperation and real veterans as extras, were as influential on later war pictures as its romance was on every farewell scene that followed.